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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

Retailers treat their customers like criminals and are surprised most of them don't come back! News at 11.

BTW, the convenience store near me has a massive shoplifting problem. The owners keep it understaffed. The thieves know the only working employee is stuck at the register so, in full view of cameras, customers, and the employee, will say hello to the cashier, take what they want, warm up some food, and walk right out! The only thing the cashier can do is mark the time and items down for the owner. Everyone knows what the solution is, yet the owners are unwilling to do it.

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E.g. Not sure if all Sam's Clubs in the USA do this but I've stopped going since their anti-shoplifting policy at the exit requires a staff member scan your receipt, then find and scan several items in your cart before you're allowed to leave.

At the one I go to they usually just have one person at the door and the line up is 10-15mins long to leave.

The Sam's by me is great, especially since they have scan'n'go. I've never waited more than 5 minutes in the exit line (usually 1-3 minutes), and don't have to wait at all to pay, since I pay on my phone. But stuff like that is always a location-by-location thing.

By the way, you only have to wait in exit lines at clubs where you're a member, since you've agreed to it in your membership. At stores like Best Buy, you can just keep walking by the person checking other people, and maybe give them a friendly wave to help brighten their day. Technically, you can legally do the same at Sam's, but they can revoke your membership for it.

Used to just walk out of Fry’s like this all the time to the bewildered looks of the 20 people waiting in line to exit. RIP Fry’s

1) Same, but they'd try to come after me and I'd curse them blue at the top of my lungs and then yell at all the other customers that what they were doing is illegal and stop being sheep.

2) Best Buy has kinda?? stepped up lately in the Frys vacuum. They have CanaKit RPi setups, and cool low-level electrical doodads now. Oh, and a lot of things to touch and feel. I miss/don't miss Frys. Rot in hell, Mr. Frys. And I hate Micro Center.

Just walk out. You paid for your things. Call the police if I stole something don’t keep me kidnapped here with the goods I’ve already paid for.

> Everyone knows what the solution is

Well, maybe everyone except me, because I don't know. What are you going to do, tackle the dude walking out with a $3 burrito? What if you break their arm and it ends up costing $50K in hospital bills? I'm sure you'll say the establishment isn't responsible which makes sense, but someone is going to eat that bill and I doubt it's the guy who couldn't afford food.

And what if the thief has a gun that they're constitutionally allowed to carry? That can get real messy, real fast.

I think things are the way they are for a reason.

You seem to be falling prey to the binary thinking flaw of security thinking. This is basically the normal way people think about security without education on the subject- "It's either completely secure or completely insecure"

In reality, security works through modifying the probability and impact of certain outcomes.

So if the store had another employee who could walk around, watch, and talk to customers the social pressure alone will decrease the frequency of theft. It would also reduce the impact (size) of the thefts because someone couldn't carry as much as possible out the door, the employee would be able to knock some of it off the stack, etc.

And yes! It wouldn't stop someone who was willing to kill for convenience store food. But events like that are less common and potentially not worth the cost of prevention.

GP made it sound like the cashier is already watching this happen, but yes, I've been the one walking around and observing customers for my Grandmother's estate sale business, but that's because it was helping my grandmother out; I doubt you'll find many people willing to do that for minimum wage. And I also doubt many store owners want to pay the wage and health insurance costs for an employee to hang out and observe/chat with customers.

I doubt any even fractionally-rational human goes into a store willing to kill for food, but shit can go sideways instantly when you start engaging in physical confrontations, particularly in a country where firearms are trivially obtained and carried; it's a latent threat in nearly any situation in the US.

There's always plenty to do in a retail store - things to the tidied on shelfs, floors to swept, and so on. You're not asking a poor suffering retailer to pay someone to do nothing while getting shot all day.

I don't have exactly legal knowledge of this.

But it's my understanding that a place like Target will track you if you shoplift and not do anything until you exceed the felony threshold of good stolen in terms of monetary value.

Then they will drop the hammer on you.

Of course, if you are young/ under 18, I don't know how that impacts the calculation/ policy

> The owners keep it understaffed.

The 2nd sentence in my post is the identified problem. There are a few ways to fix it. The store owner is not doing any of it.

> And what if the thief has a gun that they're constitutionally allowed to carry? That can get real messy, real fast.

You aren't constitutionally allowed to carry a weapon to commit a crime. That shoplifting charge with a 50-100 community hours conviction turns into a 10 year mandatory jail sentence.

These aren't even hardened criminals. These are normal people who realize they will not be caught nor punished for such a petty crime as stealing a hotdog. This is on the level of stealing extra candy from the Halloween pumpkin bowl.

It's amazing how many people see no contradiction between

"having more employees will stop shoplifting" and "lol of course employees won't do anything about shoplifters, are you risking your life for minimum wage?",

or between

"obviously criminals don't reply to increased punishment" and "of course they won't escalate to assault, that would massively increase their punishment".

And given that the current employee is simply watching as people shoplift, what do you imagine that more staff will do? I'll admit I don't know all the rules about carrying guns, but I know that quite a few are out there and not everyone behaves perfectly like they're supposed to - it's one of the reasons I don't yell at people in traffic, for instance. The threat is ever present.

Witnessing a theft of food I'd be sooner to resort to violence on behalf of the starving man than the capitalist

You've never known middle-class shoplifters? Admittedly, by their 20s become risk-averse. But in high school and college, they might not be.

Don't be surprised when those capitalists you hate stop providing you the goods and services you want at prices you find affordable then.

I mean the great thing about the free market is there is always someone else.

If you hate capitalism so much, what are you doing on a forum for startups?

I don't like the smell of sewage, but I still have to shit.

If you hate being exposed to differing points of view so much, what are you doing on a forum?

Commerce != capitalism

GP was definitely attacking capitalism. For someone throwing drive by accusations of fallacy around you sure could improve your text comprehension.

I'm fully aware of this. I'm saying you could be against capitalism and still be interested in starting a business and networking on a forum like this one. People start businesses for many reasons, not only the pure accumulation of capital.

>>Retailers treat their customers like criminals and are surprised most of them don't come back! News at 11.

Been to a Walmart lately? It's a nightmare to get in and out with security measures. No cashiers, self checkout only. It's so focused on making sure you don't do any theft/price-changing that the experience is miserable. No one around to help. HAD TO DOWNLOAD THE FKING WALMART APP TO PAY!

Many times I even considered just taking my couple items and walking out the door because despite all of the consumer-hostile measures it would be laughably easy to just steal the items if you wanted to.

So the only person all of that stuff affects is the honest consumer.

Close the store?

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