Transacting was your way of leaving a calling card for the investigators/analysts to find you... You stole regardless of how you did it.
Back when I was a kid it was common to still just have simple price tag stickers on every single item. We’d pull off a cheap sticker and put it on an expensive item. If they noticed, we’d just shrug and say “oh Nevermind then” when they found the right price.
The only problem was most cashiers actually knew all the prices of stuff and paid attention, believe it or not they even knew how to make change back in those days /s. So you couldn’t always get super aggressive.
Yup. I was in a local super market and saw Tomahawk steaks priced at $4-6 each. It had to be a mistake but I figured I would give it shot and see if they noticed. Cashier looked at the price, did a confused double take and immediately called over the manager. Turns out the decimal point was off by one so my $4.50 tomahawk was really $45. I bought it anyway and it came out great in the oven.
Over here in Poland we have a law that the store must sell you the good for the price it advertised, so in that case they'd be forced to accept $4.50 because of their mistake. May sound too biased in favor of the customer, but before that, the "errors" in price tags were more common.
So scan everything, then put it in the cart and walk off without putting in the credit card. Again, both are stealing but paying some fake, reduced rate is leaving your calling card at the scene of a crime.
I actually saw someone do this a couple weeks ago.
Anything that risks an employee might confront you in the store is a greater risk IMO. And, usually they light on the register is green (or a similar indicator) so they do know right then if you don’t pay.
I.E. just because police don’t “waste” time investigating a crime with $1000 of damage to your personal property does not mean they won’t dedicate the time to pursue $200 in losses for the local mega mart.
If you funded your own private investigation which unambiguously identified the culprit and demonstrated damages sufficient for a felony I imagine the local police would readily act on your behalf as well.
There’s plenty of documented cases where local police are the basically henchmen for large corporations, but I’ve seen no evidence of this and believe it’s kind of a fear mongering meme to think they have enough power over them to dictate them to do roundups after the fact. They may however give all the evidence they collect on you to the police with a bow on it and the cops may decide to take it seriously. Where I am, I do not see this happening. The police will have expected the retailer to have protected their inventory. Off duty police officers make a lot of money working private security and they don’t want to disturb that dynamic.
But at some point, they do start to care.
Stealing fifty dollars worth of steaks on 20 different occasions (every couple of weeks, say), with video and transaction evidence of the acts happening over and over again? That's a lot easier to prove, and in many states adds up to a nice juicy felony.
When a thief takes a steak from the cooler and walks out the door, they don't know who that person is. And while they may have video of parts of this, they don't necessarily see enough to prosecute. (Acting like you're stealing a steak but not actually doing it isn't a crime. Shoplifting can be hard to prove; part of that proof means demonstrating that they didn't change their mind and just drop off the steak somewhere else in the store.)
When a thief takes a steak from the cooler and walks it up to self-checkout and pays for it as if it is a bunch of bananas with their credit card, they have identified that person. They have them on video at the self-checkout committing this crime.
It actually doesn't matter much if they leave the store with their bounty or not in this second case. The crime is already done by converting the steak into bananas.
In that scenario it seems to me that the best the thief can do is to "accidentally" ring up a steak as bananas occasionally and hope that if someone ever takes note that the past events will remain undetected.
That said, I'm pretty sure all of the self checkouts I've interacted with over the past several years would automatically flag such a "mistake". There are some things they're still bad at and they generate plenty of false positives but they seem to be reasonably good at identifying obvious "errors".
That said: I've never, ever weighed meat at self checkout. In fact, I've never had a cashier any weigh meat, either.
I've bought plenty of steaks in regular grocery stores, but each of those steaks (even the ones that they wrapped in butcher paper just for me after I selected them from the glass case at the back of the store) had the weight coded into the UPC that was printed at the time it was wrapped up (and weighed by the meat cutter).
There has no further weighing required for the register to know the price, so weighing a steak at the checkout is pretty bizarro-world behavior to begin with -- at least in my experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Product_Code#Number_...
There's already an scale that prints UPCs in the produce department for customers to use. I'll just put the package of steak on there, punch in 4011, and scan out my "bananas" at the self-checkout. ;)
(But they'll still know who I am. Walking out is cleaner, and has fewer steps.)
Honestly if you’re a thief this is just a dumb idea. Probably works for the original commenter a few times fine. But it’s way too obviously and intentionally theft. You need to come up with something you can claim was an honest mistake.
Find another item that sounds similar but is cheaper and use that upc. If you’re keying in the upc, on a scale or something, then find one that’s cheaper but off my 1 digit or something where you can say it was a typo and you didn’t notice. Those kinds of things are more defensible. None of us have been trained to be a cashier so honest mistakes are a strong defense to any claim of misconduct.
Anyone just buying bananas and steaks is going to look suspicious fast. So rotating the banana for other things is key. Having a mixed bag of purchases where the steaks are always just accidentally unscanned or misscanned.
The facial recognition thing isn’t really in the picture for this minor type of crime. Law enforcement doesn’t have easy access to it as Hollywood would lead you to believe. Its use is reserved for higher profile crimes. You’d have to really be running a steak stealing criminal syndicate for this to happen. Before that, retailers would have already started forcing different procedures for the steaks. Like locking them up or pay at the butcher stand.
One thing facial recognition can do, if used properly by the retailer, is flag you and alert the store to put extra eyes on you every time you enter the store. There’s an increased chance they’ll confront you in the act or otherwise scare you off of it.
Depending on the value, the police probably aren't going to show up at your address, but use that card again at the store in the future and you might find the security guard coming over. Or, like many stores, they wait for you to do it repeatedly until it adds up to enough for a felony instead of just a misdemeanor, and then they bring felony charges...
The stores have cameras. Likely someone is well aware those weren't all bananas, and has it on video.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I once got stopped at self checkout because I put two vegetables (peppers, IIRC) of different types in the same bag and weighed them together.
They were the same price so it's not like I was trying to pull a fast one one anyone, but "the system" noticed and flagged me for someone to come over.
This was pre-pandemic, and I'm sure they're not less capable now than before.
It was a difference of like $5 at most on a $400 bill. I suppose 1.25% is enough to pay someone in another country to monitor everything.
> wait for you to do it repeatedly until it adds up to enough for a felony instead of just a misdemeanor
Isn't there a concept in the legal system where you have to mitigate damages even if you're the victim? I can't think of the example off the top of my head that Steve Lehto (consumer lawyer on YouTube gave).
I'm guessing people who steal from the stores aren't able to afford a decent lawyer, but I imagine a decent lawyer would ask the Target witness(es), why didn't you stop him after the first theft? Why did you keep letting him steal?
Enforcement goes to the police. Stores can't apprehend thieves. There is a lot of training for store employees to not try to engage the thieves because some can behave erratically and dangerously when they feel like they're caught.
You can tell someone they need to stop and pay for merchandise, but if they choose to keep walking there's nothing the store staff can do but document and report it.
The reason stores wait until it reaches felony level to report it is because police are too busy to try to pursue every small case that happens everywhere. There are fewer crimes that rise to the level of a felony, so they have to focus their efforts on the smaller number of more serious crimes instead of taking every report FIFO style
The stores can also make a police report after the first theft, but the stores are choosing not to.
The stores are choosing not to mitigate their damages, something that the courts frown upon in my limited knowledge.
I understand that might be a civil aspect (mitigation) versus a criminal aspect, but perhaps someone who has been to law school and studied the law, might be able shed some light.
Supermarkets actually factor breakage, theft, and spoilage into their books as "shrink", which averages between 2-3% of sales. There's no detective building a case, biding their time to bring down the banana bandit.
Although, modern self-checkouts have cameras on the scanner with ML-powered item detection, and they will alert the attendant if you incorrectly scan something that's sold by weight. (I've done this before on accident, fat-fingering the wrong PLU.)
Pre-paid gift cards would fall into the part where almost always doesn't cover. There's a reason scammers love gift cards
I was of the impression that, in our golden age of individualized surveillance, merely interacting with the kiosk was enough to leave a facial-geometry calling card these days.
I feel like I may have heard this from one of those Illinois BIPA class action suits [0], which reliably have a whiff of crackpot to them from a technical perspective. But it surely seems an obvious enough sort of application…
[0] https://www.law360.com/articles/2372764/home-depot-s-self-ch...
(Not a lawyer, I'd imagine you know better here than I do)