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That's crazy. But coming from someone who wrote a book on retail fraud and worked as a retail fraud analyst for several years... you could have just walked straight out with those items.

Transacting was your way of leaving a calling card for the investigators/analysts to find you... You stole regardless of how you did it.

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That's _bananas_.
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Congratulations, you have discovered the concept of shoplifting!
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IANAL and this depends on the jurisdiction, but in many places, the penalties for shenanigans like these are far steeper than for outright theft, as it's considered to be financial fraud.
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Some retail chains, of which Dollar General is the poster child, have one price displayed on the shelf and a different, much higher price at the checkout register.

Links:

> Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed suit against Dollar General, claiming deceptive and unfair pricing at its more than 600 retail stores throughout the state. The lawsuit alleges that Dollar General violated Missouri’s consumer protection laws by advertising one price at the shelf and charging a higher price at the register upon checkout.

> The joint investigation revealed that “92 of the 147 locations where investigations were conducted failed inspection. Price discrepancies ranged up to as much as $6.50 per item, with an average overcharge of $2.71 for the over 5,000 items price-checked by investigators.”

https://progressivegrocer.com/dollar-general-accused-decepti...

> All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.

> The January 2023 inspection produced the store’s fourth consecutive failure, and Coffield’s agency, the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...

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It sucks that we have to do extra labor and expose ourselves to this kind of legal risk all because a grocery store doesn't want to staff workers. It's not even like they pass these savings onto us...
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At least here, there are randomly triggered checks by shop staff where they have to manually rescan anything before they let you leave. And possibly, those checks are more easily triggered if you do certain very strange things like buying nothing but many separate instances of "bananas' with widely varying weights. Wouldn't be too hard to program a set of rules for the most obvious red flags.

And of course, the area is wide open and well covered by cameras, and usually self-checkout means paying by card or google pay or something, which will tie your identity to the purchase.

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I saw a video where someone took banana bar code stickers wrapped around a bunch of bananas and put them on the TVs in their shopping cart and then checked out via self checkout.

I predict that self checkout will only remain in the more trustworthy areas…

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That video was staged, at Target electronics need to be paid for in the electronics department where there is no self-check out. In addition Target has the best Loss Prevention in the business, including let shoplifters continue until they accumulate enough goods that their crime is a felony.
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Partner spent a significant time working at Target, can confirm

Their Loss Prevention is so advanced that FBI has collaborated with them for case help

https://thehorizonsun.com/features/2024/04/11/the-target-for...

I also worked there briefly in my teens, they are a great employer.

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Every self checkout around here has an employee staffing ~6 terminals. They're supposed to be watching for things like that. Usually theyre just staring vacantly into space, which I get, that job pays nothing and provides 0 mental stimulation.

When you see a TV being purchased, though, it wouldn't be hard to just watch that it in fact got checked in as such.

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Couldn't you also not just check stuff in? These are all obvious drawbacks, it's not really a high-scrutiny environment.
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That is something you can do in cahoots with a regular cashier and the reason places like Costco check your receipt. The cashier just has to fake scan an item, and nobody would notice. Receipt checking makes it possible to get caught.
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Most self-checkouts I've come across have weight validation – "Unexpected item in the bagging area".

Categorising things as "bananas" tricks the checkout into accepting the weight of an item, and you pay the appropriate price per bananagram.

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This is a more expensive form of shoplifting though, idk why even bother with the banana thing, as hilarious as it is.
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Presumably there's a slightly lower risk of getting caught, as casual observation suggests a normal shopper paying for their groceries.
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Agreed, but there's nobody looking if you're putting the items in the bagging area or not. You could simply leave an item last, pay, put it in the bag, and go. They do have (prominent) cameras over the tills I've seen, though, not sure if that's just "we see you" or if they're doing some item recognition with that.
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You know you can just walk out the door with the items without using the scanner at all right?
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Careful, the law is lenient if you steal from other normal people, but as soon as you steal from the wealthy, try to fraud them, you will see all sort of laws to make sure you are an example to others so they never think about doing the same, but a normal person? Oh well, you should have paid for insurance, or suck it up.

On the other hand, the wealthy can lobby, inflate the prices overnight just because, while also reducing the good weight aka double increase, and you can’t say anything because it’s legal!! It’s a one way “justice” system.

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Not careful enough
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People like you are why we are living in an increasingly lower trust society, with for example having items behind locked door in shops.

Reminds me a bit of the shopping cart theory.

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Think about blaming the grocery store replacing workers with no one in particular before you blame some college pranksters.

Grocery stores in general consolidating, laying off workers, leaving them without pay/benefits, taking advantage of greedflation, etc., is a bigger drain on society.

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Ah yes, let's blame some shadowy "big grocery" rather than point our fingers at individual bad actors.
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Why deal with problem systems when we can punish someone we caught?

That is your thought process?

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Is it possible that grocery stores are reducing positions to save money? Is it not possible that it is a feedback loop? Why are we blaming the grocery store for replacing labor with machines? Why don't we decry the grocery that hires only 2 people instead of 3?

And since when is stealing a prank?

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Shadowy? Kroger's and Albertsons weren't allowed to merge due to anticompetitive practices, price hikes, etc. This was only a couple years ago & is out in the open. You can point all your fingers and toes at the boards of these companies if you need to.
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