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Trick #2 is entering a code manually for an item not present in the customer's order. I don't know if there is some way the cashier can get this extra money or if they are trying to make their figures look normal after they rob the till.
They could pocket the item, it would never show up as missing in inventory.
Having managed theatres and concessions for a number of years, and having designed and sold point-of-sale software, I know a BUNCH of ways that are used to skim, defraud customers, steal, and thwart detection. I will not share them and make it easier for others to pick up tricks.
The ways to detect and thwart such crap are even more interesting, and a lot of people have misconceptions of how this is done. Again though, honest people don't have any need to know, other than that detection is possible and often is verified by more than one method.
True.
Posters on this thread have not hit the really serious methods of cheating yet.
Cheating customers by short-changing is pathetic. It doesn't happen that often, and it doesn't make the cashier much money. Serious thieves go where the money is and steal from the store in a number of different ways.
Thanks for the info. I did not want to start a seminar in How to Cheat Customers. I don't think cashiers and managers need much instruction in the art. More of what to look for, as a customer.
A few more things I remember:
Higher prices in the POS for items advertised (even in the store) as on sale. The explanation they give is that the central office put the price in wrong. Funny how it is always higher, though. Also curious how it doesn't get corrected.
When one item is on sale, keeping it out of stock and placing a more expensive, but similar in appearance, item on its shelf.
On an overpriced item, not having a shelf tag and hoping customers will think the price for the next, cheaper, item applies. Walmart is especially fond of this, at least here in Indiana.
These are store manager tricks, of course.
I've never been to an amusement park. Driving the roads around here provides all the chills and thrills I need.
Much of the overcharging at stores, is done with the knowledge of the management. It's a policy of some chain stores, to train older and trusted checkers to skim money from customers and then give them a percentage of it. I used to go to a chain grocery store and I could depend on two older checkers to always cheat me, if I didn't pay close attention to what they were doing. It would typically amount to no more than about 5% of the total, which might not be noticed by many customers. I would call them out on it and demand that they re-register all the items. But the next time I went through their lines, they would do it again. It actually became a sport for me, to catch them doing it.
A family friend was once a checker at this chain of stores. She said they wanted her to attend a weekend seminar, where they would teach her the fine points of overcharging. But she quit instead.
One way they cheat, is to ring up one more of multiple items, than were actually there. Another way is to register 1 item as being 11 of them. It's easy to claim that a slip of the finger caused that. Sometimes stores will have sale items for a week, but during the evening of the last day, change them in the computer to the regular price, even though the sale price is still shown on the shelf. I've called them out about cash-register prices being higher than shelf prices and come back days later and found that they hadn't corrected them. Every customer who had bought those items in the meantime, was cheated, unless they paid close attention to every item on their receipts.
This is assuming someone is punching numbers on a cash register. Almost everything is scanned now, you would need to scan it 11 times, kind of obvious.
Only trick #1 is do-able in today's computer environment. Cash registers have to balance with what is rung up; if the product is entered into the register, there has to be money or paper in the till to account for it.
I've had plenty of situations where an item was scanned more than once. Sometimes it's hard to see the items being rung up due to the placement of the screen, so it's hard to catch these errors. I use self-checkout whenever it's available, and where it's not available, I always check my receipt after stuff is bagged, but before I leave the store. Much easier to fix errors before leaving. I've had plenty of not only double scans, but also incorrect prices, usually higher than what is posted on the shelf.
I also take a photo of any price tags that might be incorrect, such as sale items where the register potentially hasn't been updated with sale prices. Mistakes are usually in the store's favor. Self-checkout works better for me so I can catch all of this stuff as I'm scanning and get it corrected before paying.
Serious thieves go where the money is and steal from the store in a number of different ways.
Yes. I agree. Sometimes when I'm walking around Whole Foods, I watch people shop lift. It's amazing how many people just walk around the store eating pastries and ditching the bag before checkout, or walk around eating food from the hot bar, ditching the container and not paying, and stealing coffee. I've been standing in line at the coffee bar waiting to pay watching people walk into the store, fill up a large coffee and walk back out of the store......and often get into a lux car and drive away.....LOL
I've talked to the produce guys at WF, and they also mention stuff like people standing in the produce aisle switching tags on the onions (putting conventional tags on organic produce) to save a few cents. Ridiculous.
But the big time thieves will fill up a grocery cart at WF with very expensive meat and seafood, and then just run out the door with it, and jump in a car, before anyone can run after them. It's amazing if you talk to the workers in some of these places.
In Kroger at the self-checkout, the clerks say that some people scan all of their bags of produce using the same PLU# for something cheap like bananas, which as $.49/lb. So everything they are weighing and scanning is "bananas." Kroger had to reprogram their self-checkout computers so that if a customer punches in the same PLU 3 times, the machine locks up and an attendant has to come over. I learned this when I bought 3 bags of grapes one time and after the third bag, the computer locked, and I asked why this happened. But some people will always find a way to scam the system.
It must be regional; I worked in a pizza place in the 80s and they were called pies, not ‘za.
Never heard of it, either. Is it pronounced "zah" or "zuh"? What's the pronunciation of an apostrophe?
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