[UK filter] How is the cashier scamming me, exactly?

September 28, 2023 4:10 AM

[UK filter] Did some grocery shopping at a supermarket. Bought approx 10 items which were roughly £2-5 each with a total of £40. Paid by credit card. Came home, checked the receipt and lo behold, I paid for (but did not receive) a food luxury item that cost £10! Let's assume this was deliberate and not a mistake. How did the cashier steal from me?

This is a UK cultural filter to put into UK grocery shopping context, as opposed to the default American, where it may be deemed that £2-5 is not much and neither is £10. Please respect the cultural filter. £10 is in the grand scheme of things is not a financial hardship, but it makes me sad and distrustful of the world.

Some more contextual notes: I paid by credit card.

The food luxury item was listed right in the middle of the receipt, which is where someone who wanted to sneak the purchase in would do.

Also, when the cashier was scanning the items, I absolutely did not notice the food luxury item, which makes me think that this wasn't a 'mistake': the cashier had the barcode but maybe not the item. I also bagged my groceries so I would have noticed. Also note that the item is £10, which is not too high to raise red flags, but significant enough if repeated over a course of a day.

This is part of a local supermarket chain but NOT chain that you would recognise (i.e. not the Big Four or Aldi or Lidl or Coop).

Did the cashier 'refund' himself and take the £10 in cash? Did he take the food luxury item instead (seems a odd thing to steal)?

posted by moiraine to Grab Bag (16 answers total)

I know you've said "let's assume this was deliberate", but where my mind goes first is technology failure, partly because £10 actually does seem like a lot to me, particularly on a £40 purchase! So - is every item you did buy definitely listed on the receipt?
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 4:23 AM on September 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

I think my assumptions would be, in order -

1. Error. There are some items which, for whatever reason, don't scan well with the barcodes on their wrapping, so copies of those codes are kept at the checkout. I can see one of them getting scanned by accident. Also - is your receipt missing anything that you did buy? Very occasionally two items end up with the same barcode, or could get logged wrongly in the system so they scanned your packet of digestives and the system registered it as a giant luxury ham hock or whatever.

2. Theft. I'm not sure they could refund it without your receipt, and possibly without a supervisor checking in, to prevent exactly this type of theft. And to steal the actual item, they'd still have to go onto the shop floor at some point, pick it up, and leave with it, and not have a receipt for it if challenged. Putting it on your receipt solves the issue of missing inventory but doesn't actually give them an easy way to steal the item. Either way, your fellow Metafiltarians can probably do no better than you at speculating what form of theft they might have opted for.

Admittedly that order is based on my general (maybe naive) assumption of goodness in the world, rather than recent insider knowledge of the retail industry. I did once work in a supermarket where two older women staff members were literally taken away by the police in the middle of an afternoon shift because they'd been scanning huge numbers of money off vouchers for each other, for items they weren't buying. So I know these things do happen. But in a place that scans so many thousands of objects a day, my mind would go to error first.
posted by penguin pie at 4:29 AM on September 28, 2023

I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about whether it was an error or intentional fraud. I'd just go back to the store and speak to customer service and get a refund.
posted by mareli at 5:05 AM on September 28, 2023 [13 favorites]

From my experience of being a cashier (albeit 10 years back now and in a different country), assuming your premise of deliberate scam, the cashier could have had a copy of the barcode that they somehow very slickly scanned while they were scanning your other items, maybe holding it under the bottom of one and then palming it. Or (again in my dated experience), if it was produce or inhouse meat, cheese, or some other specialty items, it could have had something as tiny as a four digit code (e.g. produce code but some stores use similar codes for other items in house) that they typed in quickly or instead of, say, the code for your apple or whatever.

That said, I suspect error is more likely than deliberate theft, because as penguin pie points out, charging a customer for a luxury item and then ending up with either cash or the item doesn't seem like an easy transition or one worth the hassle.
posted by carrioncomfort at 5:14 AM on September 28, 2023

I've been food shopping in the UK (and paying by card) for 35 years, and this hasn't happened to me once. As others have suggested, it's more likely to be an error with the barcodes. This seems like an unlikely technique for a scam - it's easy to detect, so you'd surely try to pull it when someone's doing a £150 shop, not a £40 one.
posted by pipeski at 5:20 AM on September 28, 2023

Response by poster: To avoid further speculation on this: When I checked the items against the receipt, all items were accounted and paid for. So, not wrong barcode. I bought 10 items and I paid for 11.

Also, this is not the kind of place to do a £150 weekly shop. It’s a smaller grocery store in London. The highest I ever paid was £80 and that’s feeding a family of four with some meat. And I don’t think I EVER spent £150 on even a weekly shop before, that’s far higher than the national average of a family of four (UK average £129/week).

I did think the bill was high but was in a rush to leave, so had not checked.
posted by moiraine at 5:36 AM on September 28, 2023

Yes it could be a fake sale, accomplished by typing in codes or whatever as suggested above, followed by a return without a receipt which a lot of stores make fairly easy for a cashier to do. It does seem like a silly and easy to detect (over time) method of stealing. It would inevitably be noticed when cash register records are audited, which they are. Most managers can tell who has a high number of "exceptions" such as non-receitped returns. But I went through loss prevention training and learned that people do steal in silly and inefficient ways, sometimes just for fun and to see if they can do it.

It is also absurdly easy to scan stuff by accident. Not knowing the register setup where you shop, rejected or unnoticed products are often shunted into an area where the cashier doesn't notice them but the scanner keeps picking them up. I used to work in bookstores a lot, and they would pile up merchandise all around the resigters and it would get accidentally scanned all the time.
posted by BibiRose at 5:39 AM on September 28, 2023

Given that this was a small store, it's possible the cashier was also the store owner or that things are done casually without the kind of checks and balances a large supermarket would have. In either case the cash could just go in the cashier's pocket and the item cancelled from the register.
posted by hazyjane at 5:48 AM on September 28, 2023

Logically I don't think it can be a case where they're going to do a return without receipt because that wouldn't require them to charge the OP at all! (And charging the OP makes it more likely that they'll be detected.)

And if they do a return *with* receipt presumably the money goes back onto OPs card, not into the cashier's pocket (at least this is how it would usually work in the US - or you might also be able to get a store credit). You can't be like, "oh my cash drawer is £10 short but my credit card receipts are £10 over so it's all good" (unless the cashier is also e.g. the owner or manager and the one responsible for reconciling the receipts).

This *would* be a viable way of stealing if the OP had paid with cash - the cashier could have done a return with receipt and pocketed the £10. But surely anyone who pays with cash is going to even more easily notice that they've been overcharged by 25%!

I think error is probably most likely. Second most likely is that the cashier thinks they're running a scam but it's going to be a very unsuccessful one that will not benefit them and will most likely get them fired shortly. Running a distant third, cashier is a deliberate agent of chaos who just wants to mess people around.

In any event if I were the OP I'd call or visit the store and ask for the item to be refunded.
posted by mskyle at 5:54 AM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes it could be a fake sale, accomplished by typing in codes or whatever as suggested above, followed by a return without a receipt which a lot of stores make fairly easy for a cashier to do. It does seem like a silly and easy to detect (over time) method of stealing. It would inevitably be noticed when cash register records are audited, which they are. Most managers can tell who has a high number of "exceptions" such as non-receitped returns.

Assuming it was deliberate, this explanation would be my guess. Either the cashier is living dangerously and probably will get caught as soon as someone reviews things, or they have some side deal with the manager/owner to split the proceeds. An extra 10 pounds every few transactions adds up over a day, a week, a month, and might feel worth the risk to someone.

That said, I would still think the most likely actual cause was a glitch of some kind, but that isn't what the question is about. Their reaction if you come back in and ask for a refund on that un-bought item would be interesting to see.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:54 AM on September 28, 2023

The cashier could have taken the item for which you paid, for themselves or to resell.
posted by bruinfan at 7:38 AM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

If it's a food luxury item, it'll have an RFID chip on it which gets delisted as the item's scanned, so I suspect that'd be what the cashier need to do if they wanted to take it out with them later without setting off an alarm. Possibly there's a handheld scanner connected to the checkout as well as the fixed one, which they could easily have under the counter as well as the luxury food they want to scan discreetly and take home later.

That's a scenario which feels fairly plausible to me.
posted by ambrosen at 7:56 AM on September 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

The cashier also could have inadvertently damaged/destroyed a quantity of the luxury item, and be trying to cover that up by "selling" them.
posted by teremala at 7:57 AM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Putting aside the argument that it was an accident: if it was deliberate, isn't the simplest explanation that the cashier wanted the item, and pocketed the item (or put it in a discreet place in the back to be pocketed later, etc) and charged it to you so that it wouldn't trigger an inventory error?
posted by fingersandtoes at 9:39 AM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: A family member used to be head of loss prevention for one of the UK's best-known retailers and thus encountered just about every form of shrinkage. He says he can't think of any normal form of employee theft that would result in the situation you describe and if it was theft, it was an inept, first-time attempt by someone who had no idea what they were doing.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 11:19 AM on September 28, 2023 [11 favorites]

American here who has absolutely gone back to a store to contest a mischarge of $2.00. I feel you. Can you go back to the store and speak with the manager and explain the situation? Given the parameters you laid out, it really does sound like an error on either the part of the point of sale system or the cashier. My mind does not immediately move to scam but I could be wrong.
posted by cooker girl at 1:47 PM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]