Everyone Has Gotten Caught Shoplifting

I’ll admit the title of this “Andy Wonders” is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it occurred to me the other day when I was shopping at Target that most everyone has gotten caught shoplifting, or nearly everyone at least in the eyes of the scanners that sound off an alarm when you leave the store if the anti-shoplifting tag hasn’t been de-activated properly. I know it’s happened to me. Sometimes it has happened when I bagged my own stuff at the store, which of course makes me wonder if I did forget to scan something, and then there are the times when it happens after I go to a real, live check-out person, and I’m pissed that either they A) Didn’t scan something and that makes me a shoplifter, or B) They didn’t deactivate the anti-shoplifting tag thereby having everyone look at me as I’m leaving the store thinking I’ve just stolen the latest Taylor Swift CD or porterhouse steak.

What I find mostly, though, is that for all of the times I’ve gone through the scanners and they’ve gone off, or when I’ve seen other people go through the scanners and they sound the alarm, I’ve never seen anyone actually care. I generally just keep on walking, maybe making a motion that I noticed the alarm, but also making the motion and face of “What, I didn’t steal nothin’.” Most other people seem to have the same reaction, and I can’t recall ever seeing a store employee jump to action, yelling “Halt! Thief! We must check your bags because that little metal strip inside your DVD says you are stealing it!”

I’ve never seen anyone really care up until the other day.

There I found myself, about twenty to thirty feet behind two girls as they were leaving, and the alarm sounded as they were leaving the store. Rather than act like 99.9999% of every human being, these two girls actually stopped in their tracks, turned around, and I heard the one girl tell the other “We have to go back to see if they forgot to scan something.” I wasn’t sure if I was proud of the girl for her honesty, guilty because I know I would have just kept walking, or mystified at their decision to verify their purchase.

I also wondered another couple of things. One has always been how those little things protecting the merchandise actually set off the alarm. I mean, I’ve taken them apart and it just looks like a couple of strips of metal in a plastic container. For this post I actually took one apart for you to see, at least the one inside a Reservoir Dogs DVD I had. The other thing was a little more people related, so for this post I wonder: Have you ever gone back into the store to verify your purchase when the anti-shoplifting alarm goes off?

That’s it for this one! L8R!!