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Retail Theft Detectors and False Alarms?
NichardRixon asks: "All too often I set off the 'shoplifter alarm' when leaving a major department store in my area, after purchasing OTC medicine. Even though I make a point of watching the cashier 'clear' the boxes, it is evidently an imprecise process. As often as not the alarm goes off as I leave, and the security person wants to look through my bag and compare what's found with my reciept. People passing by give me the evil eye, evidently assuming that I've been caught stealing.
This has happened so so many times that my new policy is to refuse to stop for the search, telling the gaurd that they will have to tackle me, and of course they just let me go.
Shouldn't stores be required to use more reliable equipment?" What's worse is that there are many retailers that are just plain apathetic to the alarm. What's the point of having these detectors if all they are is continuing source of false alarms? What good will they be when they catch a real theft in progress and no one reacts properly because of their questionable history?
"It happened to my wife the other day, however, and she felt as though she had no choice but to wait several minutes, embarassingly on display to other shoppers, for the arrival of the manager.
I was wondering if other Slashdot readers have been having similar experiences and if so, how they deal with them."
When this happens to me (*every* time I go to Home Depot, by the way), I just just walk away purposefully, ignoring the cries of "Sir! Sir! You set off the alarm". I don't make eye contact, I don't speed up or slow down. Just ignore. It feels good when you finally reach that Zen-like state of perfect ignoring.
:-)
I made the mistake of stopping once and had to sit there while they wasted my time rooting through all my bags. And yes, it's a waste of *my* time--It's not my duty to give them peace of mind. I guarantee they won't go out of their way to give *me* peace of mind.
This is the same way I handle the bozos at the end of the Fry's line that insist on checking eveyone's bag. I just scoot on past and ignore everything they say. The Fry's guys won't chase you though; The Home Depot people do.
-David
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
AS far as perfecting it, if I were a retailer, I'd rather have it get an extra 99 people out of a thousand who were innocent but also get the one person who was actually stealing something than not go off.
Yes, it's that mentality that encourages people to buy car alarms that go off all hours of the night because a loud truck drives by, or a rainstorm sets it off. Better to inconvenience/alienate/embarrass customers, rather than pay for a decent system, right?
Media Play, one of my least favorite stores for regularly priced merchandise (great clearance prices), has one of those lousy theft alarm systems that go off all the time. The staff don't care, rarely bothering to look up when it goes off. I saw a young hoodlum obviously pocketing XBox games and mentioned it to one of the drones at the service desk. No interest. The kid didn't set off the alarm, he had a nice, lined pouch in his coat... quite popular among thieves at the mall. Maybe we should all have foil-lined bags to put our purchases (or thefts) in before we leave the store...
Here come da fudge!
The worst case of inconvenience that I've ever experienced with this sort of thing was not at a retailer, but at the library of the Univ. of Texas at Tyler.
I was doing some research and carried my PowerMac bag with me for obvious reasons. When I was leaving the security system went off. The staff sort of freaked. I had to empty my bag and add one item at a time back into it to see if the alarm got set off by that item.
Turns out that a coiled up ethernet patch cable was the culprit. Can you say electromagnetic induction?
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
In the following email to Staples after they had this problem: ...my comment about the in-store experience:
I thought you would like to know that after I bought $350 worth of merchandise, rung up by the store general manager, no less, that the anti-theft system at the front door started going off as I departed.
I stopped, turned around, and went in hoping that someone from the store would help, as indicated by the automatic alarm warning message. I'm telling you, even though there were a gaggle of sales people standing around, no one FLINCHED.
I finally started to approach one of the cashiers. From 20 feet away he called out (over the din of the alarm) "Did you pay for that?" I called
back "Yes"
He said "Why did you stop? Just keep going!"
I turned and walked out. Presumably the shoplifters would have done the same except they would not have paused at the door.
How much money does Staples have invested in this system that is completely ignored? If it's all the same to you, would you please stop
installing these systems and lower your prices? I'd rather not pay more than I have to.
Thought you'd like to know.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
If it bothers you too much after you paid for the merchandise and the alarm goes off and you are stopped by the security people, do this - After they are done searching for those items on your receipt, you tell them that now you would like to return those items as you have no desire to take them home after the embarrassment caused to you.
2 - alarm rings
3 - store bitches
4 - tell them to call the cops, because only the cops have the right to search you **AFTER** they put you under arrest; warn them that you will sue them for false arrest.
5 - they let you off, go home. That's it.
OR 5 - they don't let you off.
6 - they call the cops. Cops don't find anything.
7 - sue them for false arrest and defamation of character.
8 - profit!!!
Very often, upon finding your innocence, they will offer to settle. Some 40 years ago, an aunt got herself to choose whatever she wanted from $BIG_CANADIAN_DEPT_STORE. She chose a mink coat...
Like many of the posters commented, I just keep on walking. I used to stop, and I used to let them look through my bags - after all, after I buy the merchandise, everything is now *mine* and not theirs. I finally got sick of it since just about every store has this problem. Now, when I'm walking and it goes off, I keep going. If anyone says anything, I keep walking. I did have someone chase me down and tell me I had to come back into the store so my bags could be searched. I hope I didn't run over his feet as I was driving away...
Self checkout lanes provide me with great amounts of fun in regards to this. It isn't that difficult to figure out which products have the sensors, and since at the self checkout you control which items get properly swiped over the deactivation pad (which is under the scale which is used as the bagging area btw). With a known active sensor, you can either cause your trouble, or you can simply keep walking and have a live sensor to use for nefarious purposes later.
I've worked in a large retail store, and I can tell you with pretty reasonable certainty that the point of such detectors is not to detect people shoplifting, but to give the greeters or store security an excuse to stop people they suspect may be stealing. I've even heard tales of security setting the alarms off on purpose to give themselves an excuse to go after someone they know to be stealing (someone who may have removed the tags from the merchendise).
But aside from that, I think previous posters have hit it on the nose when saying that they mostly function as a detterant, and retailers don't really care how reliable they are.
Maybe we should all have foil-lined bags to put our purchases (or thefts) in before we leave the store...
:)
That's called a booster bag. Having a booster bag is an offence in many jurisdictions. Of course, shoplifting is alread illegal
Worst experience for me was in the HS library. Some joker took the RFID tag out of a book on the shelf and stuck it in a book in my backpack.
I was 20 minutes late to my next class as the librarian and I dug through the pack looking for what was setting off the alarm.
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After finally making my way through the checkout and purchasing my items, I made a beeline for the door, bypassing the twenty or thirty people standing around waiting to have their bags inspected. There was no way I was going to stand around for another twenty minutes after having stood in line for an hour already. As I approached the exit, a Fry's employee stepped in front of me and said, "I need to check your receipt, sir."
I ignored him, sidestepped, and kept walking. The moron actually grabbed my left shoulder from behind -- not forcefully, but even so it startled the crap out of me because I wasn't expecting to be grabbed. Completely by reflex, I yanked my shoulder away and punched the poor guy in the throat with my right fist (my bag was in my left hand).
It surprised me as much as it did him, and I felt kinda bad about it for a moment, but I hadn't hit him hard enough to do any real damage. He gave me a very unhappy look and made some strained coughing noises, and I walked away. In hindsight, I don't really feel bad about it at all. I had nothing personal against the guy until he touched me, but as soon as his hand landed on my shoulder, he overstepped his authority. If I'd seriously injured him, I would have felt terrible, but as it is, I think he got a good lesson in how to respect a customer's personal space.
That's funny. All EZ-Pass transponders are delivered via the US Mail in foil lined bags. Otherwise you'd get billed for every tollbooth that the mail truck drove through. And you are reminded to keep your foil lined bag, in case you need to return your transponder, or you need to transport it without using it, for the same reason.
I worked at a drug store for 3 years. All we ever did when the alarm went off was to tell the customer to ignore it and "go ahead" out the door. It's what the other employees did while i was being trained so I never questioned it. (I didn't want to get into fights with customers either) The alarm gets activated by tags placed on or inside the packaging. These tags are supposed to be deactivated by a pad under the counter at the cash register, (The pads "beep" when a tag is deactivated) but it doesn't always work the way it's supposed to. Active cellphones also used to set the alarm off and cause the pads to beep, forcing us to shut them off. Since the tags that activate the alarm are usually placed on the outside of the packaging, people who want to steal would just take the products out of the boxes before leaving the store. If you search the shelves at the end of the night you come across a lot of empty boxes of razor blades, medicines, etc. The whole system is pretty useless. It does nothing but annoy the employees and embarass the customers
- steel-toe boots
- cellphones
- magnets
- digital watches
- eel-skin wallets
(Note: Eel-skin wallets aren't made from the skin of eels, they're made from the skin of hagfish.)What will set the system off are any of the following:
The alarm system I have at my store goes off most often when someone is coming in from the mall. Typically they've purchased something from a retailer who doesn't use the system, and the manufacturer ever so helpfully stuck a tag in the box before shipping it to the retailer. Cellphone kiosks, Radio Shack and Sears are the biggest offenders (they're not doing anything wrong, the manufacturers are just being too helpful). Outgoing alarms are less frequent, and are usually caused by a failure of the equipment to collapse a tag properly.
How do we handle it? Each employee has been instructed to handle an alarm in the exact same fashion. On an incoming alarm, we ask the customer to come to the register and explain that something they bought somewhere else wasn't handled properly. We make sure everyone can hear as we explain that it happens all the time, and we're helping them out by making sure the alarms don't go off in other stores as they continue to shop. I've only ever seen one customer refuse or get upset about this.
On an outgoing alarm we laugh and apologize for what obviously was our error. We screwed that one up, it must be our fault, because there's no way we'll consider that someone might be stealing from us. Of course we don't say it this way, but that's the image we project. You'd be shocked at how quickly a thief will confess or, more often, dump whatever they've stolen behind them somewhere, when you respond to the alarm.
The big thing we do is respond to the alarm. We don't ever embarass our customers (or the visitors who didn't buy). If there's any doubt or people don't want to stop, we let them go. A real shoplifter will dump the product, confess, or take off running.
Of course, this has given rise to what I tell customers as they're leaving: "Thanks for coming by. I deactivated the security tag, so the alarm shouldn't go off as you're leaving. But if it does, do what everyone else does ... just run."
My customers love me. I have no idea why. I've gotten standing ovations from them. Weird.
A friend of mine ran into the same issue at a Best Buy, IIRC. They were trying to block his exit, so he demanded to see a manager, who insisted that he allow them to search him and lift his shirt. He told them to call the cops. When the manager told him that it wasn't necessary, my friend, who likes screwing with people, told him exactly why he wouldn't lift his shirt.
"If I show you what is under my shirt, some authorities might consider it brandishing a weapon."
They let him go.
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