Did I steal something? Did the cashier give me something for free? Who is responsible? What if I didn't notice the $100 charge absent from the bill? What if I was charged twice as much? What if I told the cashier and they did nothing?
What turns something into a crime, in your eyes?
I certainly don't think I stole anything, nor do I think OP stole anything.
The different between this and the contrived shit you posted is knowing you didn’t pay and walking out of the store in the first place. There isn’t really any subtly here.
It might still be theft (or fraud or some related charge), but only if those laws create a strict liability crime out of keeping something that you know was given to you by mistake. I'm not sure but I think there might be specific laws to that effect if you knowingly take advantage of a bank's mistake. Whether there's a similar law in general, probably depends on where you live.
In the pure theft case, there's no intervening act by a store employee. It requires criminal intent.
The argument that if the customer knew, it's theft, applies equally to cases where the product is rung up incorrectly, which several other people in this thread have claimed to have witnessed. I guess we're all thieves now. I've been overcharged and undercharged at stores.
Also even if the intervening act by the store employee doesn't matter, it would be impossible to prosecute. They'd have to show that the customer knew the checkout person missed the item. How would they do that? Interrogating people you live with to find out if you mentioned it to them? No, they don't have access to admissions on HN years later.
Yes there is, they have cameras and people who can frisk at the doors. I don’t think you want to go down the path of “if there was some action an employee could have taken to stop it, it’s not theft”.
> No, they don't have access to admissions on HN years later.
“They can’t prove it” is not an argument that something isn’t theft. You can go through whatever mental gymnastics you want to go over how difficult it will be to legally prove theft for prosecution, but it doesn’t change what it morally is at all.
I'm not even sure this is relevant. We're not talking about a cashier returning too much change. In this scenario, there is nothing to not balance. The item wasn't scanned, isn't on a receipt, was simply given away. The balance in the till is still correct.
Retail stores change pricing on products and fail to update pricing on the shelf all the time. Home Depot, Walmart, etc have interactions like what OP described occur every day.
The responsibility rests with the corporation to train and reward employee behavior.
If the company has chosen to staff their store with someone that doesn't give a fuck (underpaid, poorly treated, mismanaged, improperly trained, not well rested, etc), then that is a gamble they chose to take, and the last thing I am going to do is rock their boat when they built and arranged it this way.
As for my thinking, it was impulsive, I was a fresh grad and didn't have much money, I was upset about the price, I thought the cashier was being rude by completely ignoring me. I felt like I attempted to engage with the process of buying the cable in the correct way and the process broke down in my favor. I was not going to go out of my way to fix it.
Again, none of that makes it the right thing to do. I wouldn't have considered walking in and stuffing it into my pocket, but feeling like I did my best I shrugged my shoulders and went on with my day.
Can you walk me through the thinking of "corps fuck me over and I should be thankful"?