Receipt checks: Best Buy, worst customer retention

Journalist Amy Alkon shares the disturbing experience of a Best Buy customer who refused to be detained by the store’s employees so that they could check his receipt.

[T]his verification step is purely voluntary. Merchants basically have two rights covering people entering and exiting their stores. They can refuse to let you enter the premises and/or to sell you anything, and they can place you under citizens arrest for attempting to leave the premises with any property that you haven’t paid for. But the second you hand over the appropriate amount of cash, they lose all rights to the items. They can’t legally impair you from leaving the store with your property.

...Shortly a yellow-shirted fellow, who I take to be a managerial-type, again tries to plead a case for the receipt-checking. I ask again if I’m being detained for shoplifting. He says no, but shortly thereafter mentions that he’ll need to call the police shortly if I don’t offer a receipt. I tell him to please do so, while loading my packages into the car. I suggest that before doing so he take a moment to talk to either the helpful salesperson who rung me up or to compare their inventory against sales receipts, as to avoid looking like an ass to the cops.

As I get in my car to leave, two Best Buy lackeys in a pickup truck decide its a good time to park behind me, blocking my path again. By this time, I’ve had just enough of this crap and not very politely or discreetly ask them to get out of the way. With only a little hesitation, the yellow-shirt nods in their direction and I’m soon free to leave.

Aaron Hopkins, the customer in question has posted all of the replies from Best Buy corporate and individual employees regarding his attempted detainment.

Here are some points to take away:

Hostility towards customers should not be any company’s policy.

If customers voluntarily submit to receipt checks, that is fine. Those who do not should be able to leave free from harassment.

The arguments that this is necessary for loss prevention reasons ring completely hollow.

If your loss prevention only covers loss of goods, and not loss of customers, you have much more serious problems than some stolen electronics.

If your employees are not trustworthy, they should not be working for you. Improve your recruitment and employee services.

You should not opt to harass customers as an alternative to robust loss prevention systems (such as prominent tape on big ticket items which have been paid for, or perhaps RFID technology).

If your store policy is to detain and harass, you can either choose to make that explicit or wait for your (former) customers to do it for you.

In any case, there is a better way and you should find or design it. No ifs, ands, or buts. 

It could be worse. In Australia, it is normal practice to have security guards stationed outside the exits of stores, and to ask customers to submit to searches of all bags they are carrying. Not just bags containing purchases, but things like backpacks, handbags, and the like that customers carried into the store as well as things they are leaving with. There is usually a sign on the front door stating something like “It is a condition of entry to this store that customers submit all bags they are carrying for inspection on the way out of the store.

Of course, this sign is legally meaningless. They could equally well put up a sign stating that “It is a condition of entry to this store that customers submit to being shot on the way out of the store”, but that wouldn’t actually give them the right to shoot people. The store can prevent anybody they like from entering the store and/or refuse to sell them things for any reason (including that they refused to submit to bag searches in the past) but the cannot legally search a bag or detain anyone without actual evidence that they have committed a crime.

Whilst this is an offensive way to treat customers, the worst problems from this policy do not come so much from large stores (who generally do understand your legal rights and who do inform their security guards of what the law says, so they will generally back off if you refuse to let them search your bag). The problems come from smaller stores who see the policy in place in large stores, and who assume that they therefore have some sort of legal right to search the bags of customers. (The fact that only a tiny minority of people ever object to the searches makes this
worse). In this case, if you simply say “no” and walk off when they ask if they can search your bag (which was my standard practice) the reaction can be extraordinary. I have been chased down the street by people shouting at me, I have been physically pushed in the chese when I attempted to walk off, and I have had a grab my bag and attempt to physically take it off me and open it against my will.

Quite honestly, this issue and others like it (and the sheep like acceptance of it by most Australians) is one of the main reasons I no longer live there.

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