In my experience working in chain stores, I have seen many options for cheating at the checkout, but there is one that is old, safe, and very effective.
Judging by the stories of customers, the store is one of the most dangerous places in the city. They will definitely cheat you with the price, charge you more, sell you a late fee, and the check will still contain a product that you didn't buy, informs Ukr.Media.
I am also a shopper and often go to grocery stores. Surprisingly, most of my shopping trips ended without all these dramatic stories. Maybe I'm just lucky? Let's first talk a little about people's wild imagination.
What are the methods of deception?
Weigh. Instead of 1 kg of bananas, 1,2 kg were punched. 95% of cases are a glitch in the scales, 5% are some object (glasses or a phone) that the seller left on the edge of the scales. There is no benefit for her here. The store does, but not the seller. She will not make money from this, only problems.
1+1 promotion. When two products are sold for the price of one. The buyer does not know about the promotion and brings one sausage stick to the checkout. The cashier is silent about 1+1, but specifically enters 2 units of the product in the check. The buyer pays the full price, and the seller then takes the second (paid) stick. The problem is that the employee will not be able to take it out of the store, because she does not have a receipt for this sausage.
Buyer's card. There have been so many stories about this. I don't know who came up with these rumors about a loyalty card, but it doesn't work. For example, the seller adds points to his card during the day, not to the buyer's card. Or he even replaces the customer's card with a new one, where there are no points at all. The seller sits under a high-definition camera, which allows you to see the cuticles on the fingers. Such frauds are calculated within a few hours. This is a great scheme to get yourself into trouble.
The difference between the price at the checkout and on the price tag. Some people have a favorite theory, saying that price tags are deliberately set in a way that deceives the buyer. Why? What will increase from this - turnover or the number of claims and complaints? Seriously, if you want to cheer up a store employee, tell him that the price tags are deliberately confused. They don't have time to display them anyway, and then you have to confuse them. The benefits to the seller are 0.
Double payment on the card. Occurs due to errors in the payment acceptance device. Just remember - until the check is printed, the payment has not gone through. In 99% of cases, the money will automatically be refunded to the card. This is impossible to do.
An extra item in the receipt. Yes, sometimes this happens. It happened to me too. For example, they took one package of milk, and the receipt turned out to be two. Most likely, there is no malicious intent here. The scanner may not recognize the barcode, and then suddenly read it twice. In order for the cashier to take the second package home, there must be a conspiracy with the administration. Because when she leaves with it, she will have to show the receipt, which she does not have.
And now the real method that cashiers use.
In fact, the method is universal and very simple. It works in stores of any format. I first encountered it when, for several months, a particular cashier always had a cash register with a plus. She hands over the change, and in the drawer every time there is 50-200 UAH more.
In practice, the surplus is removed and hidden in a special stash to cover up minor minuses from other cashiers. According to the rules, you have to take an explanatory note and find out the source of the extra money, but usually no one does this.
In the end, it became interesting and we reviewed the archive of the cameras for 2 weeks. She managed to extort 100-500 UAH per day from customers. She hid most of it in a sock, and she threw the coins into the cash box.
While the customer was putting the goods in the bag, she quickly counted out the change and put it on a narrow shelf above the cash register monitor. Then she started talking to the customer and often people left without taking the change. If they asked where the money was, she would point out, saying, "Here it is." Didn't you notice? We could leave right now without it!
Men were especially inattentive, they constantly forgot to take the change, which the girl used. A very safe scheme. If something went wrong, then "you didn't see it", and if the person left, you can safely hide it in a sock.
The store has cameras, electronic scales, and various monitoring programs, but the human factor is something that retail chains cannot control.