Clearing Out Your Clearance Scam

(I am a cashier. Our clearance items have red barcode stickers that go over our store’s regular barcode stickers. We get a lot of people that try to switch the tickets around, so we always have to check to make sure that the item numbers match on both of the stickers. I get a customer who brings a bunch of clearance items to my register. Upon examination, nearly all of them have clearance tickets that don’t go with the item, and it’s obvious that most of them have been tampered with. Normally, if a customer comes up with tickets that don’t match on an item, it’s only one, maybe two items per order. This woman has about ten items with clearance stickers that don’t go with the items. I call over my coworker who works in the department the customer got her items from, and we begin to look up the items in our system to see if they are on clearance and just have the wrong ticket, or are not on clearance at all. Most of the items are not on clearance. The customer becomes furious when we tell her this, saying that we “should just give her the items for the price she found them at.” It is blatantly obvious that she switched the tickets around to get herself a better deal, not knowing that we must look at the clearance tickets and remove them if they don’t match. Finally, the customer leaves the store, leaving behind most of the “clearance” items that she brought up with her. Once she is gone, I turn to the coworker who was helping me.)

Me: “[Coworker], I’m pretty sure she switched most of the tickets herself.”

Coworker: “Oh, I don’t doubt it. And if today had been my last day, I would have let her know that, too.”