That’s How You End Up Waiting For ALL Your Stuff To Be Scanned

A customer came to the register with a crate of a few bottles of wine, and he handed me just one. This is pretty normal for people who are buying a lot of one thing so they don’t have to put everything on the counter. I put it in as eight bottles of that wine, which were about 6€ per bottle.

A few days later, when the wine department was doing inventory, they noticed a number of bottles of more expensive wine (about 30€ per bottle) were missing, but the register system didn’t show any being sold. They reviewed the security footage and found my customer in front of the shelf filling the crate with one bottle of the cheap wine and the rest with the expensive one, which looked identical. It was the same brand and vineyard but different years or something. Of course, he told me they were all the same cheaper wine, and I blindly trusted that because, A) people do this all the time, B) I didn’t know there were identical-looking wines with such a huge price differential, and C) he was a somewhat regular customer; I’d definitely seen him before, and the people who stole from us or scammed us usually only came once.

We’ve also had people trying to scam cashiers by asking them to exchange large bills and break them up into smaller ones and then constantly changing their minds on how they want the bills broken up to confuse the cashier into accidentally giving them more money than they were asking to exchange. It did work on a few people, and that actually led to a policy change; we’re not allowed to exchange anything above ten bucks now. Initially, it was actually no exchanges at all, but that led to a lot of customers getting upset at us when they’d try to get a coin for a cart or change for the copy machine and be told no.