Is Costco membership worth it?

Yes, but you indulge them merely as a courtesy. Nothing wrong with that. I’ll generally do the same, if I’m not in a hurry. Or if I came to the door from somewhere other than the checkout area, have items that arent bagged, large items, etc.

Refusing to let a screaming 3 day old baby leave the store with a cart of bagged items that just came from the register 20 feet away, simply because the receipt got put in someone else’s pocket who was 5 steps ahead when walking out the door, is another matter. Their job is to ask nicely and wish people a nice day. When I dont stop, I still acknowledge them with a polite “no thank you”. If they want to go on a power trip from there, bring it on.

The whole point of my comment was to be clear that you are simply playing along with them, despite so many people being conditioned to believe it’s a rule.

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I read something on Quora that suggested most of these exit checks are to mark your receipt so you can’t immediately go back in the store and wheel out a high value item using the same receipt twice. Any other errors they find or deter is a bonus.

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As someone who was arrested once. This is a fantasy. The reality is more likely you will be dragged through the court system and spend thousand in legal fee.

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That’s why I specifically excluded that scenario. My comment was regarding the flat rectangular
tags that are attached to the boxes or clamshell cards whose presence have no detrimental effect to my making use of my property that I just acquired.

Oh my. I frequently am hostile to people that are “just doing their jobs” because they annoy me if they exceed the bounds of proper behavior towards me. If someone “just doing their job” was a blank check for getting my compliance and cooperation, I’d have to listen to their sales pitch, unsolicited phone call, etc.

Correct. They will stack the evidence regardless of whether it makes sense or not. My friend was accused of shoplifting when she forgot to remove a tag on her dress that she bought five years ago. Oddly, the alarm did not sound when she entered the store only when she exited. Furthermore, the barcode on the tag did not correspond to an item in their inventory system because they didn’t sell that dress anymore. Still, after being interrogated for six hours without being allowed to call anyone or use the bathroom, she broke down and signed a confession just so she could leave. In the end, the store dropped criminal charges after she paid $1000 for a lawyer who did practically nothing. She paid the store for the dress she already owned, agreed to perform community service, and she was banned from the store. I don’t know why this store hasn’t gone out of business yet.

The whole “not allowed to leave” crap is another fallacy people should understand. They either call the cops immediately, or you walk out of the store. Instead of paying a lawyer $1k for “doing practically nothing” to handle the criminal charges, she should’ve hired a personal injury/civil rights lawyer to sue the store.

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“Was arrested once”? That’s pretty vague. Anything that happens after the police are involved becomes a different matter, but if those amateur wanna-bes on a power trip kept “interrogating” you for hours before involving the police, it is not a fantasy. Most just let it go, simply because they’re naive and afraid of talking to a lawyer, or because they are in fact criminals and have bigger fish on their plate to focus on.

There are several variables at play here. Sometimes the store security people do have law enforcement authority, in which case dealing with them is like dealing with the police. But in the more typical case, the store can only prevent you from leaving the store if they have probable cause and they are waiting for the police to arrive. A beep as you walk out the door is absolutely not probable cause.

But I’m with glitch99 that any scenario that involved detaining someone in the store for six hours, and without bathroom privileges at that, is definitely something ripe for a false imprisonment suit.

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I can see both sides of this issue. Here in California, the voters in all their wisdom decided to “decriminalize” property crime. As a result, stealing up to $1000 is considered so minor that only a citation is issued if you’re caught. So shoplifting and other theft is rampant and the rest of us are paying for it through higher prices in the stores.

Another effect is out of control thefts from cars. Frisco (I say that to annoy the locals) is very proud that they have reduced the number of car break-ins from 32,000 last year down to about 25,000 so far this year. This means somebody smashes one or two windows on your car and reaches in and steals whatever they see inside the car. Even 25,000 is over 100 cars broken into every day with each costing the owner several thousand to repair. Anybody that drives their car into Frisco and parks at a public or even poorly guarded private parking lot is asking for it to be broken into.

So, as always there’s a tradeoff between individual liberty and security. My strategy is to just hand them the receipt but keep on walking slowly to hurry the checker up. As someone mentioned, I think they’re basically just marking the receipt so it’s not reused to take other items out of the store.

I only comply at Costco because I agreed to the checks as a term of membership. I don’t comply at Fry’s (I very rarely buy there, but they are the most aggressive and also the most consistent), Best Buy, and most definitely not at Walmart or similar stores.

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Well, what detail would you like?

As you can see just in this thread, this is not some rare incident. I mentioned this incident before in FWF as well and detailed the encounter to sgt something on FW. Keep in mind, this happend when I was much younger. I had no law enforcement encounter before that, ever and even today the worst thing is a single seat-belt ticket. Needless to say, I would have reacted and handled it much differently today.

It wasn’t 6 hour for me but they had me sign away a form saying that I willingly came with them to the back. Which I did, thinking it just some weird misunderstanding that needs to be clear up. I ended up leaving that room in a handcuff with a cop. The case was dropped when the other party didn’t show up for court after I already spent what was a huge portion of my life saving (at the time). I had hired one of the best lawyer in town (medium sized mid-western town), who was the go to guy for the local TV and Radio station to ask about the OJ trial.

Yes, of course i asked to sue them back but no one would take the case. One lawyer told me straight up to “get over it”… In the end, I filed for small claim court and got the simple, “you didn’t prove it, case dismissed with prejudice”. The one person that showed any kindness was the cop who came to arrest me at the store. During the small-claim he was their witness, as he was finishing his testimony and leaving the court, he walked by me and give me a good rub on the shoulder and said “good luck”, in front of everyone.

Reality of our justice system is very different in what people imaging it to be.

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more… that piece of paper I signed turned out say that I ADMITTED TO THE CRIME during the small-claim. I swear that it didn’t say that at all when I signed it and there was another piece of paper that said that which I refused to sign.

You would think that I was a fool for signing anything and you would be 110% correct. I replayed that scene a million time in my mind and wished for a different outcome. I was very young and couldn’t imaging why someone would fook over a total stranger like that.

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See , not fantasy, naivety.

For a family of seven it is worth every penny.

Said another way, “I’m a jerk when I don’t get my way.”

Yeah… no.

I like to live in your world, I really would. Yes, if I’m sitting in front of my computer, 20 years older, I would know exactly how I would handle it. Even that, I would have no case.

Around the same time, there was an lawyer that got falsely arrested in Menard. With all his knowledge and life experience, he didn’t do much better either.

I’m sure glad that now camera is everywhere that actually shows people who lives in their comfortable little world and says… “that never happens”. That, indeed, s*it happens, just never to you or your children because you have the privilege of the right skin color and live in the right neighborhood. I’m truly happy for you.

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Shop online. Can’t get arrested for that, can we?

But hacking…

Not sure exactly what you’re saying no to. There are store security guards that are off duty police, and in some states, that could mean they have similar authority to when they are on duty. Sometimes they are even there in uniform.

And the store most certainly cannot stop you from leaving unless they have reason to believe you committed a crime. In many, if not most or all, states, the thing beeping is not enough.

Yes. Nowadays, they’ll just get their police detail to detain and investigate instead. The casinos do this now, after paying out too many wrongful detainer suits. See James Griosjean v. Caesars.

Agreed

What are you basing this claim on? I can’t speak for every state, but generally speaking, a loss prevention agent can search your bags if you set off an alarm when walking out the door.

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