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A French teenager has been jailed after buying a PlayStation 4 for under £8 by weighing it as if the games console was a huge bag of fruit.
The 19-year-old man, named in the French media as Adel, picked the device off the shelf and took it to the fruit section and weighed it.
He then put a sticker with the heavily reduced price tag on the expensive console and went to the checkout.
Adel paid £7.86 (€9) for the 6lb bag of 'fruit' at a self-checkout at a supermarket in Montbeliard, eastern France, last September.
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Teenager Jailed After Buying PS4 for £8 by Weighing it and Paying for it as Food
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Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
-- H. L. Mencken
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @01:42PM (35 children)
I know, but what it really illustrates is how greedy these companies are. Pretty much everybody knows that the self-checkout lines are a major source of theft, even people that wouldn't normally steal will steal from the self-checkout machines. But, the machines allow the company to avoid having several checkers and make the customers do that work for them.
I definitely don't condone theft, but it says something pretty powerful about companies that are willing to tolerate the theft in order to avoid having to have enough workers to do the job.
(Score: 1) by rpnx on Wednesday October 06 2021, @01:50PM (7 children)
Having less security doesn't make it not theft.
Not locking your doors doesn't give people a right to break into your house.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @01:58PM (6 children)
If the door's not locked, they're not breaking in.
(Score: 1) by rpnx on Wednesday October 06 2021, @01:59PM (3 children)
Well, if they go in, take stuff, and leave, it's still theft even if the door wasn't locked.
(Score: 2) by BK on Wednesday October 06 2021, @03:11PM (2 children)
What if they pay for it? Just not the amount you'd hope for.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @03:19PM (1 child)
That would still be theft and abandonment of property (in your case money). You can not have a one sided transaction. You can try to dance that angel on the head of a pin. But a court would probably just toss your ass in jail for trespassing, theft and maybe breaking and entering depending on the prosecutor, judge and your lawyer. But the end result would probably have you sitting in a cell with bars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @08:29AM
The magic words you are looking for is "the absence of any manifestation of mutual assent."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @02:25PM
Same thing if you leave your door unlocked and someone comes in without you allowing them to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @04:00PM
Under what framework of laws?
In the US, yes they are. See: Definition [legaldictionary.net]
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Wednesday October 06 2021, @03:25PM
The fewer cashiers they have to pay probably offsets the extra thefts.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday October 06 2021, @04:55PM (2 children)
Do you have any data to back that up? Because the numbers I've seen from shops don't show any increase in untracked inventory loss after rolling out self-service checkouts, including in Waitrose where their self-service machines don't weigh things (and so are a lot faster to use than the ones that do and often require human interaction).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @05:22PM
There are articles, but it's bad enough at the local grocery store that corporate had fancy cameras installed directly over the top of the terminals to see what customers were doing. The reality is that this isn't an easy thing to track in general. Yes, an uptick in things disappearing from the shelves could be due to self-scan, but it could also be due to regular shoplifting. In some respects, it's far easier to go through the self check line and just scam the computer than other methods. It's one of the reasons why some stores require a manager override if a cashier wants to suspend payment on a transaction. It looks like a legitimate transaction at the time, but no payment was made and the store wouldn't know until later on during the audit.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/stealing-from-self-checkout/550940/ [theatlantic.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @09:10PM
Why would the regular customers want to steal from Waitrose? If you've chosen to shop there despite their perceived (but not necessarily so) higher prices, and you know they are a workers' cooperative, why would you want to steal when you know you're stealing from the employees and not from some faceless rich owner?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @06:08PM (20 children)
Here in California I was at the 99 cents store and there were only two registers open. The line was very long. The person in front of me asked the cashier and the manager (who was there to fix something) why don't they have more cashiers. The manager said because they can't find employees that want to work.
The 99 cents store nearest me shut down a while back (and another one in an adjacent city shut down years ago). Businesses are leaving California left and right and new businesses are not setting up shop here. Notice how Samsung is setting up in Texas while many businesses here are slowly winding down in California to start building in other states.
What's the alternative, for all the stores to shut down, go out of business, and we don't have any stores to buy anything from like in socialist countries? At least the stores are still around to provide for us with goods and services but that's not good enough, until every last business has gone out of business the democrats will never be happy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday October 06 2021, @06:54PM (19 children)
Perhaps because the typical paycheck was too close to 99 cents.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @06:57PM (14 children)
This. +1 Insightful. Our economy can't sustain a living wage for everyone AND please the corporate overlords without expanding to claim new resources.
First person to really get heavy machinery and mining in space is going to go down as one of the wealthiest people in history.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @07:13PM (13 children)
"Our economy can't sustain a living wage for everyone AND please the corporate overlords without expanding to claim new resources."
We could be more resource efficient (ie: stop having too many children since people are resource inefficient if we want to live comfortably. Fewer people = more natural resources available per person).
As far as 'pleasing' the 'corporate overlords' I suppose if all of the businesses were to shut down there would be no corporate overlords to please. This seems to be happening more and more in places like California.
Let's also remember that the national homeless rate has been increasing mostly due to increases in homelessness in states like California and Oregon (and New York). Makes sense - more taxes and expensive regulations means fewer jobs and more homelessness. But we keep on voting in the democrats and creating more and more homelessness.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @07:26PM (8 children)
Yet we prop up all those red flyover states with money from the coastal blue states. It seems we need to vote in MORE democrats to vote in laws to prevent the red state governors from becoming "welfare queens" off the backs of the blue states. You want to see some real midwestern pain? Let those states pay their own way and support their own people and stop living on welfare (I mean "subsidies"--farm subsidies isn't welfare, right, it is simply free money from the Fed for doing nothing to prevent them from becoming homeless?).
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @07:37PM (7 children)
I won't necessarily disagree with this. The whole idea of the federal income tax seems weird, perhaps what should happen is that the federal government should only be allowed to impose a tax on the taxes that states bring in. This would incentivize states to tax less because if they tax more then more goes to the federal government. It shouldn't be assumed that the end goal of government should be to maximize tax revenue.
The state governments, for instance, should be allowed to impose things like sales, property, and income tax. Of the total tax revenue that a state government receives the federal government can impose a federal tax. For instance, it can impose a ten percent federal tax on state taxes. Perhaps it can even impose tax brackets on state taxes received. So long as the same rates apply to each state.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @09:15PM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @09:50PM (3 children)
I call it an adversarial tax structure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @09:54PM (2 children)
In opposed to the cumulative or additive tax structure that we currently have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @09:58PM
Aka a compounded or compounding or compound tax structure. Let's see if the names adversarial vs compound tax structure sticks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @10:01PM
Not to be confused with a bracketed vs a flat tax.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @01:24AM (1 child)
WRT tax brackets perhaps federal tax brackets on state taxes based on the number of residents (using a federal census). This needs to be done carefully so as not to incentivize states to accept more residents just to lower their tax bracket, then everyone will have multi state residency ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @02:33PM
(they can do it based on primary residents but consideration must be taken WRT states that may allow more and more people to immigrate in or encourage more and more births just to lower their tax brackets).
So to break it down
A: Governments naturally want to maximize tax revenue
B: It should not be the goal of government to maximize tax revenue
C: Taxes are necessary
B: We should create a tax structure that allows for the government to collect necessary taxes while disincentivizing them from maximizing tax revenue
An adversarial tax structure may help to meet these requirements in opposed to a compound tax structure (where you pay state income tax in addition to federal income tax in addition to local taxes in addition to whatever other taxes every government you are subject to wants to collect). You have the local government taxing you and you have bigger regional governments that the smaller government is subject to taxing the local government's taxes. So long as the local governments get taxed the same then the government wants to balance its interests in maximizing its tax revenue with its interests in reducing the amount of money that leaves its local community.
Care must also be taken WRT to inflation as that's also an undue tax by the federal government. Perhaps if the federal government prints money then the states should receive some of that money as well to use how they see fit? The federal government's ability to print money kinda messes this up as they can easily just print more and more money to try and spend how they see fit. This is also something that needs to be looked at.
(so the whole concept still needs work for a variety of reasons).
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday October 07 2021, @02:35AM (3 children)
Or the corporate overlords could accept that we're going from today's fantastic margins back to the more modest but sustainable margins of yesteryear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @02:36PM (2 children)
When they all go out of business I suppose it won't matter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12 2021, @04:28PM (1 child)
The government also wants to shut down gardens ran by volunteers.
NYC DESTROYING gardens to "solve rat problem" - ARE YOU FNG KIDDING ME?!?!
Louis Rossmann
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2IzbqN4RuY [youtube.com]
The volunteers are happy to volunteer their time but I suppose that creates too much happiness inequality. Better to make everyone miserable.
The democrats won't be happy until everyone is miserable ... and even then, they will still be miserable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 13 2021, @03:23AM
Misery likes company
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @07:50PM (3 children)
I work at a grocery store and thanks to the union we at least get a decent benefit's package even if it's typically little better than minimum wage and hardly any position alone is full time. We haven't stopped hiring through the entirety of the pandemic. I can't particularly blame people for not wanting to give up the benefits, but really the responsibility here is the government to help the workers out and to stop encouraging the wealthy to hoard their wealth. It shouldn't be possible to work a full time job and not have anything left over to save for the future without personally spending irresponsibly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @02:43PM
This shows a misunderstanding of what wealth is.
Wealth is the production of goods and services. When all the businesses go out of business there is no one 'hoarding' wealth, there is less wealth overall.
"It shouldn't be possible to work a full time job and not have anything left over to save for the future without personally spending irresponsibly. "
In most cases it's not. Unless you have way too many children that you can't afford to support (an irresponsible act) or you spend money irresponsibly, for the most part, if you have a full time job and don't spend money irresponsibly, you can save for the future.
Government wants to tax the people that save and invest and are frugal and responsible and give that money to those that are irresponsible. That's not encouraging people to be responsible and save for the future, it's encouraging the exact opposite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @03:25PM
Here is the thing. When you are working your full time job and the government is taxing you to give that money to someone else and they are taxing the business you work for (which passes on those costs back to you) this makes it harder for you to make a living. It gives you less take home money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12 2021, @04:21PM
(inflation is also a tax. What you're complaining about is what happens in socialist countries. People work so many hours and the government taxes it all either directly or through inflation and so the people that work so many hours can't make a decent living. If you want your full time job to take you further you should be advocating for less inflation and less taxation and less government spending, not more).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @07:09PM (1 child)
Citation? I've never stole anything in a self-checkout and why would I. I can pay for it. And I only go to self-checkout in cases when it's clearly faster way out of the store.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @07:53PM
I've never stolen anything from self checkout either, but I also don't typically jaywalk just because there's no traffic either. It's rather naive to assume that other people don't do things like deliberately use the wrong product code on items they need to weigh or decide to give up on scanning something if they can't get help promptly and just take it with them. There's a reason why stores are putting more cameras around the self-checkout area.
This is a couple of years old, but it's quite difficult to get data on things like this.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/stealing-from-self-checkout/550940/ [theatlantic.com]