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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Your ideas of morality are interesting for want of a better word.

Is he wrong though? If you went to a shop and spent $2,000 but forgot to pay for 3 items (say worth $5) by accident, I do not think the shop manager should be upset, or that you should feel bad about it? If it was a smaller/non-chain store, it would probably be free! If anything, the main annoyance is probably their stock numbers being out of date.

Making mistakes is human, and I do not think they should feel bad for what they have done (and for not correcting it), and this is coming from someone who cannot steal the bags that now cost 20 pence at Tesco and even went to buy imaginary food at Waitrose after I forgot to pay another time...

Just to clarify, yes the 3 signs probably total $6. Would I feel guilty if they didn't charge me for a $300 tool? Absolutely not, because I would have gone back in and told them about it.

No, he isn't wrong, I just had not thought of it in that way. If you spend a fortune in a store then that creates a bit more leeway for accidents whereas when you walk into a store with the single purpose of relieving them of their wares then that gives a completely different vibe. Intent is what matters and I had not come to this conclusion.

I'm always going out of my way to keep things fair and can be quite rigid about this, never even realized there are shades of gray there.

The fun parts of 'shades of gray' is this can actually lead to increased sales down the line, if you end up with that quiet nagging "I owe them for .." in the back of your head. Almost like goodwill that the store did nothing to intentionally earn.

Innocent mistakes are incredibly curious beasts.

Thanks for the personal insult.

Insult?

Morality "is interesting for lack of a better word" USUALLY means a negative thing - and you meant it specifically about "my ideas of morality" as a whole - so yes that is an insult. I didn't get "your morality is awesome I wish I was like that" from your statement so I do apologize if I reached and I am wrong about what you meant.

No, I just think it is interesting, and I don't have a better term for it. For me - right up until reading your comment - such a thing was black-and-white, and I see that there is some wiggle room there based on the rest of the relationship, so thank you for that. I do believe that if you were caught in a situation like that on the way to the door from the register that it might cause a lot of trouble though, which in turn might end up with you stopping to visit that particular store.

I've seen enough of this in a local supermarket (Albert Heijn, a large chain in NL), which has switched to self checkout + random checks on a lot of checkout lanes.

Older people that are more or less forced to use the self checkout because there are now too few cashiers end up making mistakes and are then treated like shoplifters if they end up with a random check. Quite frustrating.

Thanks and I do apologize for the assumption earlier.

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