[xauronx]

So you admit openly to stealing, just to put it plainly. You chose to shop somewhere, you chose to use a self checkout, you knew there was an error, and proceeded to leave with things you didn’t pay for. No matter how you justify it to yourself, you’re a thief.

If you can justify that you can justify stealing from your employer (hey I’ve been under paid for a while, taking this unsecured device is like making up for a bit of my salary), etc.

[undecisive]

I find the logic here really interesting. When you participate in a buy-one-get-one-free offer, you "leave with things you didn't pay for". So imagine these scenarios:

You go to a greengrocers. The lady at the checkout sees you basket of 27 grapefruit and can't be bothered to do the maths, says "let's call it 5 [relevant currency]". You know you have something in the region of 7 relevant currency, but she insists she won't take a button more.

You go to the supermarket. The tills are misconfigured, a 10[currency] box of chocolates is coming up as 0.1[currency] [1]. You're buying 5 of them. The cashier has no facility to charge you more - whatever the system says is a divine edict as far as the company is concerned.

You go to the supermarket. You're walking by the main doors with your trolley when a fire alarm goes off; smoke is billowing from the back of the store, sprinklers are activated. In the blind panic, you - and your trolley - are pushed outside. After half an hour, they announce that the store will not be reopening. You tell security that you have not paid for your shopping, they gruffly request that you take it home and make use of it rather than litter the car park with rapidly defrosting frozen items, as nobody is allowed back in the building.

In most of these cases, you could probably pay the correct amount by queueing at another till, at another time, date, at your own time and cost. For the benefit of someone who doesn't care enough about the profit margin to worry.

These are much closer than your employer-theft analogy - I don't think that the parent poster's moral standpoint is at all far away from any of the above. In fact, the only difference is that because it's a technical "glitch" with no humans involved, you clearly feel you're supposed to go the extra mile to rectify the seller's mistakes, caused by the seller failing to invest sufficiently in the system.

I certainly wouldn't judge someone making any of these calls, regardless whether I personally would go that extra thankless mile.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/money-sa...

[mindslight]

I think the closest, albeit boring, analogy to the situation is you go through the traditional staffed register at a busy time. The tally comes out a little lower than you were expecting. Since it's not higher, you pay and get out of the way. In the parking lot, you look over your receipt and see that one item out of many didn't get scanned. Now you have the choice of either just accepting the benefit from the mistake, or spending your life waiting in line again simply to redo their job better than they did it themselves. IMO it's foolish to correct their mistake by harming yourself instead.

I've also corrected cashiers on the spot, especially for more significant errors. I once had a cashier ring up a manual 20% off coupon as 80% off ($20 vs $80 final price). Going through with that transaction could reasonably be called dishonest, despite it being perfectly legal.

[mindslight]

So yes, 15 years ago I got a few items for free. I didn't act to get around their system - their system was just straight up broken, moving items to the have-paid-for-them area without counting them. I don't think it is a customer's job debug a store's system and manually move items back from the have-paid area. You're trying to push a paradigm wherein the store can shirk hiring even a single person to oversee their side of the transaction, yet make the customer responsible for applying diligence for both sides. Give me a break.

I guarantee you the store doesn't analyze their situation in such inflexible absolutist terms, because they could literally never do anything ("can't just put stuff on the shelves, someone might pocket something!!"). Rather they look at cost/benefit. The cost they incurred there was part of the development of the machines, which seemingly has paid off for them by now given that the machines are still around. That is how they chose to handle their half of the responsibility, end of story.

I myself only brought up the detail to make that point that even with the machine's obtuseness leading to missed items, the frustration of it grinding of my gears was still greater! Place the item here, place the item there. no, you did something wrong, go back. no, go back. okay now I am finally ready to take your money. bills first, sorted by serial number! And every time I have tried the machines in the following years, I find that same obtuseness. If you can't take the judgment of valuing my personal convenience over wasting my effort to get free stuff as an indication that I am not a thief, it only demonstrates how useless your paradigm is.

So get off your high horse. Maybe next you can write some grandstanding general comment about the countless other occurrences where something was wrong on a receipt but people didn't go back afterwards because the error was in their favor. Or I can even give you some fodder - I also defraud the stores by changing out my surveillance nym every few months. Meanwhile you can continue missing the forest for the trees and letting slide the emergent-complexity abuses caused by the wholly logical implications of absolutist morals and laws.

I bet you're one of those people that actually waits in a line to exit the store, so that the security guard can recheck your receipt and give you a gold star. How many are you up to now?