What exactly is retail fraud? Outright shoplifting is a clear example of retail fraud, but sometimes it’s not so clear cut.
After a long break, I recently got back into collecting Star Wars action figures. Because of this, I joined a few Facebook groups dedicated to the hobby.
In one of these groups, a member posted a story about buying four Vintage Collection Speeder Bike figure sets at Target for the ridiculously low price of $2.50. For comparison purposes, this same set is currently on the Target website for $44.99.
How was this person able to buy this set for so cheap? Was it on clearance? Not really. Items that are on clearance at Target have a yellow clearance price tag attached to them.
Regular, non-clearance items at Target do not have price stickers.
From Facebook:
Got a good deal today at Target with the VC Speederbike Figure set. I saw 4 on the peg, but there was no price. I grabbed one and took it to the scanner, but it read something like “Price not available.”
So I took it to the CS desk and asked the nice lady to scan it. She did, and it rang up as $0.00. I said “Well, I’ll pay that.” She started typing some keys and said, “Hmmm…$2.50?” I said to hold on, while I ran back and grabbed the other 3.
So with my Red Card, I got all 4 of them for a bit over $10. See receipt pic. She said it was a good deal, and saved them from having to send them back. And, I saved 50 cents with my Red Card!
Note: Targets do not price match other Targets on clearance items, only Target.com. I checked the next closest store in my area, and it rang up as $23. So, I got some friends who are gonna be happy this Christmas with their Speederbikes.
In case anyone didn’t believe that he defrauded Target, he posted the receipt:
I am not impressed by people who engage in retail fraud
I think he took advantage of a customer service associate who did not know how to do her job correctly. My local Target is always hiring new people. I regularly see people working there that I’ve never seen before. It’s not hard for me to imagine the customer service associate was new to the job and didn’t realize just how expensive these Hasbro Star Wars action figures actually are.
If the person on Facebook knew the figure set was going to only cost $2.50, why did he need to run back to the toy section and grab the other three? If he honestly thought they were that cheap, he would have taken all four of the figure sets up to the customer service desk. I think it never occurred to him that the customer service associate would price the figure sets so drastically low. Once he realized he had someone at the customer service desk who didn’t know what they were doing, he pounced at the opportunity to defraud Target.
I left a comment on Facebook telling him he should take them back to Target. The associate at the customer service desk obviously made a mistake. He replied, “The lady at the CS desk said she was a manager.”
Sure she did. I’m also sure that fact just naturally came up in their conversation. If she were the manager, he would have referred to her as the manager to begin with and not the “nice lady.”
In conclusion
I try to be an honest person. It bothers me when I see people steal from a retail store. A few weeks ago, we were at a store when a guy with his arms full of jackets just marched right out of the store without paying for them. What the collector did might not rise to the level of outright theft, but I don’t believe what he did was completely honest either. If he thought what he did was okay, why not return them to the store and find out if they should have been priced so low?
Personally, I would feel guilty if I pulled something like that.
Update
I was at my local Target on October 27 and saw these same Vintage Collection Speeder Bike figure sets sitting on the shelf. There were four of them, and they had not been there before. I go to Target a lot.
I took one of the sets to a scanner and it too didn’t have a price.
I did not try to buy one.
As someone who has done retail arbitrage for over a decade I will offer it was neither fraud nor theft, but actually a run-of-the-mill transaction.
The first thing you have to consider is that big box stores are like a reservoir being filled by a river, if water is not let out of the reservoir it will eventually overflow its banks. Likewise, there is a constant flow of new products being shipped into big box stores from their suppliers. Old stock has to go to free up limited shelf space. If they didn’t put stuff on clearance, they would wind up with boxes full of old stock collecting dust in their backrooms.
They will often have two or three clearance markdowns before finally dropping the price all the way down to $0.01 or $0.02 or some similar amount. This is what is known in the biz as “pennied out.” Usually stores will have their employees go through their stock and pull those pennied items off the sales floor so they can be shipped back to one of their distribution centers, donated, disposed of some other way. That’s why it said “price not available” when the buyer scanned it. However, chain stores do allow a certain amount of discretion to individual locations and store managers to handle things as they see fit.
For instance, Walmart pennies out items at $0.03 and employees are supposed to take those items off the sales floor and send them to “Claims,” which I believe sends them back to a Walmart distribution center. However, I have seen many times when Walmart departments left the items right on the shelf and literally printed a price tag of 3 cents. Walmart corporate generally defers to local store managers to decide how to run their stores.
So in the case of the Target shopper, they handled it exactly as you should. Either take it to the employees in the department or to the customer service desk and see what they say. Usually they will say sorry we were supposed to pull this off the floor and can’t sell it to you. But other times they will simply look up the last available price, which is usually 90% off, and sell it to you at that price. Sometimes they will say you can only buy ONE at that price and they will have to send the rest back. You never know what discretion they may have to make a decision in your favor unless you inquire.
In the good old days, say 5 or 10 years ago, it was a general unwritten rule that if a customer found any of those pennied out items on the salesfloor the store would sell the items to them at that price. Back then people used to specifically go to stores looking for those items. I bought tons of them and it was completely above board. If a manager was bringing boxes of stuff out of their back storeroom for me to look through they would sometimes tell me I could buy all the pennied items on the salesfloor, but not the ones from the storeroom, because those had not been out on the floor available for sale.
Unfortunately, some of the best stores for these sorts of deals, like Kmart and Toys R Us, are no longer in business, and the Walmarts and Targets of the world have become much better organized with their computer stocking systems so it’s harder to find these bargain basement items for pennies on the dollar.
Thanks for the comment. I understand your points, but where this differs from the sceneroes you mentioned is this particular item wasn’t old stock. It had just arrived at Target. I can say this with certainty because this same item, the Speeder Bike Vehicle with Scout Trooper and Grogu showed up on the shelf at my local Target on October 27, a week after I posted this. They also showed as not having a price in the system.
I just think there was a mixup with Target that led to this situation. I still find fault with the person who bought four of them for less than $10 because he knew without a doubt they should not be sold for $2.50. He knew they were new and were not intended for clearance. I think he took advantage of someone working at the customer service desk who lacked experience.
I’d feel the same way about someone who purchased four Nintendo Switch OEM consoles for $2.50 each because the price wasn’t in the system. It’s different only because the game consoles retail for $349.99 and the Speeder Bike Vehicle with Scout Trooper and Grogu retail for $44.99. What’s not different is lack of honesty on the part of the buyer. In this case, the buyer knew it should not be priced so low.
Thanks again for the comment.