A former Best Buy employee and Consumerist tipster in good standing shared some insider insights about why store employees are so zealous in checking your receipt, and so zealously underinformed as to how they have no legal right to make you show it.

1. Store managers purposely keep employees unaware receipt check’s voluntary nature, ensuring that a manager has to be called each and every time. The last thing they want is somebody with 16 CDs in their pants yelling about his civil rights and cowing a $7.50/hr teenager.

2. Major retail store locations get an estimated yearly “shrinkage” budget, is the dollar value of the amount of merchandise they expect to lose to theft. In the our former BBY employee’s store’s case,the difference between the actual and estimated shrinkage is then distributed evenly to each and every worker in that store.

PREVIOUSLY:
Adventures In Receipt Check Refusals Continue
Circuit City Customer Arrested After Refusing To Show Receipt
TigerDirect Apologizes For Unlawfully Detaining Customer For Refusing To Show Receipt
TigerDirect Unlawfully Restrains And Verbally Abuses Customer For Not Submitting To Receipt-Showing Demands

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