Andrew ran into an IKEA receipt checker who seemed to have used Paul Blart: Mall Cop as a training video. The un-uniformed shopping cop demanded to see his receipt, threatened his arrest if he didn’t comply and made him sweat out the shakedown as he took an unreasonable amount of time.

He writes:

I was shopping at the [redacted] IKEA today and after going through the self check out a man not in any uniform (Ikea or otherwise) asked to see my receipt. What he said was ” I need to see your receipt.”

I complied and after about a minute I said, “you have another 10 seconds and then I am leaving.” He replied with “you will let me finish.” I demanded my receipt and he told me that “if you do not let me check you could be arrested”. Needless to say I became irate and demanded both my receipt and a manager. He refused to give me the receipt and then pointed to a phone on the cashier podium and said “you can call the manager yourself.”

We got into a yelling argument all the while he refused to give me the receipt. Finally an employee called a manager.

When the manager came, he had no name tag, refused his own name and told me “you have to let us check, if not you will go to jail.”

I demanded his name and the name of the “security” person, both refused.

Finally after several minutes I was given my receipt. This can not be normal for Ikea to operate this way and detain people.

A reminder: Unless a store requires you to sign to a receipt-checking agreement under a membership or you’re under a reasonable suspicion of shoplifting, you don’t have to submit to store security forces on receipt-scanning power trips.

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