New Home Depot store security

bzzzzzzt...Wrong Answer.

HD will take back items without a receipt and give you store credit as long as you have a picture ID.

As far as looking up the transaction via your credit/debit card, that's true. However, there are times when I know I'm going to buy someting while I'm in HD, so if I don't have the receipt I just tell them I paid cash - even if it was on my debit card. They just issue a gift card and I'm good to go.

Reply to
DerbyDad03
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A lot of the messages are done to discourage theft; signs cost a lot less than cameras, and a hell of a lot less than a loss prevention officer.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Danniken

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Perhaps you misunderstood my description of my local HD or I'm misunderstanding yours...

Our return counter is also just a few a few steps from the entrance and requires no walking through the scanners - but only if you are coming in from the outside.

If you are *inside* the store, you have to go through the scanners to get to the return counter or to get out of the store. Since there are no check-out registers near this entrance, so there is no good reason for a customer (or thief) to be carrying merchandise out through the scanners at this entrance. If they were carrying unscanned items as they went through these scanners, they are either trying to steal them outright or trying to return something that they never bought.

In either case, the alarms would go off.

Reply to
DerbyDad03

...

Perhaps you misunderstood my description of my local HD or I'm misunderstanding yours...

Our return counter is also just a few a few steps from the entrance and requires no walking through the scanners - but only if you are coming in from the outside.

If you are *inside* the store, you have to go through the scanners to get to the return counter or to get out of the store. Since there are no check-out registers near this entrance, so there is no good reason for a customer (or thief) to be carrying merchandise out through the scanners at this entrance. If they were carrying unscanned items as they went through these scanners, they are either trying to steal them outright or trying to return something that they never bought.

In either case, the alarms would go off.

reply: It is so at my HD also, and to the best of my memory, in EVERY HD I have ever been in. I have wondered about that more than once.

Steve

Reply to
Steve B

I remember the sequence from "The Big Easy" that shows where nailed to the wall, rock solid, beyond ANY reasonable doubt evidence mysteriously evaporates.

Steve

Reply to
Steve B

He's saying his are different than yours. At yours, the scanners are between the return desk and the rest of the store. At his, they are at the entrance door. A far as I remember, at the ones near me, there is no scanner near the entrance. The return desk is just inside the entrance door, and there is often (maybe usually) a uniformed guard hanging out right at the door where anyone trying sneak things out or to the return desk can see him and be seen. They sometimes have a guard at the door checking (very superficially) receipts. It's possible that there is a scanner right at the door that I never noticed, but certainly not one beyond there.

Reply to
Larry Fishel

If home depot had more staff just the presence of those brite orange clothes would discouage thieves.

at my HD they must stock at nite there are few workers on the floor and i have never seen them stocking shelves just straightening......

no staff in such a large store =3D more thieves at work

Reply to
bob haller

Yep. But one of the rules of loss prevention is that it is not, generally, the one-time customer that rips off the store - it's the regulars! They keep coming back to the well for more free stuff once they discover they can get away with it.

Reply to
HeyBub

I still wonder if bringing in your own pre-printed bar-code sticker to cover over the one on the package of the product you want to buy is happening to any great extent. The pre-printed code would be derived from a similar product that you intend to buy - but with a much lower price.

You take a picture of the barcode of the cheap product with your cellphone, use commonly-available software at home to re-create the barcode and print it on a sheet of sticky paper, cut it out and take sticker with you to the store, take expensive product off the shelf and put it in your shopping cart, peel sticker and apply over real barcode. Let store cashier scan it. Pay for it and walk out of the store.

Reply to
Home Guy

This is fairly common. A shopper buys a five-pound carton of mystery-meat which she takes home to poison the neighbor's dog. Carefully removing the price-sticker from the package, she coats the price-tag with rubber cement and returns to the store. There she places the label sticky-side up in her right hand while removing a package of T-bones from the cooler with her left.

She flips the T-bones over into her right hand to look at the back(?) thereby affixing the new sticker to the yummy meat.

Then pays for the product with food stamps.

Reply to
HeyBub

These scams all depend on you counting on the cashier not paying any attention to what is going on. Even if you are in self check, you better make sure your sticker matches the weight of the product you are stealing ... and that the cashier is not paying attention

Reply to
gfretwell

I'm not sure I understand why poisoning the neighbor's dog is part of this scam.

Reply to
Home Guy

PA (and others) should take lessons from Texas and Maracopa Co., AZ.

Reply to
krw

Because it isn't good enough for the bum on food stamps.

Reply to
krw

Oh, it's just a literary embellishment thrown in to make the post more interesting. Frankly, since you called me out on it, I'll admit I really have no idea what she's going to do with the meat. I presume she'd want to do SOMETHING constructive with it...

Reply to
HeyBub

Believe it or not, there's a market for the packing material (box, papers, plastic bags, etc.) that are used to ship flat-panel TVs (check Ebay).

Burglars need these boxes to re-pack the stolen TVs. The thieves can then either "return" them to some store, or sell the sets to bargain hunters as "it fell off a truck."

Reply to
HeyBub

Yeah, right. In this day and age, when all price stickers have the product description encoded to display when rung up and printed on the receipt, for the cashier to review.

Reply to
Hell Toupee

Ah, so when you ship the empty box to them, they know where the matching set is, too.

Reply to
krw

Another reason for me to go to Busy Beaver stores.

Greg

Reply to
gregz

'Nuff said.

--Vic

Reply to
Vic Smith

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