Shoppers are angry at retailers who check bags and receipts at the exit. Do customers have the right to refuse to buy?

As if grocery shopping in Canada wasn’t annoying enough for customers – from the high prices to the inconvenience – Reddit users are now pointing out another inconvenience: security guards and receipt checkers.

A Redditor from Halifax asked users about this in a post titled, “Do you let store staff check your bags and receipts?” The post received nearly 300 comments.

“Except at stores like Costco where you as a member agree to a receipt check, do you stop and let the store staff check your receipt and items?” asked user Prestigious_King_548. “Do you say no thanks and keep walking?”

“I personally haven’t done anything wrong, so I won’t stop or submit to a search. I won’t be rude to the sales staff and will only do what they tell me, but I won’t join in either.”

As it appears to be becoming more common practice for some retailers to check receipts before leaving a store, we asked experts what rights shoppers have to refuse to check these receipts.

Why Costco Checks Your Receipt Before You Leave

Martin Qiu is an associate professor of marketing at Wilfrid Laurier University. He says that at membership retailers like Costco, checking receipts is part of the membership agreement.

“Customers must agree to present their receipt for inspection when they leave the store,” he says. Yahoo News Canada.

The retailer’s website states that checking receipts is to “double-check that items purchased were handled correctly by our cashiers” as it is the “most effective method of maintaining accuracy in inventory control and is also a good way to ensure that… members have been correctly charged for purchases.”

Customer rights: Can I refuse a receipt or bag check in a store?

At other retailers, such as Walmart and Loblaws, experts say customers are not legally required to undergo these checks, especially as retail technologies, such as facial recognition at kiosks, become more advanced and commonplace.

“When you replace people with machines, you’re bound to run into problems,” says Alex Nanoff, spokesperson for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA). “What steps are these companies taking to resolve or offset the limitations they might face if they no longer have people paying for their groceries?”

According to a 2019 CCLA blog post, “the ‘storekeeper’s privilege’ … is exercised after a theft is observed, not in anticipation of an imagined crime” and “after witnessing a theft, a storekeeper may ask the customer to search the bag with him. However, the storekeeper has no right to search the bag without his consent.”

If no theft is observed and the store owner wishes to conduct an inspection, this is essentially a form of “carding,” a controversial police tactic in which a person is stopped, questioned and documented without investigating any specific offense.

Daniel Tsai, a lawyer and adjunct professor of business law at Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Toronto, says retailers who detain customers for failing to provide a receipt could legally be considered a charge of false imprisonment.

“If you have done nothing wrong and they cannot confirm it through video or eyewitnesses … and they detain you without your consent, then that is false imprisonment,” he says. “It cannot be based on a hunch or suspicion.”

Canadians react: “It’s a nuisance”

Many people expressed their disdain for the receipt and bag check procedures in the comments on the Reddit post.

User GibberBabble explained that they oppose checking receipts when shopping at the Superstore because customers are faced with a variety of security guards throughout the shopping process, including “employees who rip you off when scanning items.”

User Dependent_Reply_8644 wrote: “I’ll just move on. It’s annoying.”

User DamenAJ questions the whole practice: “If people have multiple TVs or whatever, that’s one thing, but groceries? What obvious item are they looking for in the two seconds it took them to check the receipt? Or do they actually look at everything and then form a line to get out of the damn store?”

However, a user might see an incentive for businesses to conduct such checks.

“It’s probably not that effective at actually catching people stealing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it deterred some of the more nervous potential shoplifters,” resipsaloquitor5 wrote.

Some retailers are considering self-checkout

Some Canadian Tire and Walmart stores that had installed self-checkouts are now abandoning them and relying instead on human checkouts, which could eliminate the practice of checking receipts. In the UK, grocery chain Booths found that self-checkouts did not work in its retail store because they were “unreliable” and “impersonal.”

“They realize that maybe it’s not a justification for not having staff there,” Tsai says. “Maybe it’s a special shopping experience to have a human go through the purchases and bag them. There’s a certain resistance to that.”