Re: What law(s) were broken in this incident?

On 01/22/12 4:13 PM, DerbyDad03 wrote:
Greetings. I'm a new subscriber to misc.legal. I hope this is the
right group for my question.

I'm curious as to what, if any, laws were broken in this incident:

A person goes into a grocery store to buy some pudding. The only
product on the shelf are 4 packs containing 2 vanilla and 2 chocolate.
The person doesn't like vanilla, so she opens two packages and swaps
containers to create a 4 pack of chocolate and a 4 pack of vanilla.

She leaves the 4 pack of vanilla on the shelf and brings the 4 pack of
chocolate to the cashier, who scans it and accepts the customer's
payment.

Has she broken any laws? I'm assuming that there is something related
to "damage to a product" here, since she not only left an open package
on the shelf but altered the contents so that it no longer matches to
package description.

Shoplifting. Swapping price tags and paying for the mis-labeled product is a crime (some states call it shoplifting and some call it something else). She cannot defend on the basis that the price was the same. In order to obtain four chocolate puddings legally, she would have paid for two properly-labeled packages. She actually paid for only one. The amount of the theft is easy to calculate.

The pudding package that she left is the store cannot be sold by the store except by accident or by re-labeling. They cannot sell it intentionally as-is because it is incorrectly labeled. They could sell it by accident if they don't notice the alteration. In that case they have passed the damage on to an innocent customer. They could re-label it and sell it at a discount on the damaged goods shelf. They could give it to an employee or throw it away.

Regardless of what the store does with the remaining product, they will need to manually adjust the inventory records and sales records.

Vandalism.

Damage to personal property.

Fraud.

Stupidity.

You missed an opportunity to ask two more interesting questions:

First: What should the store do with the sales tax money that was collected? They owe to the state sales tax on goods sold, but not on shoplifted goods. Since they don't owe anything to the state, may the store keep the sales tax money as partial compensation for their damages? Or should it be held in trust for the shoplifter? Answer: It all belongs to the state. (Relax, everybody, I'm just kidding. This is not a real question.)

Second: What crime has been committed by the manufacturer? Hmmm, "Illegal tying arrangement", maybe. That's a form of price-fixing in which a product that the customer wants cannot be purchased without also purchasing a related product that the customer does not want. (This one is serious.)

This answer must not be relied on as legal advice for the reasons posted here: http://mcgyverdisclaimer.blogspot.com . And I am not your attorney.

McGyver

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