lsu_nonleg said:
Can someone just buy everything, walk past a security grandma that requests your receipt, and proceed to your car? We keep bouncing back and forth between policy consent and "phantom" consequences. If there are essentially no consequences, then there is no policy.
IANAL .. that being said.
Short answer, yes.
Long answer. According to the Georgia Shoplifter's Act, Georgia shopkeepers must show "that the person had so conducted himself or behaved in such a manner as to cause a man of reasonable prudence to believe that the person was committing the crime of shoplifting" in order to be protected from liability for the detention or arrest of a customer.
Well, what constitutes probable cause then that would cause a reasonable person to conclude shoplifting was occuring?
In Tomblin v. S.S. Kresge Company a woman was arrested based on store employees seeing her pick up an item and later put her hand in her pocket. She was taken to an office, forced to empty her pockets and later handed over to a police officer to be taken to jail. Her statement was that she had reached in her pocket for a kleenex (of which some were found) and that she still held the store's merchandise in her hands. She sued the company, but the company asked for and received a directed verdict from the trial judge based on the Georgia Shoplifter's Act's protection for shopkeepers if they show reasonable cause for detaining someone suspected of shoplifting. This directed verdict was appealed and the appellant court determined "We reverse for the sole reason that we find a factual issue to be resolved by the jury, viz., whether the defendant's servants or agents had reasonable cause to believe that the plaintiff had engaged in an act of shoplifting when they detained, questioned plaintiff and thereafter delivered her over to the police." So the court determined that merely putting your hand in your pocket while holding merchant property was not enough reasonable cause to give the merchant automatic protection under the shoplifting act and should have been left up to a jury to decide.
In a 1995 case, Robert and Annie Simmons filed suit against Kroger, the store manager, and the store's security guard for false imprisonment, false arrest, tortious misconduct and loss of consortium for an incident that occured at an Atlanta Kroger location. Evidently, the security guard, acting on information from an unnamed employee accosted Mr. Simmons because he said this employee had told him that Simmons was seen eating candy. The false arrest and tortious misconduct charges were dropped in summary judgement, but on the remaining counts the Simmons prevailed in court and were awarded $23,300. The Simmons appealed the summary judgement on the two charges the court did not let a jury hear and won a reversal of the judgement in appellate court. Again the courts declared that whether or not the merchant acted reasonably was a matter for a jury to decide.
So will you or the business prevail if it goes to court? I guess that depends on the jury decision as to whether or not the business had probable cause to detain you simply over your refusal to show a receipt. Juries in the past have refused to give this protection to retailers when they had actual statements or video concerning possible shoplifting, so I would say that the business is most likely going to lose.
This is why most large corporations have very strict guidelines concerning what their employees can and cannot do when it comes to shoplifters. In every company I have ever worked for only loss prevention or a member of store management could make the decision to detain a customer. And then they could only do so after the customer was clearly observed taking an item, concealing it, and had passed the last possible point in the store where they could pay for the item, all the while under constant surveillance to ensure that they did not drop the item in some other location of the store.
So, because of my experience with other retailers I seriously doubt that Walmart, Best Buy or Circuit City have other policies that allow their door employees to decide on their own to detain a customer, or even for the manager to detain a customer based solely on them not cooperating with a door checker. The risk is far too great for them to allow such an internal policy.
One little nugget to keep in mind though, the shoplifter's act does give the retailer a statutory protection on detaining you if their door sensor goes off. So if that cashier forgets to swipe the sensor over their magnetic plate at the register and you walk through the door causing the door alarm to go off, you can be detained and the business will face absolutely no liability for doing so.
