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Aside from putting up the odd sign to discourage certain behavior, no, I do not think that stores have any good reason to bend over backwards to keep individual customers.

Retail is far too accommodating already. Some people figure that being a “valued customer” means they can be an unending source of sunken costs in time, effort and stress, among other things. And those costs can be multiplied across the other customers waiting in line, too.

If a “customer” is destroying your inventory, annoying other customers, or commanding far more of your time than warranted, there is no reason to put up with them. Protect the larger investment, which is: all your other customers, your store, and your employees.

Stores bake that into the cost of doing business, it's like dropping something and breaking it, in the vast vast majority of cases you won't be charged for it, just be clean up on aisle 3...

Heck I've dropped jars or similar things during bagging after paying for them several times and every time I was offered a replacement.

Mistakes happen, it's often considerably more expensive to deal with customer complaints especially in the age of social media than it is to replace an item.

It's also important to note that this is baked into the cost of doing business all along the supply chain, if items are not sold they will be often returned by the store to the distributor which would chuck them as a loss, or more often than not sell them for other uses other than human consumption.

Some perishables are thrown away others are then sold to other industries e.g. the roast that was left over might end up as dog food...

For a dog food company it's cheaper to buy discarded meat produce the dog food take samples and while it's being shipped do the cultures to ensure that there are no contaminants or bacteria and if something fishy is found just do a recall upstream for specific batch than it is to buy "fresh" meat and ingredients which are fit for human consumption.

Supply chains are huge and complex and all these little annoyances don't really count for much, it only really bothered very small stores that have to buy everything almost up front and they aren't leasing effectively shelf space for distributors.

Perhaps my example was a bit too extreme. But someone else replied to me with a better example of notifications on an app, or warnings that items are still in their cart but did not pass the store threshold, etc.

Seems like the maximized value could be somewhere in the middle, maybe without trying to sneak in replacement costs for items left on other shelves..

It'd be nice, for the stores, if they didn't have to bake so much "attrition" into their accounting.

I agree, especially you see those videos on youtube where the kids are intentionally 'slipping' and throwing multiple jugs of milk onto the floor.

> I do not think that stores have any good reason to bend over backwards to keep individual customers.

Funny; want to know how Amazon CS became so popular with people? They gave complainers what they wanted, and only shut down repeat abusers. You want to exchange or return this TV for no reason at all? Go ahead. You bought this a year ago and want to return it now? Get a rep on the phone and it's done.

It was fascinating to watch from the inside. CS reps became easier to hire (no need for independent thought when 95% of the calls can be answered with binary flags determined by a "follow the prompts" wizard), Amazon's CS approval rating skyrocketed, and they're still making money to this day.

So, yeah, they have proven that there is a really good reason to keep all but the most abusive individual customers.

The store will have video footage of everything... maybe their sensor AI will eventually distinguish between intentional and accidental spoilage.

The attrition is going to be high anyhow, tons of stuff gets damaged during shipping, handling and stocking, tons more is never sold.

Most large stores take out nearly everything off the shelves at night even if it's still within it's "use before" date which on it's own is utterly nonsensical to begin with as most items don't expire for days, if not weeks, months and even years from the "use/best before" date.

People drop stuff, people mishandle goods, how many people squeeze a vegetable or a fruit to check if it's ripe damaging it? how many apples get a mushy spot because they banged around in the crate?

You are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel of inventory attrition when you are talking about perishable misplaced items, compared to everything else they are a rounding error.

There is a lot of loss baked into every supply chain, unless you are going to change it in it's entirety really don't bother with the end, the loss at the point of sale is minimal compared to everything else.

In Australia if you break something in store, they typically wont charge you, but if they do, they have to charge at cost. I wonder if this another reason many stores dont charge. As any store with a larger markup would have to let you know that $55 vase they were trying to sell you cost them $6.

I've never heard this "rule" before, do you have a source? "Cost" is a pretty flimsy concept.

I thought "cost" was one of the simpler concepts - the price at which the store bought the item from the supplier.

Even that fluctuates frequently. When I worked at a grocery store, when you ordered something it would show you what the item would "cost" the store.

This could change from day to day (e.g. fruits, veggies), vary based on quantity ordered, etc.

Then you get into private label (store brand) products, where the "cost" was usually either $0 or some ridiculously low number.

This was a national chain. At the store level at least, we wouldn't have been able to find the value of an item "at cost" with any confidence.

> > Some people figure that being a “valued customer” means they can be an unending source of sunken costs in time, effort and stress, among other things.

> Stores bake that into the cost of doing business

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37711091

> "I return half of what I buy," says 30-year-old Alex Demetri, who spends £500 to £700 on clothes each month.

> She also admits to wearing some of her clothes first before returning them.

> It is customers like Ms Demetri who are causing problems for shops, which are "struggling to cope" with the number of items returned, new research suggests.

> So-called "serial returners" are bringing back items which have been used, are marked or have parts missing, making a quarter of it unfit to resell.

Occasional mistakes happen, but some people deliberately do this kind of stuff.

I get that there's a lot of attrition, but less attrition would be nice.

I may be wrong... I read this previously that was very clear about the customer was due to pay the supplier cost. But I did a google now to find the article and the best I could find is this is a civil case and not "not covered by the Australian Consumer Law" and it seems to be at discretion of the court for value lost and how at fault you were.

https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/shopping/refunds-and-returns...

I think the rule is that, when a business charges a consumer a penalty fee of any kind, the fee must relate to actual costs that the customer's actions imposed on the business. A business could estimate the cost of bananas, but they couldn't use the sale price if that was usually ten times the cost. This applies to things like bank overdraft fees and hotel cleaning charges as well. The idea is that consumer contracts can recover costs, but aren't allowed to punish people.

I don't have a source for that.

Wait til they apply music piracy concepts!

"sir, you ate 4 grapes in store. Our grapes average 2seeds/grape, so we've calculated lost sales in the range of $800.

You see, those seeds could each grow into a vine that will produce an estimated $100 worth of grapes over the lifetime of the plant. You're basically stealing that money from us!"