The stock at Sam's Club may change and move around a lot, but there is one constant we
can expect at the warehouse club, the "exit greeter," a person who hovers near the door,
waiting to check our receipts before we head to our cars.
You might think the men and women who say goodbye are there because the store doesn't
trust shoppers and is trying to prevent theft. But at Sam's Club, that isn't exactly what
exit greeters are doing when they ask you to stop.
Laura Ladd Poff, senior manager of corporate communications for Sam's Club, explained to
Cooking Light,
"Having an exit greeter is a great opportunity to have another chance to connect with the
customer before they leave. It's an opportunity to ask them if they found everything they
were looking for, and if they have everything they need."
"Ooh, whose birthday is it?"
"Check the price, Carmine. At 5 cents a cubic inch, it's all our birthdays."
According to one poster on Reddit, who claimed to once hold the job of exit greeter at a
big-box store, the receipt check at the doors is not necessarily a loss prevention tactic,
contrary to popular belief. They explained,
"Trust me, we're not loss prevention, we have loss prevention in the store and that's not
us. We're literally just trying to make sure our cashiers do the job right, and when we
DO catch it, all the information gets stored...This is not to benefit anyone but the member to
improve the experience overall."
The employee shed some more light on the process, saying that the main thing the exit greeters
are looking for is to make sure customers aren't accidentally under or over-charged.
They're not trying to catch intentional theft, they have loss-prevention teams for that.
As they put it,
"We're not gonna catch EVERYTHING and that's fine, we also don't want to keep you there
all day long. Ideally the people at the register are doing their jobs right, sadly that's not
always the case. 99 percent of the time, it's not due to theft."
And, as the exit greeter pointed out, if a shopper was really looking to steal something,
he or she probably wouldn't just leave it in plain sight in the cart.
Another good reason for checking the receipt? The Redditor explained that they're also checking
to make sure members have received all the goods they paid for, like gift cards.
When purchasing gift cards at a big box store, you often have to retrieve them from someone
other than the cashier once you've paid, and the exit greeters check your receipt in part
to make sure you didn't forget. Nice of them, right?
According to Laura Poff with Sam's Club, the exit checkers at Sam's Club might be able
to fill you in on some inside scoop, too. As she told Cooking Light,
"Taking a moment to check the receipt also offers us another opportunity to engage that
member further. It's not uncommon for the greeter to say, 'Hey! Swing back on Saturday
for a special sale on these items.'"
If online chatter about the subject is any indication, the question on most shoppers'
minds after "Why are you checking my receipt?" tends to be "Is this practice actually legal?"
According to reporting by Lawyers.com, it is. While most stores would need to have some
sort of reasonable suspicion of shoplifting to actually stop a shopper on their way out
the door, that's not the case with stores like Costco and Sam's Club. As the website
points out, stores that require a membership to shop at tend to be able to enforce rules
that other merchants wouldn't be able to. In signing up for a membership at a store
like Costco or Sam's Club, it's likely that you're also signing a contract agreeing to
submit to a quick check of your receipt on the way out the door.
So, the next time you're asked for your receipt as you're pushing your cart out, put your
mind at ease. No one suspects you're up to no good. It's just part of the process, and
even if it holds you up on the way out, don't take your frustrations out on the employee.
As the Redditor who provided insight into the process put it,
"Save your frustrations for a manager, not the people at the door. They're literally
doing their jobs."
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