If you shop at warehouse clubs like Costco or Sam’s Club, you know that you never put your receipt in your purse or pocket as soon as you get it. Why? There will likely be someone waiting to check it at the door before you can leave.
Obviously, these employees are just hoping to catch you smuggling out 40 rolls of toilet paper, right? Wrong. The reason for checking receipts at the exit actually has nothing to do with stsimealing. In fact, the purpose is to help the customer, not because they assume we’re all thieves.
As Laura Ladd Poff, the senior manager of corporate communications for Sam’s Club, told Cooking Light, having an exit greeter is an opportunity for the store to connect with the customer for the final time before leaving — and it’s also to ensure customers were checked out properly.
“It’s an opportunity to ask them if they found everything they were looking for, and if they have everything they need — but it’s also a chance to make sure their transaction went smoothly, and the cashier didn’t accidentally ring up anything twice,” she said.
A Reddit thread featuring responses from former employees of these big-box retailers first surfaced this revelation. As the thread suggests, the exit greeter checks your receipt to make sure that the cashiers did their jobs correctly. They ensure that an item wasn’t actually scanned twice and that you didn’t miss out any discounts. If they do see a problem, the exit greeters will then work to correct it before you leave the store.
“If a receipt shows under 20 items, we count. It’s a very quick count to 20,” wrote one Redditor, who says he worked there before. “For carts with over 20 items … [t]he main things we check for are stuff on the bottom. Cases of water, TP, pop cases, etc. All those extra things that maybe a cashier misses.”
The same goes for if you use the “scan and go” app at Sam’s Club, which allows you to scan the items you’re buying as you shop and avoid the line and cashier completely. You could easily forget to scan something or scan something twice by accident. But if the exit greeter catches the mistake, you could end up saving money.
“Trust me, we’re not loss prevention, we have loss prevention in the store and that’s not us,” another Redditor wrote. “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. Who did it, what time, etc. … and those cashiers get spoken to. This is not to benefit anyone but the member to improve the experience overall.”
