Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
AN Indian family were forced to pay a BD20 fine by a security guard at Geant hypermarket because they had forgotten to pay for a 100 fils carton of juice that their five-year-old daughter had drank as they shopped – despite the fact that they had just spent almost BD22 in the shop.
When you spend that amount you’re not going to try and steal 100 fils worth of goods so it was very obviously a genuine mistake.
Bizarrely enough, in response to an earlier similar incident, management claimed that the penalty is incurred to avoid customers being taken away by the police when they forget to pay for something that is consumed in the shop and not paid for.
Either the law is broken and the police should be called or a mistake has occurred and you allow the customer to correct that mistake and to pay for the item. There can be no justification in charging someone 200 times the cost of the item consumed.
