I’ll tell you what you can do with your “No Backpack” rule....

I went into a large retail establishment yesterday. Should I say who? Mmmmmhhh, they’re Canadian and they sell tires. 

They have a notice towards the front of the store stating that bags need to be handed in at the customer service desk. Which I ignore. 

I had a friend who left his backpack at the front of one of their stores, a shitstain came by, said that it was his, the clerk handed it over – bye bye backpack. To say that their efforts to remedy the situation fell far short of satisfactory is an understatement.

One of the 16 year olds behind the counter asks me to hand over my backpack.
“Are you going to give me some sort of security measure?”

Look of incomprehension.
“You know, something that you attach to the pack, and you give me something to hand over to you when I’m ready to leave your store, in order to prove that it is indeed my property?”

“Uh no, we don’t have anything like that.”

“Okay, well the answer is no then.” Walked away.

I’m walking around the store, and some sort of manager type comes up to me and says “Excuse me sir, but we have a strict no backpack in the store policy.”

“And I have a strict no handing over my backpack to your teenage minimum wage employees without some kind of security measure.”

Same look of incomprehension.

I mentioned my friend having his backpack stolen in one of their stores. “You want to protect your merchandise, which is fine and understandable, but you do nothing to protect the property of your customers. I have a backpack that costs $300, plus a laptop that costs say $1000, $1500, a first aid kit I have a $100 into, a $200 camera, plus many hundreds of dollars of other stuff. I’m supposed to hand over my pack to a teenager making minimum wage, who will wander away from that pack as soon as a customer comes along and asks for assistance. Another teenager making minimum wage will come back a minute later from assisting another customer, have no idea who that pack belongs to. Some lowlife will come along, claim it’s his, she’ll take his statement at face value and hand over the pack. If you aren’t offering the customer some form of security to protect their valuable possessions, this customer is not about to entrust it to you. If you want to inspect my bag as I’m leaving the store, that’s fine with me. It remains in my possession to safeguard and allows you the opportunity to make sure that I’m not walking off with your merchandise without paying for it. That to me is an equitable solution. Not to mention the fact that I’m probably the most noticeable person in the store, and that the act of shucking off the pack to put something inside isn’t likely to escape anyone’s notice. That you’re not asking women to hand over their purses, or asking people wearing hoodies with kangaroo pockets on the front to take them off, your policy strikes me as a double standard and little more than appearance. I’ll see you at the door when I’m done shopping.”

The look on his face made it all worthwhile. Never did see him at the door.

Some stores will ask for your bag, but they have someone behind the counter who stays there, and they also hand you over something like a half a playing card. The other half is pinned to your pack. When you go to retrieve it the same clerk from before is there and with the proffering of the half card, the correct card is found to match it and you get your bag back. That’s a pretty simple means of assuring a measure of security. That I don’t mind so much.

But this pathetic, we get to protect ourselves, but screw the customer approach that Canadian Tire pulls is totally unsat. I get it, you lose a lot to shoplifting. Frustrating, harmful to your bottom line – I get all that. But you let women walk around with a purse, although I can’t walk around with a ruck on my back. Piss off. As if anyone couldn’t see through that half assed double standard. Oh right, cause women never shoplift. And expecting me to have faith in the underpaid kids you have working there to guard my pack, and not giving me something that protects my investment – yeah right.

I’ll keep on ignoring their and anyone elses idiotic attempts to protect themselves from theft while leaving their customers open to having their valuables stolen. Don’t like that? Then I’ll stop being a customer.