We’ve all seen it. Someone is leaving a store and they set off the alarm. Sometimes the weary clerks give a half-hearted wave to the customer to tell them to keep on going, and sometimes they ask for the customer to step back into the store. Almost every single time the culprit is a legitimately purchased item that wasn’t de-magnetized properly. Sometimes it’s a cell phone, a rental DVD, or an item from another store. For me, recently, it was a book I bought at a library sale that was not de-magnetized.
I really, really hate these things, and have long, involved fantasies of refusing the search, suffering through arrest, court dates, and ultimately a Supreme Court ruling that agrees with me that this is an unconstitutional breach of our fourth amendment rights against unreasonable search.
Given the almost complete inadequacy of these devices, I don’t think any court or judge in the land would rule against me.
But, worst of all, they are completely de-humanizing. This machine accuses you (almost always falsely) in front of your community of being a thief. Even worse, your fellow human (the clerk) trusts the machine, even though it is almost invariably wrong, and searches you. The opinion of the machine trumps the opinion of the human.
The merchant may say that setting off the alarm is reasonable grounds to search you for suspected shoplifting. I say that those alarms are almost always in error, and taking the advice of a dumb machine is embarrassing, humiliating, and ultimately de-humanizing.
