Veritas said:

Been there, done that.  Several times, in fact.  I call situations like that "character tests," and they are graded on a pass/fail basis.

I have and would bring back the excess $.  Whether the clerk would be "punished" or not, or whether they were an innie or an outie (:)) has been and would be irrelevant.  Whether I could be caught and punished would be irrelevant.

What counts for me is whether I am being the person I want to be when I grow up.  That standard is what I hold myself to, and all that truly matters to me when ethical decisions are involved.

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how noble!

unfort, I doubt I would return the money.  In fact, I'd probably get myself a nice sack with the "rebate."

backfromthedead said:

For some reason I want to say that if I was at a small local 'mom and pop' type place I would be more inclined to give it back.  But Walmart??  They might be down 100$.  Like they would notice.

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You don't think it would be noticed?

Now, personally, I find that very amusing.

Because I know it would.

What you do not realize is that $100 is always $100. It will be noticed. Its a sizable discrepancy. There are individuals held accountable for that discrepancy. Don't think otherwise, it is not a reasonable perspective; it belies the nature of reality.

kotik said:

yes, its reasonable to assume whoever is short $100 in their drawer at the end of the day will be out of a job, although wal-mart won't be wounded from it.

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backfromthedead said:

This believe it or not, is not beyond my ability to comprehend.  In the scheme of things, and we are talking about Walmart, $100 IMO is not a 'sizable discrepancy'.

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You misconceive "Wal*Mart" as being a uniform entity. Well, you're wrong, and this is why you do not feel that an unaccounted for $100 is a concern regarding Wal*Mart as a whole. Within the scheme of things, as far as Wal*Mart itself is concerned, it is a cause for concern, and I think you fail to understand this.

Profit is profit, and the more a store effectively secures profit, the more money the store produces for the company - the bigger the bonuses for the associates and management, the more the customers are served as the store is not losing money, thus more capable of providing for the customer's needs by hiring more staff, which means more jobs for those who need them...

The thing is, in the scheme of Wal*Mart, the same line of thinking that, to Wal*Mart, a $100 isn't really a loss to Wal*Mart, implies that a $100 lost here is also a $100 lost there, especially in the regard that losing money implies that the store is less able to put that money into producing more sales, which means that an unaccounted for $100 means that the store loses more than just $100.

To think of a highly dynamic and complex system existing on a variety of levels, such as Wal*Mart, exists as a uniform identity, and that a missing $100 is simply an $100 addition to the $264,152,000,000 cost of sales for the year 2006, for example, is simply ignorant of the nature of the organization and how it operates.