The computer monitor cost $329. At the self-checkout lane, it rang up as a banana.
Loss prevention staff at a Walmart Superstore on U.S. Highway 19 in Pinellas Park, Florida were already watching the lane. Police took Bruce Wayne Higgins Jr., 51, into custody on May 2, 2026. The arrest affidavit says he scanned the monitor as produce, then failed to properly scan more merchandise before heading for the exit. The items came to $525.68. He was charged with petit theft between $100 and $750, a misdemeanor under Florida law, and was detained without incident. The transaction was on surveillance video.
After being read his Miranda rights, Higgins denied stealing anything on purpose. He told officers it was a mistake and that he was exhausted from working overnight.
The Trick Has A Name And Every Loss Prevention Officer Knows It
The banana trick is simple enough that people invent it on their own. You put an expensive item on the scale or in the bagging area, then punch in the code for a cheap piece of produce instead of scanning the real barcode. The machine charges you for fruit.
The math is the whole appeal. A T-bone at $13.99 a pound rung up with the code for a 49-cent-a-pound piece of produce, the example The Atlantic used when it named the trick in 2018, is a steak dinner for pocket change. It works on anything a scale will accept, and it works on items that never touch the scale at all, since the code can be keyed in by hand while the real product slides into a bag.
It travels with cousins. The switcheroo means peeling the sticker off something cheap and laying it over the barcode of something expensive. The pass around means dropping an item straight into the bag without scanning it. And some shoppers simply scan fewer items on purpose, then blame the machine when someone asks.
Stores Catch It In The Receipt, Not At The Lane
Nobody has to be standing there watching you. Grocers run reports on their own transaction data looking for one specific pattern, according to the firms that sell them the software: duplicate SKUs for cheap products piling up in a single order.
Six separate banana entries in one basket is not a shopping habit. It is a flag. Once a transaction gets flagged, the store pulls the video for that exact timestamp, and the shopper who thought the moment was long gone is on camera holding a vacuum cleaner while the screen says produce.
Walmart Put Cameras Inside The Scanner Itself
The London firm Edgify sells grocers cameras that mount on the scale or the scanner and check whether the thing you are holding matches the thing you rang up. Its own selling point is that it identifies loose produce through a plastic bag. Its named customers are mostly European chains, plus the Indiana grocer Strack and Van Til.
Walmart’s own system, reported in 2020 from an employee leak and never confirmed by the company, comes from Everseen Ltd. of Cork, Ireland. It tracks product and shopper movement against what is being scanned, nudges the shopper before payment goes through, and alerts a worker only when it decides somebody needs to step in.
The spending followed some blunt talk from the top. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon told CNBC in December 2022 that theft at the chain was “higher than what it has historically been,” and warned that if it “is not corrected over time, prices will be higher, and/or stores will close.” Target had told investors the month before that inventory shrink had cut its gross margin by more than $400 million so far that year.
Getting Accused Is Not The Same As Doing It
Alaina Alejandra Villa, then 31, of Spring, Texas, got tagged in the press as the “Taco Seasoning Bandit” in 2019. Surveillance video showed a woman holding a 99-cent spice packet and scanning its barcode instead of the codes on a $152.99 air purifier, an $89.99 duvet, a $189.99 vacuum cleaner and more than a dozen other home goods. On a second Target trip, the woman used a 49-cent spice packet to ring up 19 products for $20.88.
Villa was charged with misdemeanor theft by the Harris County district attorney and turned herself in. The charges were dismissed on a form reading “probable cause exists but case cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt at this time.”
She says it was never her. She says she does not drive the car store security identified, that she has never had dyed purple hair like the woman on camera, and that she does not have any of the items Target says were taken. In September 2019 she sued Target and the store’s assets protection lead in Harris County district court for more than $1 million, pleading malicious prosecution, false imprisonment, defamation, abuse of process and negligence, and saying the accusation cost her a job she had lined up at a credit union and her place volunteering at her kids’ school. Target said at the time that it was aware of the suit and looking into it, removed the case to federal court, and the parties filed a stipulation of dismissal in July 2020. The terms are not public.
Eighty-Three Dollars Of Groceries, Two Charges
Katherine Gordon was stopped on her way out the doors of a Florida Walmart after using banana barcodes on other items to take $83 worth of groceries. That part was the misdemeanor.
She then told officers her kids were waiting in the car with the windows up in 85 degree weather. EMS checked them and they were fine. She was taken in on charges of child neglect and second-degree petit theft, which is how an $83 grocery run turns into something much bigger than an $83 grocery run.
More Than 36 Million Americans Have Done It
This is not a fringe hobby. In a 2025 online survey of 2,050 American adults run by LendingTree, 27% of self-checkout users said they had intentionally taken an item without scanning it, and 55% of that group thought they would do it again.
An earlier wave of the same survey put the self-reported value of what people took at $60 on average. Research by ECR Retail Loss finds stores with self-checkout run about a third higher shrink than stores without, with individual cases ranging from 33% to 147%. Some 69% of self-checkout users say the machines make stealing easier, and 36% say they have walked out with an unscanned item by accident at least once.
A 2022 ECR study of 93 retail companies across 25 countries found 96% of the grocers surveyed had deployed self-checkout somewhere in their estate. In the LendingTree survey, 41% of millennial and 37% of Gen Z self-checkout users admitted taking something, against 27% overall.
Why These Cases Almost Always Stay Misdemeanors
Dollar thresholds decide everything. Higgins was charged at the misdemeanor level because the merchandise came to $525.68. In New York, the common shoplifting charge is petit larceny, punishable by up to 364 days in jail; the case only becomes grand larceny in the fourth degree, a felony, once the property tops $1,000.
That is also why plenty of these never reach a courtroom. Police departments have quietly set floors of their own, below which a retail theft gets a report rather than a patrol car. In the National Retail Federation’s survey work, 61% of retailers said limited law enforcement resources hurt their ability to investigate and prosecute.
The rules are tightening anyway. More than 30 state organized retail crime laws have been enacted or amended since 2022, by the National Retail Federation’s count. California’s Proposition 36, in effect since December 2024, allows a felony charge for petty theft or shoplifting regardless of value if the defendant has two or more prior convictions for qualifying offenses, a list that takes in burglary and carjacking as well as theft. A $6 steak can be charged as a felony under that math, though it is the priors doing the work.
Why People Who Never Steal Anything Else Try It
Barbara Staib, then director of communications at the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, told The Atlantic in 2018 that self-checkout “gives the false impression of anonymity,” and that “this apparently empowers people to shoplift.” Queen’s University Belfast criminologist Shadd Maruna put the rationalization more plainly: people tell themselves nobody is hurt, only “some mega-corporation that can surely afford the loss of a few quid,” and that the company “has saved so much money by laying off all its cashiers that it is almost morally necessary to steal from them.” Temple University psychologist Frank Farley points at personality, describing many supermarket thieves as thrill seekers. “Shopping can be quite boring because it’s such a routine, and this is a way to make the routine more interesting,” he told the same magazine. “These can be risk-taking, stimulation-seeking people.”
The Bet Is Worse Than It Looks
Forty-six percent of the people in that survey who admitted taking something said they had been caught. That is a coin flip on a $60 average payoff, against a theft charge that follows you onto background checks.
Stores have stacked the odds further. Security firms now push random exit audits, item and transaction limits, rules sending electronics and high-value goods to a staffed register, and camera analytics wired directly into point-of-sale data so the video and the receipt line up automatically.
The honest shopper has a smaller problem worth watching: more than a third of self-checkout users say they have left with something unscanned by accident, and most of those who did kept it. Machines miss scans. Bags block barcodes. Check your receipt against your cart before you walk, because “I thought it scanned” is the same sentence every actual thief uses, and the people reviewing the footage have heard it a thousand times.
