WalMart's Highly Trained Counterfeit Bill Experts Buy Lawsuit

Here'a a real-life hypothetical for your torts lecture.

It's nearly Christmas and you have no money to buy presents for your kids.  So, you sell your car for cash and go to WalMart to get what you can. It's 2:00 AM after an exhausting day and you finally get your purchases to the checkout counter. When you pay for your kids' Christmas gifts with the $100 bills you just got from selling your car, the cashier tells you they are fake and tears them up. When you protest, she marks the bills with the counterfeit detecting pen and the pen fails to detect a fake. It doesn't matter.  The Manager has determined the bills are fakes.  They call the police.  You are told to wait.  In the meantime, WalMart employees engage in loud public conversations about your attempt to pay for goods with counterfeit bills. The police arrive, inspect the bills and deem them to be real. The manager argues with them.  Finally, the manager tries to give you back your ripped up bills.  The police insist that that the manager give you replacement bills. Finally, at 5:00 AM, you leave the store.

The subsequent lawsuit is based in Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress and False Imprisonment.  Read the complaint, here.

What result?

Example of the type of counterfeit detecting device that WalMart uses but apparently doesn't trust:

Tragic Shoplifting Case

Shopkeepers have a qualified privilege against a false imprisonment claim.  As long as a shopkeeper has a reasonable belief that a customer is shoplifting and uses reasonable means of restraint for a reasonable time, the shopkeeper may avoid liability.  This is the law's attempt to balance the  individual interest in personal freedom and the shopkeeper's legitimate right to avoid merchandise walking out of his store.

During Black Friday weekend, a couple of WalMart employees and a security guard confronted a customer in the parking lot after concluding that the customer was stealing two DVD players. The customer ended up dead. Certainly, there are more facts to this story yet to be disclosed.  But this is the kind of tragic incident that the shopkeeper's privilege is designed to prevent.  "Reasonableness" in all areas of conduct is the required standard.

When a Walgreen Pharmacy assistant manager believed that a teenager had stolen a pack of condoms, she called the East Hartford, Conn. police department.  The responding officer conducted a strip search of the 18-year-old male suspect in the men's room.  Reasonable conduct?  Not likely.

WalMart spokesperson says that no amount of merchandise is worth someone's life:

Shopkeeper's Privilege

Why do we need to provide a Shopkeeper's Privilege in false imprisonment cases? Maybe it is because of this:



Is there anyone working at this store to detain these shoplifters?