Did you think I wasn't gonna see that?

[Food Lady]

We get bands of roving teens on scavenger hunts every once in a while. Also, we don't allow photography in the store, save news cameras during Christmas, and that's with permission. Anyway, I had some girls with an adult lady ask if they could take a pic with me, and I wasn't comfortable w/ that, so fortunately I was able to tell them we don't allow it. They were polite about it and went off.

The next thing I knew, one of the girls took a pic of a new cashier who didn't know better. I saw MOD and grabbed him, explaining and pointing them out, so he immediately spoke to the adult with them, who of course, denied it and got pissy with him. Um, you're going to deny it when we have cameras everywhere and the girl is on tape taking the picture?

[hinakiba777]

Why doesn't your store allow for cameras? Just curious.

[RetailMom]

My store does not allow cameras either. The reason is to keep competition from "stealing" our "fabulous" ideas. You know, because no-one else in the whole world ever thought of putting sale merchandise on an endcap!

[Tama]

Or the idea of putting baby wipes next to diapers. Gasp. No one else would possibly think of such a thing!

[phoenixv07]

The vast majority of retailers don't allow photography on their property. Corporate espionage is often a reason, but thieves have been known to take pictures of merchandise to help plan their "shopping" sprees.

The only people allowed to take photos or video at the Dartboard are: Team members for explicitly business-related purposes, and vendor reps taking pictures of their own product runs.

[bankworking]

Yeah, we get the scavenger hunt groups, except ours are all adults. The near-by base does the scavenger hunts every three months. We're supposed to put up with them, because one of the items, besides the picture, is getting a list of our locations, and corporate thinks that is good advertising. Really a pain when we're busy though.

[NateTheChops]

Shops in Salem are quite explicit about it. I saw one owner throw an entire tour group out because they kept whipping out their cameras even after they were politely asked to stop.

Competition is a huge part of it. But it's also a matter of courtesy, which some shoppers don't seem to get.

[emax4]

The irony about this is that I just saw on television news reports recently (Pittsburgh area) on how there's an app where you can basically spy for companies. I don't know how to describe it without sounding like spam, but you download this app from the app store (dunno if there's one for the Android market and others), then sign up. You go to various business and take photos, then send or upload them to the competing business, and get paid for it. The article showed how one woman was going through the process, drove to a gas station and photographed the prices on the huge sign, drove somewhere else to a Wally World, photographed some coffee along with the prices and the location next to other coffees, and sent them in. Within minutes or hours (I forget) some money got put in to her PayPal account, like $20 or so.

The concept is neat because it basically puts you as the investigator for corporations, but the flipside is that it might also get you banned or thrown out of certain stores that you shop at on a regular basis. I love spy stuff and used to do it as a kid, but I wouldn't risk it now, esp with gas prices as high as they are. I'll admit that I do have the app that lets you scan a barcode of something, then it compares that price to the same item that can be found cheaper elsewhere. It's not 100% guaranteed though because a model of one coffeemaker at K Mart could be a different model with one more or one less feature at Wally World.

When I worked at Guitar Center we had issues with people and cameras on their phones, so we had to watch for those. The prices were high on a number of items (compared to online and local music stores), but I don't think we made a big fuss about it. Obviously for things that cost a lot of money you want to save as much as you can, but some don't realize that the higher price means that they're paying for the convenience of getting something right there right now, and don't have to worry about sending it back via mail if it breaks.

[bainsidhe]

A school group was allowed to tape inside the mall, so long as you couldn't see the names of the stores. So it has something to do with privacy policy, but I'm not sure what exactly. Either way, it's private property and they make the rules.

[SummerI]

Cake Wrecks lol

[emt_cookies]

If you do a search for holiday displays on our internal employee network, pictures of competitors' displays will pop up. I've seen Easter, Halloween, and Back-to-School displays. They had Wal-mart, Target, Hobby Lobby, Office Max, K-mart, and so on.

[MoonCat]

Museums and historic places do that too. When my sister visited New England some years ago, her tour group was told they could not take pics of anything in John Paul Jones' house. The woman working there told them it was to prevent theft (someone could case the place this way & note what was valuable). My sister asked why, then, did they have postcards of the exact same items for sale in their gift shop?

[lineswine]

...but they were all OK in the house of Robert Plant?
That sounds like a poor job to me! *runs*

[Jester]

My sister asked why, then, did they have postcards of the exact same items for sale in their gift shop?

Oh, that's easy. The reason for that is that the company controls what is in the picture on the postcard. They also control what is NOT on the postcard picture, such as various security measures.

Considering last year a local museum had a $5,000 gold bar stolen, I can understand why some museums might want to prevent such shenanigans. And while I'm sure said museum has postcards with various treasure (possibly including the gold bar in question), they had full control of just how that picture was taken.

Hope that makes sense. I haven't had my first beer today, so it may not.

[PepperElf]

Yeah... I asked first at work before pulling out my camera to photograph one of the price tags. I wanted to show it to my bf to see if he liked the deal. (and it's 20+ miles to the store)