I was stopped by a security guard at Tesco for the wrong reason.

Yesterday, I was shopping at Tesco. All was fine until I got to self checkout, as I always do.

You see, our checkouts have the quantity option, which allows me to enter multiple pieces of a single item at once without having to call staff.

Everything went normally, as it always does, except when I was ringing up a bakery item. I proceeded to hit the aforementioned qty button, then, after entering the quantity, I keyed in the internal item code, as I always do. (I buy that item a lot so I memorized its code from the shelf label.) However, the attendant didn’t know what I was doing, and assumed I was trying to do something bad, so he decided to stealthily call security on us and continued to observe us closely.

When we finally paid for our purchases, took the receipt (which I’m glad I did!) and started to leave, we were calmly confronted by security and the self-checkout attendant. Since it was so sudden, I immediately started to feel very anxious and tensed up.

At first, I thought he just wanted to check our receipt. But no. With suspicion, he asked us what were we keying into the checkout. The attendant came over as well. My anxiety rose with the accusation.

I had to explain I was just keying in the internal item code for a loose bakery item I was buying. They didn’t even want to see the receipt itself. Luckily, they understood the explanation, and we could finally leave the store, even though I was rather shaken and embarrassed from the experience.

Maybe I’ll just take a photo of the shelf label containing the code next time and show it to the attendant to help explain what I was entering. I’d hate to keep having to look the item up through the list, because it’s more effort compared to just keying in the code, which I (not-so-painlessly) memorized.

What do you think? Was the decision to summon security reasonable? Let me know in the comments.