Customers at a New Zealand supermarket got more than they bargained for when it comes to bargains, thanks to an unexpected computer glitch. At 8 AM, the doors to the Hamilton’s Mill Street Pak ‘n Save opened up with absolutely no employees inside. Cue the rampaging thievery, right? Well, not quite: about half the customers paid using self-service scanners until those broke when someone tried to scan alcohol. Once those scanners were down, that’s when the stealing started in earnest.
Ironically, the incident happened on Good Friday, which leads some to speculate on the nature of moral behavior and the influence of religion.
“It is like real life candid camera where people are clearly faced with this series of moral dilemmas,” said Paul Morris, a religious studies professor at Victoria University. “The Christian Right have tended to think [that] without the Ten Commandments and God’s divining hand we would never have been able to develop a plausible and sustainable morality. This [Pak ‘n Save incident] is like some mad experiment, because you’ve sent off to church the religious and it’s the secular who have gone shopping on Good Friday … and you’ve put them to the test. Most acted morally and responded in very appropriate ways by trying to pay by using the self-service area. But clearly others saw that fortune had smiled on them in some perverse way.”
Of course, to think that way would discount all the years of social training that people receive in which they’re told by others that taking things that don’t belong to you and robbing stores would not be considered acceptable behavior in the eyes of temporal authorities. Even people who don’t believe in God don’t want to go to jail.
Tags: computer glitch, store opens with no employees, Hamilton’s Mill Street Pak ‘n Save, New Zealand, Paul Morris, Victoria University, social experiments, store opens with no workers, free groceries, store accidentally opens, free groceries when store opens with no workers, theft, unusual accidents, unusual computer glitches