California put the rule in Penal Code 490.5. Detention is allowed only after a merchant has probable cause to think someone walked out with merchandise they did not pay for. A receipt does not come into it. Section 490.5 does not require a customer to show one at the door, and a refusal to show one cannot supply the probable cause the statute demands. Most states have a version of the rule, so the employee asking for the slip is making a request, and at the vast majority of stores, that request carries no power to compel.
Texas put the same privilege in its Civil Practice and Remedies Code at section 124.001. Virginia capped any detention at one hour before the police have to be called. Every version turns on probable cause, and on whether refusing a receipt check creates it, the courts have not wavered. It does not. Tonya Krause-Phelan, a criminal law professor, told Grand Rapids station WZZM that the store “has to have facts.” A greeter running down every receipt as a matter of routine produces none. At Walmart or Best Buy or the big box stores, the check at the door is a courtesy, and the shopper who declines it has broken no rule. Block the exit without probable cause, and the store has a false imprisonment claim on its hands.
The warehouse clubs are the exception. Buy the membership, and the agreement comes with it. The Costco receipt gets matched against that contract at the door, the inspection that the member agreed to in writing when the card was issued. Costco’s membership terms put it in writing that “all receipts and merchandise will be inspected as you leave the warehouse.” Sam’s Club spells out the same right in its agreement. BJ’s Wholesale Club does the exit check too. Since the consent was signed at the counter, the shopkeeper’s privilege never enters into it. A member who waves the check off is not risking arrest, but a flagged account and eventually a card that stops working. A regular Walmart has no comparable hold at its exit, no contract, and no card to suspend.
Costco’s enforcement has gotten more aggressive. Over the last couple of years, the company moved the membership check to the entrance. Card scanners now read each card on the way in, not at the register. Members whose card has no photo get sent to the membership desk for one. The effort started at self checkout, where a borrowed card could get scanned without an employee ever seeing it. About 90 percent of members renew each year, and the fees are Costco’s main source of profit. In September 2024, Costco lifted the basic Gold Star membership from $60 to $65, its first raise since 2017. Membership fees ran to roughly $1.4 billion in one recent quarter, against $1.2 billion the year before. Cards, scanners, the attendant matching a Costco receipt to the cart on the way out, all of it runs on that one idea.
The newest version of the check barely involves paper at all. Costco has a Scan and Go pilot where members scan items into the app and pay inside it. What they hold up at the exit is a QR code on a phone. On the company’s first quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call, chief executive Ron Vachris put the pilot at 27 warehouses and said it had taken as much as 20 percent off the time at checkout. He told the analysts it was not “technology for technology’s sake,” but a way to build member loyalty. Even with the app, an attendant still checks at the door that the person leaving has paid as a member. Anyone who has stood at a Costco exit behind a loaded flatbed has watched the attendant work a highlighter down the whole receipt.
At a Walmart or a Best Buy, none of that structure exists. There is no membership contract and no scanner reading anyone in, only a store policy and an employee asking. The greeter has no signed agreement and no probable cause tied to the cart going by. Shoppers hand the slip over anyway, most not knowing they can decline. The law settled this decades ago. A shopper who knows the slip is optional still weighs the few seconds against the friction of refusing, and hands it over.