Catpone Cerberus

Because of the rising prices In Finland, stealing has increased, which in turn has made it so that some shops put alarms on new things, like Cheese.

These alarms work in a way that when you scan the product, be it you yourself on a self-checkout, or the store staff on regular checkout, it should deactivate. Emphasis on Should.

It didn't for me this time, so the alarm gate went off and a minute of my life was wasted, not a big deal.

But it made me realize that those things aren't there to actually stop anyone, but rather to separate thieves from "regular" people. 
Because all they do is beep. When a person who is not trying to steal something, like myself in this case, hears it, we stop, and wait for a staff member. In my case said staff member didn't check any bags or anything, as I said "Probably the cheese in the backpack" and moved said pack through the gate, and he just checked that indeed there was cheese on the receipt.

But if I was a thief, and was somehow too stupid not to notice the very obvious alarm on the cheese, I wouldn't stop there right? Because while in my example, it would have been easy to get away stealing cheese, by paying for just one, since the staff member didn't deem necessary to check that I indeed did only have one cheese like I did (or didn't have anything else alarmed), but you can't know that in advance, you don't know if they want to check your entire bag just in case. So an actual thief would likely just take off and run, after all, the staff is unlikely to run after you, and even if there's a security guard, their actions are also limited, because in Finland there's lot of things only cops are allowed to do legally. 

I do also wonder if there was bit of profiling going on. I'm a white man that speaks Finnish (obviously, being a Finn and all), I stayed perfectly calm, and was wearing construction work clothes. So I wonder if there was a level of trust that wouldn't exist if I was one of the people that more stereotypically steal stuff.