At Essos in Canada you get a 1.5 c/L discount if you use a "speedpass" connected to your credit card. (contactless payment system) I'd never fill somewhere where it cost me more to pay by credit card. Seriously, what decade are we living in?

I should start by saying we don't know if the Clerk was scanning an air miles like object for a procedural reason. Shell in Canada often requires strange things to be scanned to activate different promotions and deal with air miles. It's possible the clerk was being perfectly legitimate.

If the clerk was collecting the points for his own benefit he likely committed "theft under" contrary to the Criminal Code of Canada.

Aeroplan and Air Miles are taxable benefits by the CRA (at least if collected the course of employment). See Griffen et al. v The Queen [1995] (Tax Court of Canada). Yes - that means you're supposed to declare them.

The points do have value and they didn't belong to him. He took them.

The rough value of 40 air miles is $4.00. (Air Miles are generally worth about $0.10 - $0.15 each - I'm not getting into that explanation here).

It is not that likely the Crown (Canadian prosecutor) would be interested in going after a gas store clerk who probably didn't know he was stealing.

More importantly to the clerk, it is probably a breach of his terms of employment. We cannot know for sure but it's a good guess.

This happens a lot at companies with reward programs that don't have to be connected to a credit card (shopper's drug mart, sobey's, famous players, to name a few).

So there we are.

There is more to it than such a simplified statement.
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/bsnss/tp.../menu-eng.html
The clerk did not convert to cash and it almost certainly wasn't part of an arrangement with his employer, so it would not be taxable. Against the terms of his employment? Possibly. Ethically questionable? Probably.

I'm curious if people in this thread would think differently if the clerk had simply asked (and been given) permission from the customer first.

The clerk is making $9/hour, I'm pretty sure they don't have an extensive list of terms besides "show up on time, accept payments, and make change"

wow if the government comes after you in canada, they still have the queen of england as the plaintiff?

no wonder she's on the loonie (or is it the toonie?)

She's on all coins and the $20 bill.

If the state comes after you criminally the style of cause is always
"R v [your name]" The R stands for "Rex (King) or Regina (Queen)".

Technically, when you sue the government it is "[Your name] v Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Ontario" or something like that. Usually it just shows up as [you] v Ontario.

It's all a formality though and doesn't really mean much.

I've gone way off topic but thought it might be interesting to share.

That's common in Germany too, or at least it used to be...
Here you get between 1 and 10 "Shell Clubsmart" Points per Liter (depending on Membership and type of Petrol) that you can trade to Air Berlin Miles which are amongst the most valuable miles there are (if only for the fact that it's one of the few programs that lets you pay taxes with miles) and Accor Hotel Points.

Have seen a few occasions where employees scan their own cards - I would do it in a heartbeat. That way any gas station clerk will be able to afford two intercontinental holidays per year (if they even know what their points are worth and don't trade em for less valuable things) ^

Unfortunately I haven't seen it in a while - still hoping to find one of those clerks again to buy their miles

Actually, she's the Queen of Canada as well. And I find that tone rather offensive.

Yeah why not? I'd do it too.

imo.. not a cc charge fee.. but the operator does pay for the miles to redeem..

whether its the location operator, or corporate, there is a cost associated to divying out miles..

Consider yourself lucky.

I don't actually drive for most of the year now so I don't even have to worry about this anymore!

I've never seen it before neither.. until I hit California this past summer..

and we've visited Florida, Texas, Cancun and Hawaii this year..

Just floored me when the cashier said that I had to pay extra more than what the posted sign said the price was.. I pointed to the sign.. and it was a cash price (unadvertised), and it was already $4.79 per gallon..

I can't speak to the legality under Canadian law, but I'm certain it's against the employment conditions.

A friend who works at a grocery chain tells me that using his personal loyalty card for customers is forbidden. First, the whole point of the loyalty card is the data mining aspect, which is frustrated if all the transactions are funneled into one card. Second, they're running a promotion where you can get 10c/gallon discount on gasoline for every $100 spend. For someone working a register, it would be very easy to max this out at $1/gallon off.

They had at one time used a store card to avoid arguments with customers over getting discounted prices, but were told to stop (again, the data mining).

He's not allowed to benefit in any personal way from transactions he processes.