Comment by mattlondon
3 days ago
Often happens in the UK for things like bags of screws or bathroom/plumbing fittings.
The charitable view is someone is opening the packaging to e.g. make sure that the thread is the right size (in the UK especially we suffer from annoying mixture of old legacy imperial measurement era pipes/threads/etc as well as metric).
The unchartiable view is they are opening the packet and stealing the bit they need/lost/broke 45 minutes earlier and need to finish the job.
This could be a by-product of bad merchandising too.
The local Home Depot sells some types of screws only in pre-packed bags.
The Ace Hardware a block over (a franchise of independently owned shops) sells the same screws from cabinets with several hundred types of loose parts, and you can select as many as you need and bag yourself. You can even put multiple types and prices of items in one bag
So if you need one, HD makes you buy four. If you need sixteen, HD makes you buy a bunch of extra plastic waste. That might create an unexpected nudge towards just ripping the bag and pocketing the rest.