Downvoted and flagged not for your opinion, but for your apparent lack of common decency. Go back to lurking and keep your casual discrimination to yourself.
There is an awful lot of useless chatter going on here so to straighten out some facts:
- the 0 is not padding
- this will be harder to pull off with alcohol, electrical items or anything else that requires a checkout assistant to approve as they will likely spot the scam
- a list of barcodes for items can be found online, and these stickers can be printed off at home and then applied in store under the cover of shelves
- the reduced item barcodes are only stored until around 3am the next day, meaning it is easy to pull off this scam without getting caught
So to go over the numbers again...
971 - means the item is discounted
5000221503354 - is the original barcode for the item (if you pass a 14 digit number to the checkout this causes a buffer overflow)
6 - this is the reason for why the item is discounted (damaged, out of date, end of line, etc)
000070 - the price you want to pay in pence (000070 = 7p, 000170 = 17p, 001170 = £1.17, etc)
