Remember, if you see someone stealing food, no you didn't.

Much more understandable though. Even without anything to declare, the "please come here" can mean that you'll lose the next 20 minutes looking at your dirty underwear with a stranger, while you are probably already kinda stressed from the travel.

Legend says he's still stuck in that store to this day

Man I've done this before but maybe spent 15 minutes and that felt like an hour. A whole hour must have felt like a whole day.

My problem is that I AM buying something but I stand there analyzing all the options just walk out with 1 thing. As I'm checking out I start to wonder if anybody realized that I've just spent 15 minutes standing at one shelf to end up buying 1 bottle of infant cough syrup.

I regularly put stuff in my pockets while im browsing. Sometimes I even pay for it.

I accidentally put a product in my purse at Walgreens to get my phone out, and within 5 seconds an overhead page went off saying “code zero, code zero”. I quickly grabbed the product back out and half yelled “omg I’m sorry!” before going to the register to pay for it and also mumbling to the cashier who probably gave no fucks that I was sorry, it was very much an accident.

It might look like you stole something. And the more you think that as you walk out the door, the more you start to look like you stole something.

My wife always feels guilty about leaving a small shop without buying anything and will say stuff like "We'll be back!". I have to remind her we're under no obligation to buy anything and you shouldn't feel guilty about it.

I won't let myself leave a local book store without buying anything, hence I only visit when I'm out of reading material.

Probably plays back into when I helped watch my father's and mother's trade show tables respectively. My father would sell sports cards back in the 90s and he was lucky to have one paying customer all day at an event we had spent all morning setting up for.

My mother used to paint whimsical designs on chunks of wood (toll painting) and set up a table of her painted wood art various church sales. I saw the hours my mom had spent tracing and painting those dumb little seasonal characters, only to see these rich bitches saunter by her table, turn her work over, say "That's cute!", And walk on.

To this day I will not walk into an antique store or junk shop or book store without at least ten bucks to burn. It feels gross to take up a shopkeeps time and space without buying something.

It's not just legal—it's not even impolite.

It's fine since you brought them from home

Raised catholic here too, maybe catholic guilt but personally I think it's more so the pervading idea that people implicitly aren't allowed to exist in a space outside the home or offices unless they spend money and by walking out without buying anything bypasses the normal routine of going to a store to get something and going through some kind of checkout process.