Found in a local grocery store in Espoo, Finland, this sig was positioned above a scale for weighing loose candy and translates roughly as:
Please don't be1 offended if we sometimes do checkup weighings on the checkout.
The color scheme fits the style of the shop, the font is playful and on the surface the message is polite (though not exceedingly polite as it uses the everyday "singular you" to address the viewer). And yet this almost apologetic sign is also a warning. Because it tells the viewer that the shop is aware that some people try to cheat and underweigh their candy, so the clerks will be doing random extra checks at the tills. And so this sign serves a different message to two groups of people:
- Potential candy thiefs are warned that they might get caught.
- Honest shopgoers are apologized in advanced for the implied mistrust towards them that a checkup weighing will induce.
It would be fun to see a case where there would be two signs in such a situation, each more explicitly targeting one of these two groups of people.
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Yet another case of me struggling to translate the Finnish nuance here. There is a sort of connotation in the first part of "We hope you don't mind" or "surely you won't be offended". ↩