Except that our store is right in the heart of the high-crime area. We have people–both kids and grownups–who routinely walk into our store and help themselves to merchandise. Every day. All the time. They open packages, they eat, they steal. They fill their pockets and drop stuff down the front of their pants and put it in their baby strollers. When we clean the store every night, we find the tags and packaging they’ve ripped off the dog collars, garden gloves, Choreboys, condoms, bags of marshmallows, fake nails, Advil, endless opened tubs of gummy worms and Slim Jims and DVDs. This isn’t a Nice Store where we can afford to wink at a little shoplifting; this is wholesale looting, every day, all day. And the only weapon we have is…
…nuttin’.
We got nuttin’.
We can’t stop them.
All we can do is occasionally have a cop haul one of them away in handcuffs, or maybe give a six-year-old a stern talking-to, and hope the deterrence trickles down just a bit.
So, calling the police on a six-year-old–who we know perfectly well will be back this summer with his friends, filling his pockets with our Kit-Kat bars–is a perfectly sensible reaction, made by people who literally have no other recourse. All we can do, otherwise, is just stand there and take it. Which none of us is inclined to do, thankyouverymuch.
[laughs helplessly]
You’ve never worked in retail sales, have you? You’ve never had to deal with the Infuriated Mom, whose son you have just mortally insulted by accusing of shoplifting?
Nuh-uh. I don’t get paid enough to go there, no way. Nope, my standard operating procedure is–and may I stress that this is officially sanctioned by Walgreens Corporate up in Deerfield–I see a problem, I send for Management, I let Management handle it. Corporate’s expectation is that their Management personnel will have the people skills to deal with infuriated customers, not their minimum wage checkout clerks. I mean, c’mon, be serious–you wouldn’t seriously expect a checkout clerk at Wal-Mart or Dollar Tree to go mano-a-mano with an angry customer, would you? No way. They send for the gals in the Red Vests, that’s what happens. That checkout girl isn’t being paid to deal with the public, she’s being paid to run the cash register.
And so with me. Confronting the woman myself would have been my absolutely last-on-the-list option, coming after “bashing the kid over the head with my stepstool” and “shrieking ‘stop thief!’ at the top of my lungs”.
Well, sorry to disagree, it certainly IS my concern to go all judgemental on her and say she’s a bad mother, as it’s a free country and I’m entitled to my opinion.
And there’s this, which you may have heard before: “The only thing that is required for evil to flourish is for good men to stand by and do nothing.” In my own small way, I’m helping to make the world a better place by pointing my finger to the place wherein dwells Evil, when I come across it. And a mother who fails to teach her son that stealing is wrong is Evil.
Ah. And what “old days” would those have been? The ones in which we all grew up together in a cozy, wee village in Mid-America, and everybody knew who everybody’s kid was? Or did your particular old days take place in a high-crime, drug-dealing area of a post-industrial economically-depressed Rust Belt city of 86,000? There’s no way I would have presumed to have informed this woman that her son was less than perfect, because I was a stranger to her, and round these hyar parts, strangers’ input into how one is raising one’s kids is not welcome.
Oh yes. Absolutely. My expectation was–and not only mine, but also the Assistant Manager’s, and the majority of the people posting in this thread–that she would, first of all, stop with her own business, and address herself to the fact that her son had just done something heinous, as in “wrong”, “bad”, “evil”, and “totally unacceptable to Society”.
And that, having stopped her own train of thought, she would then address herself to her offspring, and, you know, like, say something reprimand-like to him, along the lines of, oh, I dunno, “Bad puppy! No biscuit!”
Yanno? Like, TELL him he did something bad.
At the minimum.
Now, as for whether she merely reprimanded him, or made him apologize, or spanked him, or took him out into the parking lot and beat the crap outta him, it doesn’t matter. What she OWED me–and not just me, but Society in general–was, at the minimum, to reinforce for her son the information that he had just received from two other adults that yes, he had indeed just done something heinous.
And that she was Not Happy about it.
And that there would now be Consequences, of some kind, if only an expression of parental disappointment.
And he’d better not do it again.
Really, like I said, that would have been enough. I didn’t need to SEE him punished, I just needed HER to acknowledge that there was indeed a problem, and to indicate such to her son.
Okay. How many kids do you have, and how old are they, and how would you discipline them in this situation? Mine are 24, 21, and 18, and none of them has ever been in any kind of trouble, not even being caught stealing candy at the store.
If that had been my kid, what would have happened would have been:
Mom: shock, horror, disappointment, anger. “You’re way old enough to know better! That’s STEALING! That’s EVIL!” Followed by, “Apologize to the store manager!” followed by, “We are going straight home, whatever outing we have planned for the rest of the day is cancelled, and you will stay in your room for an hour with no toys. And when Daddy gets home from work, you will have to explain to him what you did today, because it’s not my job to tattle on you. You can man up and tell Daddy yourself.”
As a number of people have pointed out in the thread, it was precisely the memory of that humiliation that kept them from further pecadillos. You might think about that. That kid wasn’t caught doing something merely “embarrassing”, like peeing his pants or farting–he was caught doing something “wrong”, as in “bad”, as in “evil”, in “totally not acceptable to Society”. And yeah, if humiliation will prevent him from ever again doing something “wrong”, “bad”, “evil”, and “totally not acceptable to Society”–and many people in this thread feel that it does–then bring it on.
