Hey grendel, how about this…let’s just both cut out the bullshit insults and name calling and whatever. We both got a little too carried away, and in reviewing a lot of my posts, I acknowledge there are times that I went off when there wasn’t a need. For these incidents, I apologize to all.
Hey Stoid. Why are you worried if they DO think you are a thief? Are you? Last I heard, honest people weren’t worried about legitimate business processes. If you have worries, then why not share them with all of us. And I don’t mean the liberal “why are they picking on meeeeeeee” type ones either.
Do you think that everyone that logs into your porno site is a legitimate user? OR, do you think that there may be a possibility, no matter how small, that that user may be a hacker, that you take precautions in some form or other?
Get real Stoid. Your business is no more important than anyone elses.
You got it, Monster. For the record, I was not trying to be snarky when I appologized for seeming to insult your work. I do think there is still an issue here, and hope you don’t think I’m an asshole.
If “legitimate business practices” lead to discrimination, I don’t give a shit how legal they are, they are wrong. If “legitimate business practices” are slowly leading our society down the drain, I’m gonna bitch.
By the way, you act as if you’ve never heard a conservative whine.
I don’t know where you people shop with the credit cards, but I give mine to a fellow I work with (I’m female) all the time because we take turns buying food occasionally and I never have cash. He signs my name “Jin Wicked” even though that’s not what’s on the card, so basically it’s a man, using a female’s card and signing a different female name. My bank hasn’t noticed or complained about it so far, and as far as I know, no one has hassled him over it.
My signature on the card is fairly, neat, but usually when I buy anything it’s barely more than a squiggly line. And of all the places I’ve shopped, I’ve only seen Target check receipts once, and I just flashed the receipt at the guy and smiled and he let me out the door without a problem.
Maybe you’d have better luck not getting searched if you wore a push-up bra, guys. 
Us lucky moderates get to be pissed at the conservative and liberal arguments.
And grendel, I completely agree with you that any practices that lead to discrimination are wrong. If there wasn’t the chance of bias on the part of LP employees, I would not object to random searches. However, living in the real world, everyone is capable of bias. Not saying they are biased, just capable. That’s why we implement checks (or attempt to) on everyone.
Sorry if it inconveniences you, but I really don’t think this issue is dehumanizing/demeaning/insulting/etc. Very minor inconvenience, yes, but none of those.
I’m not * worried *, I’m ** insulted. ** Are you unclear on the difference between “worry” and “insult”?
See, this is what I do not understand. At Old Navy, it was drilled into our heads that an average of 51 items a day were stolen. I still remember it three years later. They made a HUGE fucking deal about it. But secruity measures? A FEW cameras with footage that ended up playing in the manager’s office. Was the manager ever in the office? Not usually.
Now, we were “trained” to “apprehend” theives. I use the quotations because our training was one 10-minute video and we were not allowed to ever confront thieves. If we saw someone steal, we had to get the manager. The manager had to see the person steal before he/she could do anything. I saw at least one or two thieves a day, more on the weekends, and nothing ever happened to them. The first five or six times I reported seeing someone steal, I was treated rudely by my manager, as if I were making shit up. It pissed me off and I stopped looking for thieves. In fact, after I moved up the chain and was a senior salesperson, I had to conduct employee surveys, and most of them admitted not looking for thieves because nothing was ever done about it (in two years, I will vow that no thieves were every caught at my store), apparently no one had the power or the desire to stop them, and employees were treated poorly when they tried to “apprehend” a thief. So we all stopped caring. I made it clear after the survey that they were not deterring thieves at all, but that their treatment of employees was actually preventing a decrease in shoplifting. Did anyone care? Nope. But they still searched out purses.
Yet every night before I left, my purse was searched. In two years, they never once found anything suspicious in anyone’s bag. About three months after I stopped working there, I stopped by, bought a sweater with my mom, and the manager tried to stop me to search my bag. I just ignored her and kept walking.
Why did I keep working there? Because I was 16, I liked the clothes, I made $6 an hour (when min. wage was $5), I had a decent discount, and I had a lot of friends there.
How exactly was I being a “fuckstick”?
By Bringing real life consequences into a stupid internet pissing match.
If Monster treats customers like he treated me that would be one thing, but to post on a message board to blow off steam is nothing to get yr panties in a twist over. Threatening someones livelihood is a fucked up thing to do for any reason.
Nobody asked you to solve their problem, just to cooperate with their answer. If you have a better method that works, and is cost effective, I’m sure every one of these stores would drop the door checks in a heartbeat. Hell invent a better way you could make a few million selling it to these stores.
There’s one point I’d like to make before we have a group hug and abandon the thread to drift to the oblivion of page 2, however:
Courtesy.
Plain, everyday, old-fashioned courtesy.
If I trade at a store, I expect that my willingness to spend my hard-earned money for merchandise they’ve chosen to carry at prices they’ve chosen to place on it will be appreciated by treating me like one of the reasons their store is open and they have jobs. And I expect to reciprocate: because you’re wearing a red vest and nametag does not make you dirt beneath my feet but a person who is trying to make a living in retail, probably at a lower salary than mine, and probably not exuberant about the joys of going to work again today.
My merchant may be experiencing shoplifting and such. I ought to be sympathetic to that.
But I am not, by walking through the door, liable to be deemed a possible shoplifter.
What I am a possible one of, is a customer.
If I choose to spend my money there.
If I’m getting the suspicious stare from half-a-dozen clerks…
If the clerk can’t be bothered to stop chatting on the phone or with the other clerk to ring me up…
If the store considers me enough of a master at prestidigitation to stash thousands of dollars of pilfered merchandise into my bag in the seventeen feet of open space between checkout counter and door…
Then that “possible customer” becomes “non-customer.”
If I’ve purchased merchandise, realized Barb is still shopping, gone back in the store to see what she’s up to, and am politely asked for my receipt at the door, my courteous response is “Sure.” And, if it’s somebody I know, to ask if they’re having any luck at combatting the light-fingered element.
Draw all the lines between.
Monster, if you treat me as though I’m making the decision between paying money that will eventually go towards your salary, and might have a question or two about the product I think I need, and not as a likely thief, you’ll get my business. If you (generically, not you personally) flip that around, and figure you’re being paid for putting in eight hours there, so customers can just find what they want, and presume that every non-employee is looking for a chance to shoplift, then you won’t.
And the $495.00 item I just purchased, showed you the receipt for?
It’s going back. For an immediate refund. And the address of corporate headquaters, while I’m at it.
Not because you needed to check to prevent shoplifting. Because you were rude in the way you told me you need to check.
Catch the difference?
Thank you.
These problems should be addressed with store management, niether are acceptable behavior at any store.
More of the unpaid items they find are cashier mistakes or cashiers “missing an item” for a friend. If that cashier develops a history they will be disciplined.
Good attitude and proper procedure by the store, the ideal situation
In my experience
Employees generally steal more per capita than the customers. They know the store, the systems, the people involved, the break schedule, etc. Its a hundred times easier for an employee to get away with many types of theft just because their job gives them access. I as an inventory person have access to modify my company’s inventory. If I say something was lost or damaged it is not generally questioned. Me and a co-worker buddy who works in shipping could easily rip off our company for thousands of dollars at a shot AND have a paper trail that shows the item as damaged out or as a shipment shortage.
If an employee is looking at you suspiciously the store needs to watch that employee. He is either horribly misguided or possibly a theif himself looking to place himself beyond suspicion with his excellent catch record.
I asked my manager today about whether or not shoplifting raises prices. He said no.
Basically, without getting into specific details, my company (IKEA) allows for a certain amount of lost money. That money is lost in many places: goods that arrive at the store damaged, products that are broken on the floor (this happens a lot in my department, Pictures & Frames) or products that are opened and have to be written off, products that are damaged while stored in the warehouse, and products that are stolen. They also factor in expenses for damage to the building (last year, someone rammed his forklift into a water pipe and caused $20,000 worth of damage). Now, I write off an average of 30 items a day - broken frames usually, and also opened packages, or sometimes things that have been discontinued. The most expensive items in my department is a $70 clock and some Norrsund pre-framed prints, but if you add it up daily, every department writes off a ton of money. But that comes out of the same loss set up for stolen material.
At the end of the year, the money left over is divided equally among employees. Last year, the year of the broken water pipe, we didn’t get anything. We should get more this year. It seems the biggest theft problem for IKEA is not in the stores but through credit card orders from the catalogue.
So, in short, no, shoplifting does not affect IKEA’s prices. I would think that most large-scale stores (like the ones mentioned here) would account for a certain money loss that includes theft.
Oh, and because I’m sure someone will mention it if I don’t, we sell many small products that can easily be stolen. But I’ve heard of people trying to steal beds and dressers too.
Touching on a couple of topics raised in this thread …
A couple of weeks ago, I was returning from Portland, Oregon. Went to the airport, got my boarding pass, went through the metal detector. All according to plan, nothing strange happening. Out of the blue, a polite security guard with one of the portable wand metal detectors asks me to step aside. I do so, wondering what’s wrong. He proceeds to search me up one side and down the other, patting me down, and generally getting further than I did on my first 37 dates. I was embarrassed and nervous at first, then it got kinda funny. I had a hoot back at the office, telling people I was suspected of being a terrorist.
I do a lot of shopping at Wal-Mart, where the practice of checking receipts against bags happens sometimes. Some weeks they don’t check, other weeks they check everyone. Twice the checker has noticed that some items on the receipt aren’t in my bags, and I’ve discovered that the cashier forgot to put one bag in my buggy. So in those instances, it saved me money and an additional trip to the store. Another time, the alarm went off as I tried to walk out of the store, and I had to go back to a cashier to have them de-magnetize an item that I’d purchased.
Overall, I don’t have a problem with such bag checks. If they’re profiling customers and only checking certain people, that’s wrong. If they’re checking everyone, I can live with that.
I believe this is technically correct but misleading. What you state is true, in that any individual theft does not increase the store’s prices. This, because they have already written off some amount or other for anticipated thefts, as you say. But this does not imply that the overall impact of thefts does not increase the prices. Obviously, if the store anticipated significantly fewer thefts, they would set aside a lot less money to account for it.
If a business allows a certain amount to be written off due to theft loss, it will affect prices. The business doesn’t eat the write-off but will adjust their prices to meet their profit margin. Again, it is the consumer who pays for theft, not the business.
In the case of our family business a certain amount of profit must be met (although I am not directly involved, I do know what it entails). In order to meet the profit requirement different things have to be considered. These include but aren’t limited to a juggling act of:
Cost of supplies and product.
Employee salaries and outside training.
Advertisement.
Insurance.
Building lease and utilities.
Upkeep of premises.
Loss due to damage, overstock, and theft.
I can assure you that a drastic change in any of these areas that changes the required profit margin will affect the cost of the product. An increase of theft loss that goes beyond the amount allowed for write-off will result in a need for increased prices to cover the loss.
Actually, yes I am proud. My friend had run away from abusive situation. She tried to support herself with a legitimate job
but because she was 15 and without a fixed address, no go. I never took any of her catch because I was being fed and
clothed by my parents.
Now since you are apparantly too simpleminded to know the difference between “morality” and “legality”, you might have enjoyed
a mastubatory fantasy about how “moral” (and in your mind “better”) you are because you would have not sullied yourself by
being associated with crime. I, on the other hand, could not have watched her starve/freeze or move into other ways to support
herself that were much more dangerous and/or degrading without feeling that I was being amoral.
And while I think most people understood the meaning of my post, I’ll spell it out for those who prefer preprogramed reactions
to thought (I apologize if I scared you with the big mean scary “t” word).
It’s a prevalant myth in our society that people who look different from the pretend “norm” whether it be because of race,
dress, hair style, tatts, piercing, etc., are more likely to be criminals. Store security usually buys into this myth, and
in doing so, rather than being generally vigilant, they are doing their employers a disservice. I thought an example of such
would be heartening to those who have suffered inappropriate attention from store security because of the way they look.
But after reading my restating, I think I’m still using concepts that are too complex for you to grasp, Spiritus, so maybe
it will help you if I just respond using words you can understand - Fuck you, you fucking poopiehead.
I don’t want to “continue the pissing match” but I do want to clear something up. I never made any threats, real or imagined, to Monster’s IRL job. All I said was that if I were to post a similiar thread about my company, I would expect to get fired. Not sure how you and Anthracite thought otherwise. Sorry, especially if Montster thought I was threatening him.