Care to engage with my question, or is a silly 20s-speak dismissal the best you can do?
I’ll pass, thanks.
They were doing something illegal, AND something that COULD potentially put other people in danger. I’d probably do the same thing, and maybe that action would be the kick in the butt that prompted them to get help at last.
This thread has proven to be quite timely.
Just yesterday, I was covering a cashier’s break. I happened to look up and see a woman (as in someone 30ish years old, not a kid) pick up a big handful of candy and put it in her pocket. I yelled, clear across the entire store, firmly, but in a ‘I’m not fucking around’ manner, “Take the candy out of your pocket”. She looked at me, as if to be sure I was directing that comment at her, reached into her pocket and put the candy back. She then said to her friend “he caught me doing it” to which her friend said “that’s not good”. *
Here’s what really seemed odd to me. If I had been in her shoes, I would have put the candy back, abandoned my groceries and left. Possibly making a very sheepish apology as I passed the cashier. But what did these two do? They finished shopping (with the store owner now following about 5 feet behind them the rest of the time) and checked out AND they both used credit cards, as if to say “in addition to an eye witness and cameras, here’s my name, in case you want to report me to the police later”.
It never ceases to amaze me at how many people will pull, or attempt to pull a scam, but use a credit card**. It’s like text messaging a threat to someone.
*When I thought about this later, the ‘he caught me doing it’/‘that’s not good’, suggests this is something she probably does everywhere, that she didn’t have to say what she was caught doing and the friend didn’t seem to really care.
**similarly, a few months back, I had to remove a customer from the store because he was screaming at my crew, calling them ‘fucking nazis’ because someone asked him to put a mask on. He was getting scary loud. After he left, I wrote down his license plate. But then he went and trashed our facebook page (including one comment where he mentioned he lived nearby), then he called the store to make sure we saw what he wrote.
Think about that. You act like that in a store, but then almost go out of your way to make sure I have your name, phone number and address.
She came back yesterday. Someone noticed her in the store. We watched on the cameras as she grabbed something off a shelf that the camera very clearly showed did not have any type of discount sticker on it. When she got to the register there was a bright orange $1.69 sticker on the same thing she got last time that should be five or six dollars.
She was called out, denied doing anything, they told her not only was it on camera, but we have a recording of her doing it a few weeks ago too. She left, pretending to be confused about the hostility directed towards her, but you could see just enough embarrassment that she knew she was busted and no amount of talking was going to convince anyone that they didn’t see what they saw…twice. She was escorted to the door and told she was no longer welcome (which means now she risks being arrested just by coming back).
Some takeaways:
1)Nothing in the store had a $1.69 sticker on it. That means she keeps peeling off the sticker and bringing it back in. I have to wonder if she has similar stickers from other stores and has to keep them organized so she grabs the right when for the store she’s at. I assume we’re not the only place she does this at.
2)As she left, she said ‘I’m never coming back here again’…yeah, that’s the preferable outcome.
3)She was even luckier than she realizes in that there was an off duty cop (detective?) in line behind her. I assume, had he wanted to or if things got out of hand, he could have jumped in and helped.
Too bad she always paid in cash, so I never got a chance to get her name. I’m always curious about what I can find online in these situations.
Somebody still uses stick on price tags?
Yes, my store does.
It’s a smaller store and upgrading the two registers with newer ones that have price scanners is somewhere in the neighborhood of $30k-$60k. You have to keep in mind that it’s more than just the registers. It would also require scales and credit card terminals for each register, a server to run the whole thing, bar code/shelf sticker printers as well as whatever other incidentals end up being required, like rebuilding our checkout area to accommodate the new equipment and training. Plus, on top of all that, most of these require software that either needs to be purchased or licensed. Then of course there’s all the additional features these come with that aren’t applicable to our store, but they’re part of the package, so we have to pay for them anyway (ie job tracking, inventory control etc).
We’d love to do it, we get quotes on having it done every few years, it’s just such an enormous expense, it’s hard to justify. Especially when I can pick up a couple new registers on Amazon for a few hundred dollars every 5 or 10 years.
Late to a thread again, but I’ll pitch in my first and last stories.
I had my first full time job at 13, mom and pop grocery. There was an older guy that had been hanging around quite a bit, both in the parking lot and in the store, Usually just bought a soda or a coffee. Very polite and his clothes were a little shabby so we all took him as a homeless guy and since it was winter we didn’t care if he hung out in the store occasionally.
One day I was in the back of the cooler stocking things and he didn’t know I was in there. I saw him stick two packs of bologna under his jacket from the door where we put things at half price because they were reaching their sell by date. My first thought was to tell the boss, but all I could think was here’s this 50 year old homeless guy that was hungry enough to steal a dollars worth of almost out of date food. So I followed him to the front of the store and told him I saw what he did and I wasn’t going to say anything but maybe he should move on. He did, and I never saw him again. I paid the dollar for what he stole and still felt bad for him, even tho I realized he was probably stealing food the whole time he was hanging out there.
The last time was a year ago, shortly before Christmas at Costco so it was packed full of crazy people buying last minute stuff. There was a line at the exit door and only one person doing the cart checks. I noticed the guy in front of me had about 4 or 5 items in his cart, but I also noticed his backpack had a rip in the bottom and I could see a corner of a box sticking out. Also the top wouldn’t zip all the way because box corners were sticking out on both sides.
I caught the attention of a lady at the service desk and pointed it out to her. She got a security guy that was nearby and he asked to see what was in the backpack. The guy reluctantly gave it up and he had three of the sound bars that you hook up to your tv, still in their boxes. Not sure why anyone needs 3 sound bars unless you are giving a sound bar to everyone in your family this year. He was quickly and quietly escorted away.
To sell it on Ebay.
Good thinking, I never even considered that. Kind of makes me wonder if ebay is taking over for selling stolen items out of the trunk of your car.
Only goes to show that I got a more criminal mind than you 
. But really, though I got no statistics, there are tons of stolen goods sold every day on Ebay. Before the net, you needed some shady hustler for to buy your stolen goods for a lousy price, now you only need some sucker on Ebay who doesn’t even know.
You don’t really need to do much thinking to realize that someone stealing 3 high priced electronic items is doing it to make money.
No, but I was talking specifically about selling on ebay. The image in my mind of someone who steals stuff to sell, wants to get rid of it quickly and for cash. Posting it in ebay, waiting for a seller, packaging it up and paying postage to ship it seems a lot more work than just selling them at your local watering hole or to your friends and neighbors.
If you had a couple hundred of sound bars, ebay sounds good because of the customer base. But three? Seems to be way easier to sell locally to me.
Someone who bought it locally, on the streets or wherever, would know that it was stolen and give you a bad price. Someone on Ebay wouldn’t know and probably give you good money. That’s worth the effort for packaging and postage.
Some of these other posts reminded me of yet another shoplifting story. This one was from when I was a young teenager, before I had a job or anything.
I had gone with some friends to see a movie across the street from the local big mall (early 90s). After the movie I went to the mall with one of my friends and we walked around, eventually going into a Waldenbooks. (Does anyone remember them?) We both were into tabletop role-playing games and were looking at the stuff they had. A new game had just came out that he liked so we went up to the counter, he paid for it, and we left. (I think I bought something too but I can’t remember what.)
We left the mall to hang out a bit before his mom came to pick us up, and he pulls out a novel; brand new. I asked him where the hell that came from, and he said he swiped it from Waldenbooks while he bought the game. I was stunned and angry, but before I could say anything he slapped his forehead and said he was so stupid, he should have bought the novel and stolen the game, because the novel was only about a third of the price and he would have saved money. I asked him if he was going to steal, why not just steal all of it? His reply, “If I didn’t buy something then stealing would be wrong.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to him in response to that. The logic was so twisted and confusing that I didn’t know what to do with it. And he’d said such an insane thing in such a reasonable and off-hand way that I was just confused, like maybe I just didn’t get it.
He stayed my friend but I never went shopping with him anywhere after that. I did not want to be an accomplice if he got caught. He turned out okay; he’s now an assistant director/producer with over 100 credits on IMDb, including shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Sesame Street. I assume he just grew up.
Some years back I stopped at a CVS near a college campus. As I was parking, a couple of teenage girls came sashaying–and I use that word advisedly, I’ve never seen anyone sashay quite like that–out the front door. One of them looked behind her, and then nonchalantly tucked her purse into a garbage can near the door.
A second later an angry older woman in CVS uniform barreled out the door, shouting at the two girls to stop. At first they planned to ignore her, but she brought her full-on I AM IN CHARGE voice to bear, and they stopped. The employee, no fool, plucked the purse out of the garbage can and continued shouting at the two girls.
I went inside and bought my thing and went to pay. The two girls were by that point inside, corralled by another store employee near entrance. One of them was crying, and the older woman was on the phone.
The sashay was gone.