i think thats the real shame in all of this…is that he will now have a bad reference…as will i
because before this…i surely would have received a good one if i had left the company under my own terms…i had a good relationship with my boss and supervisors(i was actually the only other employee who lived in the same town as my boss…wed chat about the local spots or chatter on occasion)…never written up or suspended…always got good reviews…always did what was asked of me…he was just as unaware of what was about to happen as i was when i was called to see him…it came from up above…
im still thumbing through my HR packet i received when i started…there is nothing in there about our discount…
i just think its a shame that a huge wholesaler supplier would actually feel like im a threat to competition…when in fact i did not buy anything with my discount…i think a more reasonable solution would be to suspend my ability to use the discount…to monitor my future purchases…or even do away with my ability to use it…rather than just terminate me
like i said…i feel more like they are convinced i was or was going to “steal to order”…and since they had nothing in the theft department…they went with what they could justify
ya i totally hear you on that…it definitley looks bad…and i was never underestimating that aspect…because i have strongly felt thats why they were terminating me…
and the sad part is i have never stolen…which makes the feeling even worse for me…its a huge warehouse…im talking enormous…and there is missing product all of the time…before i started…before i started placing ads…and there will be after im gone
they take a hardline stance…but i guess i kind of figured they would realize “only a retard would be actually stealing shit and then trying to sell locally”…“only a retard would ask what products someone might be interested in and then try to go steal them with cameras around and a boss that watches us exit the building about 90 percent of the time”
one of the items listed as missing was a $1400 chart plotter…not sure how many of you are aware of what size a box like that is…but i said in the meeting “youve got to be kidding me…i mean how you would get out of here with something like that?..do you guys think i just shoved that thing down the front of my pants”…
i figured the fact that i never actually purchased anything might help me in the matter of abusing my discount…when in fact it probably just fueled them even more into believing i was stealing…and when they accused me of stealing i refuted the claim and told them what the ad was for…was a no win situation from the start i guess
**dunn/ledo **: If you’re going to come back, please learn how to punctuate. You aren’t doing yourself any favours here by eliminating capital letters and including ellipses after every damned sentence.
Sure, they figure only a real dumbass would do those things. You know what else they figure? Only a real dumbass would try to resell/undercut his employer, put it in writing on a public forum like CL, and use an email that can easily be traced back to him to do it. You freely admit to being stupid enough to do that, so why should they believe you’re not stupid enough to do those other things? Are you seriously arguing that they should just take your word for it that you’re exactly this dumb and unethical, but not a particle more?
Because I wouldn’t take somebody’s word on that, and I suspect if the boot was on the other foot you wouldn’t either. And if you were running a business, you wouldn’t keep someone who was self-admittedly stupid and shady when you could replace him with someone who was neither in a snap.
My guess is that they noticed that things are missing from the stock room. Perhaps one of your ex-coworkers is stealing. Craigslist is the first place I would look if things were stolen from me or my company.
I find it strange that you, OP, admit it would have been wrong for you to do what you were intending to do, but you think your employer should have been just fine with you intending to do it.
I only made it through three of the OP’s posts before they started giving me a headache and I had to stop reading them.
If it hasn’t been mentioned, the problem was intent, whether you carried it out ultimately or not doesn’t matter. There was clearly intent either to steal or to take advantage of undercut pricing, and make a profit using your employer’s goods. Buh-bye.
So you attempted to steal, weren’t able to pull it off even though it was fairly easy, and have no sense of remorse or guilt. You thought you were an employee in good standing but you sound like you were one blind eye away from being a thief.
You got exactly what you deserved, and don’t seem to have learned from your experience.
I’ve worked both retail and for a very distribution company, and the employee discount was always solely for personal use or gifts. The company didn’t really care if you bought a book for a family member, but to be dumb enough to try and set up your own online business using your discount and advertise where the bosses could see would definitely be basis for immediate termination.
Too bad you did something so dumb when the jobs market is in the toilet.
You’ve shown that you WOULD do this, though, if you had the opportunity. Why the hell would they want to keep you around, if you WANT to steal from them? And yes, buying stuff at a discount and then selling to the company’s potential customers is stealing, no matter how you try to rationalize it.
I’ve worked with thieves. Generally they don’t confine their thefts to one category, if they think they can get away with it they’ll steal from anyone. It’s very bad for company morale when someone is stealing money from people’s purses, for instance (in one place, we had to leave our purses in the break room, and someone was stealing a few bucks from everybody, and we couldn’t pin it down until one person left).
As I read th OP at the start I thought there goes his job. Then you mentioned the law officer, I thought now it escalates. But they were not able to prove anything so you got off the second hook but not the first.
You must be young. When I worked in retail and recieved a employee I knew with out question I would go walking if I used it to make money off the company. That is not hard to figure out.
And before you go on with the I did not do anything yet, if I was your employeer I would assume that you will.
As I understand it the OP was going to buy a load of stagnant stock using his (her?) staff discount, then sell the items via CL at a later date, but he decided to test the water first [by placing ads] to see if this was a viable option…?
I have no idea what the law where you live thinks of this, I imagine your employer wouldn’t be too amused about it, and they might decide to fire you over it.
shrugs
This reminds me, in a way, of a woman I knew over 20 years ago. She got married, invited over 100 people to the wedding. In those days (and according to local custom) if you were invited to a wedding you sent a present to the bride and groom regardless of whether you went to the wedding or not. A year later she placed ads in the paper and shop windows and sold off 40some wedding presents and made a bucketful of money on them. She also somehow had found out about a warehouse that sold (at huge discounts) end of line stock, unsold stock from shops that had gone bust, and stock from shops that had suffered floor or fire damage. She would go there buy maybe 20 things for £50, then sell them on and make a packet.
Come to think she was fired from her job (in an accountant’s office) for poaching clients for her own accountancy firm that she was secretly setting up.
He was attempting to steal customers, and the profits of the merchandise. He might not have stolen the merchandise, but he was planning on stealing the profits of the sales.
If an item cost the company $50, and the company priced it at $100, but the employee could buy the item for $66, then the OP was planning to steal $33 of profit from the company. I am, of course, pulling prices out of my ass…but in the retail stores where I worked, if a discount was given at all, the discount was between 15 and 50 percent, depending on the company and the employee level.
Count me as another who is amazed that it isn’t blindingly obvious that staff discounts are limited, and the penalties for abuse are stringent.
The only thing that surprises me about this tale is how they discovered the activity on Craigslist - but that might be more to do with my ignorance on everything about Craigslist. Is it easy to discern the real-life identity of a person on it? Is it so ubiquitous that it’s likely you will bump into people you know on there without looking too hard?
Otherwise, it’s likely that either the OP confided in a colleague, and got ratted out, or that the company was already investigating the loss of stock and keeping an eye on eBay and Craigslist to see if any of the missing items would appear there.
I imagine they still suspect the OP of stealing the stock, but decided to justify their decision to terminate with the lesser (although still serious) issue of abuse of discount/selling in competition.
Initial contact with a CL seller is via email, but typically the seller than gives a phone contact. Once you have a phone number, you can determine whose number it is.
And a wholesaler who is experiencing loss is likely to check venues like CL for his product.
This, most likely. Same way they would routinely look for fenced items in all the local pawn shops.
Somebody posting above speculated that this OP is young. Maybe so. I think he sounds very naive about several things: First, about the ethics of all this employee discount stuff. Second, about how expendable most employees are to their employers, especially these days. (third, for whatever we might glean from it…his all…lower…case writing…style) I wonder if this was the OP’s first “real” job?
No, he was not legally stealing from the company. That’s why he didn’t go to jail.
He was abusing the employee discount privilege to undercut his employer. While not illegal, It’s clearly fucking frowned upon.
And the OP’s excuse is bullshit. The fact that you “never actually purchased anything” is irrelevant. The ad clearly shows intent. And the company is under no legal obligation to keep you as an employee if you are showing intent to defraud it, even if your particular case isn’t specifically spelled out in the employee handbook.