A friend of mine used to work at a toy store. Her manager had this obnoxious habit of finding out what items were popular that Christmas season, and cleaning out the entire stock of popular or ‘collector’ type toys. He’d buy them with his store discount, and list them on ebay at inflated prices. If he couldn’t move any stock, he’d simply return it back to the store (after Christmas, usually). Apparently he made a decent chunk of change with this little side-job. I’m not familiar with toy store business ethics, but this seemed pretty jacked up to me. I told my friend he should report it, but my friend said that the manager’s higher-ups were in on the same thing, and he didn’t want to jeopardize his own job as a wage slave in the name of ethics.
While I have no background in retail or with similar situations and am most certainly not a lawyer, that seems pretty clearly unethical to me. The manager is exploiting his position as the manager of a toy store to make a profit on the side at the expense of the customers. No clue what to do about it though if the higher ups are also involved.
Call the local news channel, tell them you have a story for “Expose Person”. It’ll run like wildfire right before the holidays and every one of those involved will be fired before the day’s out.
My wife and her coworkers regularly order lunch as a group; they all take turns being in charge of collecting orders and determining how much each person owes. There’s one guy who will consistently find some small way to “scam” the rest of the office-- claim he put in more than he actually did, talk someone else into paying for him, even deliberately collect too much money and pocket the extra. But he usually nets less than a dollar from his grand scheme, so it’s more a source of amusement than anything else.
IANAL. While I don’t think what he’s doing is illegal, it is almost certainly against company policy, for obvious reasons, and would probably be deemed gross misconduct and a firing offence.
The electrical retailer I work for has a 24hr confidential telephone line for employees to call to report a theft by any member of staff and they’d certainly be interested in this as well. Depends how big the company is I suppose, but I’d be surprised if all the people above her manager were in on it too. Maybe she could report it without it becoming known who it was?
We had a co-worker at my old job who was cheap to the extreme. He wore his dead uncle’s suits for several years. Let me mention that he was probably 6’3 and 200 pounds and his uncle must have been around 5’5 and 300 pounds. Anyway, that is just a side note to illustrate his cheapness and give you a chuckle, it has nothing to do with his crookedness.
When we were throwing a wedding shower for one of the girls in the office everyone pitched in. It was a small close-knit office and the shower was quite nice. We didn’t force anyone to participate and we were all kind of secretly surprised and delighted when El Cheapo offered to bring the cake. He actually brought a very fancy cake from a very nice bakery and everyone in the office heaped praise upon him and asked him about it and commented on it and he seemed very pleased with himself. We later found out that he expensed the cake and his assistant picked it out and picked it up. He did nothing except accept the gratitude.
A similar story to samm’s.
I had a morning meeting with a salesman from another company. We had an inexpensive lunch afterwards and I paid the bill. Just before leaving I asked the bar manager for a receipt. He told me the other guy had collected it.
The amount involved was about £15.
Certainly unethical and probably a violation of company policy. If it is a publicly traded company I’m sure someone is intrested in knowing and doing something about it. I doubt all the mamagers are activlely involved or approving of that behavior
I resent that…
…but you still have all that gratitude! 
I should mention that my friend eventually quit and moved on to bigger and better things. While it would have been noble of her to report the misdeed, I think from her perspective she simply didn’t want to pick a fight that really didn’t affect her, particularly because she was really scraping by financially at the time.
Many years ago I used to work at Target. The Target store I worked in had such rampant employee theft I seriously wondered if I was the only one there who didn’t work there solely to steal merchendise. Employees would literally take appliances, move them in the backroom, then when their shift was over, walk right out the store with the items. Nobody did anything about it :eek: The guy I worked with in the electronics kiosk was a former car thief who quit his former job when a friend of his got shot. Apparently petty theft was a much safer crime.
I can tell you from experience, if you feel you have to report him, start looking for another job. Even if it is confedential, unless they fire that guy, which they probably won’t, he’ll find out and make your life miserable.
What I would do <wink> make a phony eBay account or two and bid. Ok he’ll get his fees back and you’ll get kicked off of eBay for violating his rules, and in the end nothing will change but it will annoy him.
It’s funny because it’s similar to the X-Boxes or whatever they were selling a week or so again. EVERYONE they interviewed (they had been standing in line, some for almost two days) said they would sell the games station on eBay and then take the profits and buy the X-Box (or whatever) when it comes down to normal price.
With the recent launch of the ps3 i know of a lot of preorders that went unfullfilled because video game store employees took them for themselves to make a killing on ebay.
So he uses his employee discount to do something that would probably work for anybody without a discount.
I don’t see the tragedy here.
Except that, as an employee they get an unfair advantage in that they get to the product first. Just like the PS3 incidents that DigitalC mentioned. It isn’t right if the paying customers don’t even get a chance to attempt to purchase a much sought after item.
It’s not a tragedy, and it’s probably not illegal (but it might be against company policy), but it is totally uncool to use your employee insider status to make things that you know customers will want unavailable to them. I work at a rental company; staff are more than welcome to use any equipment or machines that we want, but not at the expense of a paying customer. We’re not in the business of keeping staff in tools; we’re in the business of making money from rentals.
The store in the OP is in the business of making money from selling things people want, and when a manager prevents that, he is making a bad choice for the business. The fact that this behaviour goes up the corporate ladder doesn’t make it better; it just means that the business will suffer from all of their behaviour. I would go so far as to say that the other employees might suffer, too, in the form of layoffs, salary freezes, etc. when the business doesn’t make enough money.
Most companies have policies in place to ensure customers get first option over employees. Like for home depot employees could only buy items that had been on the sales for for three days without a price change.
As an employee of Sony I was given the opportunity to buy a PS3 before Christmas through internal channels so I could get one without having to camp out for it. However, the offer specified that we were forbidden from buying one and reselling it.
I am told this is SOP in the Goodwill/Salvation Army type thrift stores. You can bet if someone donates a flawless desginer dress, it will not end up on the sales racks.
A few years ago, there was a new person in my cube-area who bragged that she used her old employer’s company ID to scam free parking daily from a commercial parking facility in Newark. (A parking space there goes for about $25@day rental) We work in an ‘Ethics’ division of our employer, and are required to abide by extremely high ethical standards by our employment contract. I told her that what she was doing was a problem, and she needed to stop it now. She refused. I felt ethically bound by the specific provisions of our employment contract at that point to report it, and I did.
I was dragged into HR 2 weeks later and ordered to withdraw my complaint by 2 senior managers and a rep from HR. I was told that since neither the former employer nor the parking service she was stealing from were clients, that it was ‘none of my business’. :mad: