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As of this week, I've been moved from graveyard onto the evening shift at the Store. Today, I was the front end supervisor, a job which consists mainly of standing at a podium with a clipboard and a walkie-talkie and staring at people. You answer questions for customers, deal with any complaints or issues that come up, help cashiers with problems, assign cashiers to registers and make sure people get their breaks on time, call up help if the lines get backed up, and other stuff like that, but mainly it's a lot of standing and staring.
This really isn't a story about me, though. It's a story about our Loss Prevention department. Unlike a lot of big chains that rely on rent-a-cops who only observe and report, our company has an in-house security team. They're plainclothes and spend most of their time in an office at the front of the store, watching our many security cameras for any customer who's attempting to steal from us. We are encouraged to not know their names - for safety reasons when they're on duty, the LP all address each other by the exact same name, and we use that name as well when talking to or about them. (For the purposes of this post, let's call them "Mr. Wayne".) When shoplifters try to walk out the front door with their pilfered goods, Mr. Wayne move into position to apprehend them, and though they aren't armed with anything but handcuffs, that doesn't mean they're helpless. These are big guys - most of them are former police or military, almost all of them have some degree of wrestling or martial arts experience, and they are fully allowed, both by the company and state law, to lay hands on shoplifters if they attempt to flee. (I once personally witnessed an LP in his mid-60s apply a crossface to a shoplifter and hold him in that position for an extended period until the cops arrived.)
These days, in general, we're pretty lenient with shoplifters - as long as they cooperate after being caught, we assess them a civil penalty of $200 + the price of whatever they were trying to steal and send them on their way. We don't even trespass them anymore unless the value of their attempted theft exceeds the dividing line the state has established between "petty theft" and "third degree burglary". As long as they don't try to fight or deny their acts, the process can be completed in a matter of minutes and the police don't have to get involved.
But I digress. This story takes place shortly after 8 PM this evening. The sun is just starting to set, which means our big evening rush is in full swing. I'm at the podium, all of our available cashiers are in checkstands, and we still have long lines. As I'm checking to see when the next person comes back from break and whether we have any outer-department people on duty who can be called up to check, I hear Mr. Wayne's voice in my earpiece. He asks me to tell the self-checkout clerk to call his office. I stroll by and tell her to do so, then proceed back to the podium.
A minute or two later, I see the LPs emerge from their office in the sort of way that indicates that a bust is about to go down. A customer who's been using the self-checkout makes his way towards the exit with his stuff... and one guy comes at him from the front and two behind to confront him. He reaches in his pocket for something, and just like that he gets slammed against the soda machine, flipped around, handcuffed, and lead into the security office.
Long story short; our suspect had grabbed several Cup Noodles off the shelf, tore the barcodes off the packages, and then taped them over the barcodes of more expensive products. Mr. Wayne had observed him in the act on the cameras, and he brought his altered goods through the self-checkout presumably expecting that nobody would notice. When the SCO clerk called Wayne, he told her to pretend not to notice what he was doing (which she did flawlessly), so that when he headed for the exit they could bust him.
He didn't end up being so lucky as to get let go with the civil penalty. He got the cops called on him and he got to take a ride to county with a criminal charge on his head, and a 99-year trespass order prohibiting him from coming to any store in the company. Mr. Wayne was, however, gracious enough to let his brother, who'd come to the store with him but hadn't been involved in the attempted larceny, take home the Cup Noodles that he'd torn the barcodes off of and had in fact paid for.
Oh, and the sum value of the goods that our villain had been attempting to steal?
Fourteen dollars, mostly consisting of makeup.
There've been times when I've empathized with people trying to steal from us. Once, Thanksgiving week a few years ago, I sat in on a bust of a heroin-addicted woman who was living in a motel a few blocks away from us, who'd been trying to steal some deli sliced turkey, a pumpkin pie, and a can of whipped cream. That's just sad and tragic, and I hope that that bust lead to her getting the help she needed.
This guy, however? Screw this guy. This obviously wasn't the first time he'd pulled this con - he knew what he was doing, and he was confident that he could pull it off without anyone noticing. It takes a special kind of jerk to risk jail and lofty fines over a few dollars' worth of junk, and the fewer of them that are running free, the better.
This really isn't a story about me, though. It's a story about our Loss Prevention department. Unlike a lot of big chains that rely on rent-a-cops who only observe and report, our company has an in-house security team. They're plainclothes and spend most of their time in an office at the front of the store, watching our many security cameras for any customer who's attempting to steal from us. We are encouraged to not know their names - for safety reasons when they're on duty, the LP all address each other by the exact same name, and we use that name as well when talking to or about them. (For the purposes of this post, let's call them "Mr. Wayne".) When shoplifters try to walk out the front door with their pilfered goods, Mr. Wayne move into position to apprehend them, and though they aren't armed with anything but handcuffs, that doesn't mean they're helpless. These are big guys - most of them are former police or military, almost all of them have some degree of wrestling or martial arts experience, and they are fully allowed, both by the company and state law, to lay hands on shoplifters if they attempt to flee. (I once personally witnessed an LP in his mid-60s apply a crossface to a shoplifter and hold him in that position for an extended period until the cops arrived.)
These days, in general, we're pretty lenient with shoplifters - as long as they cooperate after being caught, we assess them a civil penalty of $200 + the price of whatever they were trying to steal and send them on their way. We don't even trespass them anymore unless the value of their attempted theft exceeds the dividing line the state has established between "petty theft" and "third degree burglary". As long as they don't try to fight or deny their acts, the process can be completed in a matter of minutes and the police don't have to get involved.
But I digress. This story takes place shortly after 8 PM this evening. The sun is just starting to set, which means our big evening rush is in full swing. I'm at the podium, all of our available cashiers are in checkstands, and we still have long lines. As I'm checking to see when the next person comes back from break and whether we have any outer-department people on duty who can be called up to check, I hear Mr. Wayne's voice in my earpiece. He asks me to tell the self-checkout clerk to call his office. I stroll by and tell her to do so, then proceed back to the podium.
A minute or two later, I see the LPs emerge from their office in the sort of way that indicates that a bust is about to go down. A customer who's been using the self-checkout makes his way towards the exit with his stuff... and one guy comes at him from the front and two behind to confront him. He reaches in his pocket for something, and just like that he gets slammed against the soda machine, flipped around, handcuffed, and lead into the security office.
Long story short; our suspect had grabbed several Cup Noodles off the shelf, tore the barcodes off the packages, and then taped them over the barcodes of more expensive products. Mr. Wayne had observed him in the act on the cameras, and he brought his altered goods through the self-checkout presumably expecting that nobody would notice. When the SCO clerk called Wayne, he told her to pretend not to notice what he was doing (which she did flawlessly), so that when he headed for the exit they could bust him.
He didn't end up being so lucky as to get let go with the civil penalty. He got the cops called on him and he got to take a ride to county with a criminal charge on his head, and a 99-year trespass order prohibiting him from coming to any store in the company. Mr. Wayne was, however, gracious enough to let his brother, who'd come to the store with him but hadn't been involved in the attempted larceny, take home the Cup Noodles that he'd torn the barcodes off of and had in fact paid for.
Oh, and the sum value of the goods that our villain had been attempting to steal?
Fourteen dollars, mostly consisting of makeup.
There've been times when I've empathized with people trying to steal from us. Once, Thanksgiving week a few years ago, I sat in on a bust of a heroin-addicted woman who was living in a motel a few blocks away from us, who'd been trying to steal some deli sliced turkey, a pumpkin pie, and a can of whipped cream. That's just sad and tragic, and I hope that that bust lead to her getting the help she needed.
This guy, however? Screw this guy. This obviously wasn't the first time he'd pulled this con - he knew what he was doing, and he was confident that he could pull it off without anyone noticing. It takes a special kind of jerk to risk jail and lofty fines over a few dollars' worth of junk, and the fewer of them that are running free, the better.
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