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Saturday, September 30, 2006

Five-Finger Discounts

In all my one year working in retail, I have never witnessed someone shoplift before. I have tailed suspicious people, helped to call in suspicious people, found things that have been stored away for stealing later, but never have I witnessed someone in the act... until tonight.
This evening, at E.B. I was working peacefully and folding shirts, as was my business. We had two customers in the store, both "Koreans", or so they said, and they were rather nice. They didn't appear to speak much English and asked the price on everything. Now, being the nice, non-racist associate that I am, I rang the first woman up. Nothing fishy, right? Well, these ladies were headed toward the door, and I'm in the middle of the store. When they walked past me, I figured, Well, they're probably going to look around some more, because the second lady had a sweater in her hand still. The next time I turned around, the ladies were opening the doors and the second woman had her hand in her relatively large purse, and the sweater was nowhere in sight.
I knew I sould have stopped them, but I hadn't actually seen the woman put the sweater in her purse so if I had stopped her, I couldn't say anything because I couldn't prove that she took anything. I told my manager really fast and she had me get the liscense number so we could report her to mall security. I really hate shoplifters... We get trained in the initiation videos on how to deal with them and keep them from stealing, but you never think that it's going to happen to you. And then it does, and you feel like crap.