Love The Dickens Out of Them – An Unfortunate Case of Employee Theft

If you have ever had to sit through loss prevention seminars or loss prevention workshop on employee theft, you would probably hear about stealing merchandise or cash. You may not have been taught about other types of employee caused losses.

I had the most charming, elderly grandmother working in one of my clothing stores. There were two things she loved above all sewing, and her grandchildren.

To a lesser degree, she loved her job in the children’s department too, and would frequently buy little items of clothing and trinkets for her grandkids. Most of the items came from the clearance racks, as she did not have a lot of disposable income.

Several months after she was with us, I started to notice that there were major discounts on her employee purchases. These were not the normal percentage off discounts for clearance items. These were major discounts being taken on brand new items.

I started snooping around, and one day, I stumbled across two brand new Halloween costumes out of place in a stockroom. As I picked the costumes up, the grandmother in question hurried to tell me what a shame it was that the zippers were broken on them. She had set them aside to buy them later, figuring she could just sew them up and fix them. She even showed me where there was a little rip in the seams of the zippers.

It was no coincidence that these costumes just happened to be in her grandchildren’s sizes. It was also no coincidence they were the only two costumes with zipper issues we had all season.

Did I mention our store policy was to take 40% off for a broken zipper?

Was grandmother shoplifting? No! My supervisor had to walk me through proper handling of that case. Sad as it was, granny was let go for employee theft via discount abuse and vandalism. Loss prevention training books alone can’t show you how to handle a case like this. This is a situation that having a mentor to talk you through makes all the difference.

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