verdantpanda

Since I must involve myself with the public in my job, I deal with a fair amount of retardation.  I wish I could think of a better word for it, because it’s not fair to compare these people to the mentally challenged in our society. Even the challenged have more sense than these idiots.

I don’t know which is more embarrassing, the sign or having actually stolen from WALMART.

Why does shoplifting exist? It’s profitable, of course. A good amount of shoplifters actually do it for a living. They steal high-priced items and either sell them (ebay, craigslist, or to people in person), or return them and sell the store credit they get. A good shoplifter can make several thousand a month doing this. Of course, that won’t compare at all to the jail time they’ll recieve once they get caught, but they figure they’re too smart to get caught.

So, back to my story. Lately, because of the Back to School Season, we’ve stayed open additional hours in the night when no normal person shops for clothing. Though I’ve pointed out that this just attracts sleazy people and shoplifters, Corporate seems to think there’s money in staying open that extra hour.

About a week ago, I got seriously fed up with this when I had to deal with three habitual shoplifters in under an hour. As in, I’ve personally had to interact with them in the past, so I’m clueless as to why they think I would not remember them. To sum up their appearances: you could scrape more attractive things off the bottom of your shoe.

Enter: Toothless Hag. It’s not really accurate to say she’s toothless, it’s more like her teeth are rotted to a point where they’re just brown nubs in her mouth. She likes to hide them with her lips, though, so it’s hard to spot at first. I was warned about her from another coworker, who described her as, “short, Hispanic, dyed hair, missing teeth”.  While the first three describe about 70% of the people who shop here,  missing teeth is a pretty significant difference. She’s wearing a very badly-fitting, black and white speckled top that accentuates her rolls nicely, and she’s made a point to tuck in this spandex shirt into her jeans to make the bulges more noticeable. Her greasy, red-streaked hair is pulled tightly back into a small bun on the back of her head.

No, it’s not the good kind of Muffin Top. No one wants to see this.

She comes up to my counter with a dress in hand. Usually, legitimate returns are brought in a bag of some sort, so this is strike one against her. “I need to return this, it was a gift and it’s too big.”  I notice that the tag is ripped off, which is not uncommon for gifts. However, the plastic piece that attaches the tag to the garment is still there. Yeah, people who give gifts usually take those off, too. Shoplifters don’t bother, though. Strike two.

She also brings up two pairs of Levi’s jeans that she would like to buy in replacement of the dress she’s returning. She wants to know how much these jeans will cost so she knows how much the store credit will cover. As she sets them on the counter, I notice that one of the tags falls off. I also notice her trying to distract me as she shoves it back in place. I then notice that the tag isn’t even for the same brand of jean. Strike three. This is definitely a shoplifter. It’s about this time that I notice that this is the same woman I was warned about…I get a glimpse of those gorgeous brown chompers.

Because any other picture would have made you vomit, I’ll just say she looked a little like these sponge monkeys, minus the white teeth part.

I take the tag, throw it away in front of her, and begin typing in the UPC, which is printed on the inside of the jeans. Surprise, surprise, the two jeans suddenly cost over $50 together. “Oh, wow, looks like I’ll have to return my purse too, then, so I can get the jeans. Let me go to the car to get it,” she says.

The purse may as well have been this one.

Yeah, sure. And I’ll just pretend you’re not going directly to the purse department to steal a purse, rip off the tags, and bring it to me. I take this time to alert my manager, who basically says we can’t do anything but document it at the moment. Of course. Only Loss Prevention people can confront and apprehend these people, and ours isn’t in the building at the moment. I’m instead instructed to smile and act like I haven’t a clue what’s going on. That part is what infuriates me the most. I hate that these people might even get the impression that they’re outsmarting me.

So she comes back, with a purse with no tags in her hands. Not just any purse though, one of the most expensive brands we carry! More than enough to cover the amount of the jeans. Wish I had friends like that to give me $150 dollar purses. She gets her credit and buys her jeans, with quite a bit to spare on the store credit. I get a minor headache from mentally rolling my eyes the entire time.

Enter: Fatty Winehouse. Next comes my least favorite thieves. This couple are very obviously “professional” shoplifters.  They both stink of cigarettes and poverty, and they always bring their ADHD son with them on their illegal activities. I always feel sorry for the future of this child, as having idiotic parents has already begun to take a toll on him. When he speaks, he’s barely intelligible, despite being about 7 years old.

We seriously need this stuff in bulk.

This time I get to be annoyed by the wife. She looks like an obese Amy Winehouse without the beehive hairdo. She smells like she’s spent her day rolling around in a thousand ash trays, she’s wearing a spandex spaghetti strap black shirt, which is low cut enough to fully display her Double D’s. On those lovely lady lumps, a wide array of tattoos are displayed. One is the name of her lazy-eyed husband, Joel. I don’t take the time to look at the rest, because there’s no point in torturing myself.

I wasn’t sure about my comparison until I saw this picture. She looks exactly like this. She’s even wearing a similar shirt. It’s eerie.

She plops a big, dirty box of 10 pieces of stainless steel cookware on my counter, and says it was a gift and she wants “one of them te-…tefron…telefron ones instead.” If I would just wait a minute while she goes to grab one of them teafon cookware off the shelf so she can just exchange it. “Nope, sorry, you’ll have to do a return without a receipt. You can use the store credit toward a Teflon set if you want,” I tell her between gasping to the side for fresh air.

I foolishly decide to open this box in front of me to check if it actually contained said 10 piece cookware. What greets me are ten of the nastiest, most used pieces of cookware I’ve seen. They’ve obviously been used for a long time. I reach in, against my better judgment, and grab a piece to move it aside to count them, and my fingers actually slip off it because of all the grease and slime on them. At that point, I just give up and process the return.

Maybe she was just testing the limits of “stainless” steel.

‘Why would you do that?’ You might ask. I’ve brought questionable returns like this to the attention of managers in the past, and just about every single time, I’ve been told to return it and send it back to the vendor (which will most likely not give us any kind of credit for the disgusting things). “Yes we can” taken to the extreme. Also, I knew that this expensive of a return would undoubtedly give her the dreaded CORPORATE REFUND. Meaning Corporate would look into the return and decide if it really was fraudulent or not. They would also have a record of all the previous returns that this woman has done without a receipt, and hopefully realize she’s a freakin’ thief.

I get all of her information into the computer (yes, even knowing her name, address and phone number isn’t enough for me to stop her at this point), and give her the Corporate Refund receipt. She decides, however, that she has not done enough annoyance to me yet. She begins to ask me about what she can do about a “lost store credit” that she had.

This shirt might come in handy if she were actually literate.

I’m completely on to this scam that they’re trying to get away with, with “lost store credits.” I’ve tried explaining this to management, too. Essentially, they steal, get store credit, sell store credit to some moron, report that the card is lost and bring in the receipt where they got it in the first place, then ask us to void the old card and give them a new card, which they sell, say is lost, void, and the cycle repeats.  They continually make money from the selling of the cards, but the people who buy them end up with a useless card.

Since I’ve figured this much out, I tell her she’s out of luck and that the card should be treated like money and if they’re lost, it is not our liability to replace them. It says as much on the back of the card, but I don’t expect her to be able to read, so I repeat it to her. Apparently someone has done it for her before, so my answer isn’t what she wants to hear. She asks me the same question in five different ways before getting the point that I’m not going to budge, and then she finally leaves.

Imagine this, but…black.

Enter: Dirt Man. The next guy that comes in a minute later, I’ve seen at least twice before. He’s returning the exact same thing he did both times before, too. The only way to describe him is Dirt. He’s a very tall, 60ish-year-old man, covered in dirt. He’s wearing acid washed jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His fingernails are so encrusted with dirt, that it looks like someone took a permanent marker and drew along the outside of the entire nail. I don’t want to know how many years of non-bathing results in that look.

The real crime is the one against fashion, IMHO.

Anyway, he’s returning an expensive knife. A small, easy to steal, expensive knife. One that has all the sensor stickers ripped off of it. And like I said, this is the third time I’ve seen him do it. The first time he said it was a gift for his recent wedding, and he didn’t need it (this guy’s in his 60s and hardly looks like he just got married), this time he says his (fictional) wife bought it and he was mad with her for buying such an expensive knife.  I resist the urge to comment on his frequent bad luck with these knives, and do the return.

Oh knife, why do you plague this man so?

He’s shocked, shocked I say, that his $150 knife is only returning for $49.99.  I inform him of something he should already know…you don’t get the full price of the item when returning it without a receipt. You get the lowest selling price. He shrugs it off, and walks away with his store credit, because hey, it was free for him anyway. He can just steal more next time to make up for it. Normal people, if they’d paid three times more for an item and got back less, they’d be, you know, upset. Well, at least I can thank that nonchalance for giving me a break in that area.

So there you have it, that was just one eventful night in my adventures in retail. I commend you if you really did read all that. Geez, that really is like a novel after looking through it all again.