“My baby!” the woman screamed, as my boss Ivan and the thief smacked against the floor not far from her baby’s stroller. Ivan hefted the thief to his feet, while Amy, my other co-worker, and I picked up the stolen blue jeans. Aside from the woman’s exclamation and a few stares from nearby shoppers, we caused nothing more than a minor stir in the busy mall’s concourse. I thought for sure someone would demand to know what we were doing – we weren’t the police. We were loss prevention specialists for a major retailer. We had no authority beyond that.
We “escorted” the thief through our store (the scene of the crime), through the ‘Employees Only’ door, and to the back office. Ivan sat him down in a chair, while Amy and I stood in the doorway. Ivan pulled a report from a folder with one eye on his detainee, but the thief didn’t look like he wanted to run again. He gazed down at his hand. Two of his knuckles were scraped and purple, and may have been broken.
I didn’t speak enough Spanish to understand why he took the jeans. He was going to sell them, is what I understood. I felt bad about his hand, and made him a bag of ice from the freezer in the breakroom.
I thought thieves were addicts or convicts, but the jean-runner appeared to be neither. When I said as much to Ivan, he dismissed my assumptions with a wave of his hand. “Everyone steals. No one does it because they’re starving. Almost no one does it because they want to keep the stuff. Employees who steal are the same way.”
A feeling of deprivation often prompts someone to steal, and the feeling doesn’t depend on economic status, according to this article from David DiSalvo for Forbes. Wealthy people who compare themselves to wealthier people may feel deprived, and act accordingly. Workplace theft can also stem from an instance when you feel like you are the only one who is forced to stay late at the office, according to ‘Why Do People Steal Their Co-workers Lunch?’ from Katie Heaney for The Cut.
If you think a co-worker is stealing, you’d better have a detailed and documented account if you choose to report it. Also, a face-to-face sit-down is the best method for speaking up. If a suspicion is expressed anonymously or the details are vague, managers are less likely to engage in thorough responsive action. Whether or not you report it, the stealing co-worker will eventually be caught, in my opinion, and any investigation will include interviews with co-workers in their radius. The interviewer will not care about your history with the company, or your intentions or concerns. Their task will be to uncover who else was involved, and who knew about the theft prior to its discovery.
Ivan’s lessons didn’t stop at everyone steals. He taught me how to follow someone down a city street without them noticing. He coached me on where to stand for the best viewing-angle and camouflage when tracking someone inside a store. I felt like a creep, but that was where Ivan’s lessons stopped – I had to learn to deal with that feeling on my own.
According to Ivan, a customer who eyed the sales people and appeared nervous was likely a thief. He or she may act like a high-maintenance customer and send the sales people away with numerous requests, or ask to be left alone. They may carry empty shopping bags which didn’t belong to any nearby store. Stacking was an obvious tip-off – when someone made a pile of goods before knocking them into a bag or grabbing them and running. Stacking sounded absurd to me – why would anyone do anything so obvious – until I watched the jean-runner do it.
A few weeks into the job, I was on a break and wandered into a store which specialized in earrings, toe rings, and similar trinkets. Two people with large no-logo shopping bags browsed the product carousels in a way that caught my trained eye – like the displays were open jars of cookies. They joked to each other a bit louder than necessary inside the small store. I stood a few feet away, watched, and sipped my coffee.
One of the two, a heavy-set woman in her mid-thirties, flipped three earring packets into her shopping bag with her pointer finger – flip flip flip. She glanced my way and saw me watching her, and our eyes locked. A shock of adrenaline prickled my stomach and for half a second I wondered what I was doing there. Then, anger took over – I hated theft, and that was why the job appealed to me.
I smiled. “You know, there’s undercover security in this mall. Like, plain-clothes officers.”
The woman’s mouth fell open and then snapped shut. “Are you one?”
I sipped my coffee. I hoped she didn’t see my hand shaking. The cramped space featured one exit, and the lofty third-floor railing was just outside the store. “No, I’m not. But I know they’re here.” I raised my eyebrows over my coffee cup. “You should put that back, and leave.”
She took a handful of shoplifted items from her bag and dropped them at the base of the product carousel. “Come on, we’re leaving,” she said to her friend, and left. I picked the items up and brought them to the sales counter.
“Thanks,” the girl behind the counter said. She knew what the woman and her friend were doing, but she was alone behind the counter and her boss, unlike my boss, didn’t see the need to train her in how to prevent or deal with theft.
When I shared the incident with Ivan, he smiled and nodded. I was ready, he said. He promoted me from a loss-prevention trainee to a specialist, and I was free to hone my skills. I learned that practiced thieves looked for items without sensors, or carried their own sensor-remover, which you could get online. Also, the more success a thief had, the more emboldened he or she became. Jaded thieves used intimidation to repel well-meaning sales people, who were taught to use attentive customer service as a deterrent. From what I saw, that policy placed the sales person at risk and almost never worked.
Thanks to my job I noticed people stealing everywhere else, or at least it felt that way, and my ability to detect a theft-in-progress lingered. Years later, I saw an elderly woman in a health-food store stuff a bag of cereal into her skirt’s waistband. The bag was not well-hidden. She wore light clothing and the bag was a bulge in her outline.
I followed her to the check-out line and wondered what I could do to stop her while also offering her my help. I watched her interact with the cashier as she bought the numerous items in her shopping basket. The woman didn’t appear to be a pro, but acted as though she couldn’t understand what the cashier said. Was her confusion a distraction tactic? Or was she so nervous and inexperienced that she couldn’t maintain the conversation? In my mind’s eye, Ivan leaned against a nearby wall in a smug pose. No one does it because they’re starving, he whispered. I shook my head, and left.
Now, I rarely see people stealing in the stores I frequent. My awareness has shifted. I see plain-clothed security everywhere, especially in large one-stop retailers. It’s no wonder – half of the world’s population now lives in countries where private security personnel outnumber police, according to Niall McCarthy for Forbes.
Undercover guards appear, to me, a lot like they’re looking for something to steal. They wear windbreakers or sweatshirts on warm days (to hide their radios). They wear running shoes or tactical boots. They do not often carry a shopping basket and, if they do, their basket is empty. Their eyes glide over me, assess me, and then move on to the next shopper. Today, though I still hate theft, I relate better to the woman with the baby in a stroller, whose reaction I felt at the time to be overly startled. Now, I can imagine her fear, and I wonder how we can prevent it.