Adventures in Retail, Part One: The Bead Woman

[talkingsoup]

We have this woman who apparently comes into Michael's periodically. We call her the Bead Woman. What she does is she grabs a cart and fills it up with beads, then proceeds to steal quite a few of them, leaving the rest for us to "reshop" (that is, put them back where they're supposed to be.

Now, first of all, if you've never seen the bead section of a Michaels--let me tell you right now, it is EPIC. Two entire aisles of nothing but beads and beading tools--loose beads, beads in canisters, strings of beads. Glass, clay, semi-precious stones, metal. There's about ten different brands, and that's not including the ones that are just outside of the aisle. Never mind that a good portion of those are rather pricey. Finding everything is a chore in and of itself, and finding things quickly is virtually impossible unless you know the store well or have a scanner gun with you.

Second of all, SHOPLIFTING IS BAD. It means we get our hours cut, which essentially means our pay gets cut >(

So, this woman comes in the other day, and since we know she's a tricksy little thief, the manager sets someone to just sort of keep an eye on her--which tends to deter her from stealing quite as much. And who should be assigned to watch her but yours truly.

Monitoring a thief is more epic than it sounds! It was very spec ops. I would "recover" (clean up) in the next aisle over, and then she would suddenly disappear and I'd have to go find her again. I think at this point, this has happened often enough that it's become a battle of wills between her and the rest of us. I'm pretty sure she knew she was being watched, and so decided to make our lives a bit more delightful (read: difficult). She kept hopping around between beads, crystals, latch hook rugs and back, and I had to essentially spy on her each time.

And yeah, I know, profiling and all that--but this is different than sending someone to watch the OMG SCARY BLACK MAN, since we know for a fact that this woman has stolen from us several times in the past.

Anyway, I ended up ninja-ing back and forth to follow her (while, of course, trying to look inconspicuous). Finally she disappeared and I couldn't find her again, and it turned out she'd gone to check out. Pretty much all of us were in on the whole thing, so the girl on register got the manager out and, in the end, we managed to salvage most of what she tried to steal.

But, of course, there in the bead aisle, is a cart full of beads and crystals.

At seven.

Two hours before close.

So, of course, me being back-up register, me having to recover ALL THOSE BEADS, and the store being busier that night than usual, well. We didn't go home until about 9:45.

On the plus side, I'm pretty sure I now have the bead aisles memorized.

Comments

[sheandhersin.livejournal.com]

Holy shit, that's awful. Glad to say I never had to deal with stuff like that, mostly probably because I worked pre-opening Sundays for four months. Hope y'all have good scanners/guns! We only had four and one of them was always breaking, but something like that - you bet I'd be on the manager's ass to let me use his.

Stories like that are always fun though. Makes wore more interesting at the least!

[talkingsoup]

It is! Though in retrospect, it was pretty amusing. And our guns are very nice, actually, except for when the "guns go down" which is basically one of the worst Javascript errors I've ever encountered :O

Lol, only a few months at Michaels and I'm already getting all kinds of stories~

[sheandhersin.livejournal.com]

Heheh, we had this one bipolar customer who always bought about $300 of embroidery floss - which is, y'know, tons of floss. Fortunately I never checked her out, but I was there one night when she freaked out on the other cashier - it was scary! She was yelling at her about it being closing time, part of me thought she was going to go postal or something. But then she calmed down and told us she was bipolar, like it was an apology, but it didn't really put me any more at ease. o.o

[talkingsoup]

Oh lord. I SHIVER at the idea of ringing all those up...particularly when there's no FES readily available o_O But yeah, that would be rather terrifying. It's bad enough dealing with angry customers.

[sheandhersin.livejournal.com]

No kidding. Definitely looking for a job now with less people, boring as that sounds. ^-^

[talkingsoup]

Haha, good luck. All things considered, I'm actually rather liking it at Michael's--my coworkers are pretty awesome, which definitely makes things bearable.

[sheandhersin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was easily my favorite part. They're more or less really good at hiring the best sort of people. The only person there I didn't get along with was this 16-year-old transfer from California, who was a good employee but could be a real snot about it. First night there she pretty much treated me like I didn't know shit about the job, because I said "recovery" instead of "go-backs", even though it IS recovery, an' I'm like, "hey, this ain't California, this is Texas, and we do our shit however the hell we want to here!" She was half the reason I quit, lol - couldn't take some young bitch treating me like an ignorant n00b all the time. XD

[talkingsoup]

Ugh, that fricking sucks. And yes, it is recovery, though every once in awhile people will call it go-backs. But it's really not a big deal and definitely not something to get upset over :\ Lame, man.

But that also makes me think of this one woman we have who's middle-aged and really is an ignorant noob. Not only does she just generally do her job badly, she also pages people when they're on their breaks and complains about having "too much work to do"--while being primary register for crying out loud. Never mind those of us out on the floor doing overstock, planograms, decorating and shit like that. And this is from me, who is pretty much primary all the time >(

[sheandhersin.livejournal.com]

Ugh, that's obnoxious. I took my breaks outside to avoid the rampant paging! Though that's probably illegal now or some shit, I left when corporate threw a rule book at us without reading it. I mean, if you feel like you have too much work to do, then quit, don't complain about it! S'not like Michaels is one of those careers you can't get out of. Oi. -.-

[taelow.livejournal.com]

Why don't you guys just bar her from entering the store? That's in your manager's right.

[talkingsoup]

I don't really know, but I think it mostly has to do with the complete what-the-fuckery that is the world of retail. Customer service is the priority, so we really can't do anything that would even remotely piss off the customers. Frankly, our hands are tied when it comes to theft--if we witness a theft we're not even allowed to confront the person, even if we're 100% sure.

Plus, barring someone from entering sends the wrong message, yadda yadda etc. I'm pretty sure the only way we could get away with banning someone would be if they were caught ritualistically sacrificing goats in the store once a week or something XD

[fairyfey.livejournal.com]

Has anyone confronted her about it?

[talkingsoup]

Nope! We're not allowed to. Silly policy within the retail world where you can't actually confront someone about a theft, even if you're 100% sure that they've stolen something.