Loss Prevention Part 1

When I first moved to the Washington DC area (Northern Virginia really) in 1992 I stayed with my brother and his then girlfriend in a one bedroom apartment in Fairfax, VA. This happens alot in the DC area because housing prices are ridiculous here. I got a position as a Manager in Training at the Sam Goody music store (The Musicland Group went bankrupt a while back.) The hours sucked but I learned alot about retail management and ended up with a pretty decent jazz cd collection due to samples and the employee discount. So as part of my management training I was taught how to identify characteristics of shoplifting. We'd constantly find evidence of swiped CD's and Cassettes in the store and we had to catalog everything we found to try and track what type of losses we incurred.

My first encounter with preventing this type of loss (actual shoplifting) was on a very busy weekend during the holiday shopping period. I was stationed in the middle of the store and was mostly there to help folks find what they needed and keep the CD browsers organized. I was doing a typical scan of the store when I noticed three teenage girls snickering in the back of the store at the rock t-shirt rack next to those stupid poster panels that you flip one at a time to see different ignorant posters. I was good at blending in with the crowd (that's just the way I roll) and so I stood and watched them for a minute or so and all of sudden there it was. One of the girls slipped a shirt off the hanger on the rack and stuffed it in to her large shopping bag. I couldn't believe my eyes. I was such a trusting and naive soul back then. So I glanced away and looked back and one of the other girls did the exact same move with a black long sleeved t-shirt. Just then one of our part-time workers walked by me. I grabbed her arm, stared her directly in the eye and said, "go back to the office right now and tell Dale to meet me at the front of the store immediately." Her eyebrows raised and she said, "ok."

Dale was the Store Manager and he was a cocky guy that loved to chew tobacco. It was difficult to like the guy. The office was an elevated office in back with a one way mirror window so managers could watch the crowd but the customers can't see in the window.

I kept my eye on the three girls and made my way to the front of the store and stood at the large open doorway. The girls were making their way to the front from the side aisle to try and avoid being noticed. Just as they got to the front I moved closer to the group and as soon as they stepped out of the store I said, "excuse me!" in a loud voice. They stopped dead in their tracks. I stepped up to the closest girl reached for her shopping bag and said, "can I see your receipt for the items you have in your bag?" She stood motionless with the fear of God on her face. One of the other girls bolted into the busy mall. The third girl hesitated, looked at her friend standing next to me, looked at me, and I just shook my head as to say, "don't do it" (I used to be a junior high band director in a public school. The look comes in handy every so often.) She backed up a bit and I moved closer to her and reached for her bag. She stopped and I motioned for them to step back in to the store. By this time, Dale had made his way to the doorway and took the bag from me and I said, "these girls have items in their bags they did not pay for." Dale looked at them and said, "let's go back to the office." He told me to stay on the floor and manage the store while he dealt with the girls. The part-time workers all knew what was going on and they looked at me like I was the man. Little did they know how true that statement was.

About 15 minutes later, two mall security officers showed up with the second girl (the one that bolted into the mall) who was balling her eyes out by now and made their way to the back of the store to the office. They were in there for about 10 minutes when the cops showed up and made their way back there. 20 minutes later we had a trickle of store managers from around the mall coming in and out of the store. About an hour later three sets of parents showed up.

The girls, parents, and cops all left out the back utility door and Dale finally emerged from the back office. He walked up to me with a huge smile on his face and told me the girls had ripped off close to 20 stores in the mall in one way or another and had about $5,000 worth of inventory in their bags. I couldn't believe it.

So what was my reward for this good deed?

I ended up having to drive clear across town several times to provide my testimony to a judge/mediator of the case. The parents asked me to go easy on them and I just looked at them and said, "it's not up to me." "I'm just telling how it happened and what I saw." I never found out what kind of sentences they received, if any, and I've never really cared.

Sam Goody did promote me to Manager of another store soon after the holiday rush was over, but because they only raised a worker's salary based on longevity, I only got a $2,000 a year raise from $13,000 to $15,000. That's right. I was working about 70 hours a week and making just over $4 an hour.

Well, soon after becoming manager of the Springfield Mall Sam Goody, my second encounter with shoplifting came to pass . . . .