“There once was a kid on the loose
who wanted to drink him some booze
He grabbed all the beer
with nothing to fear
‘cause the night crew had nothing to do”

Lately this seems to be the escalating way of the world in my overnight shift reality working in the grocery store. I see many an odd character during my 40 hour work week and so much has gone on in the last couple of months, that I figured a good little blurb about one aspect of the third shift would make for a good post this morning. I sense I might even elaborate on the regular non-sense in later posts but for right now I would like to have shoplifting and fraud take the center stage.

This past week has been ‘Shrink Week’ and it is the most ridiculous array of obviousness that anyone with half a clue would ever be forced to participate in. The break room is full of tawdry decorations and each day has been full of silly and elementary games for the 1^st and 2^nd  shift people to learn about shrink (appropriately so, since most are first and second grade level and the questions on shrink contest quizes consist of, "You should get the __ __ number of the car of someone participating in a crime" ... Do you know the answer to the blank-blank?). It just so happens that the store I work in has experienced quite a bit of theft lately and many attempted thefts that have been averted by mere chance rather than the thinly veiled attempts of formality followed through with by Loss Prevention; Loss Prevention, in it’s own right, is the joke of the century!

These are the consumer items that always make their way out of a store without being paid for; they are high ticket items: razors, film, baby formula, and of course booze. However, there are many aspects of thievery going on in the grocery world which is in stark contrast to the common-place thoughts of retail when it comes to shoplifting. Remember boys and girls, shoplifting is a serious offense; unless of course you are ripping off a grocery store during the 90% of the time that Loss Prevention is not there. Those bracelets hurt; they hurt well indeed. Meat hooks beware!

The most innocent form of stealing from a grocery store is called ‘grazing’. Many people are guilty of this and do not even consider it a crime or an offense that they could get in trouble for. It is when you walk around the store shopping and you eat food that is readily devour-able; such as produce, nuts, bulk candy, prepared foods, or the package that you rip open because you just can’t get through the whole shopping experience due to how famished you are. I remember shopping with my maternal grandmother and she would munch on grapes the whole time (she said that was what they wanted us to do so we would buy more!) and hand them down to me in the cart. Oh, what fruit of the tree, so to speak! We have a guy who is an organic/produce nut (no pun intended, well, yes, pun intended) and he consumes about ten to twenty bucks a visit while “shopping” (he shops at least once every three to four days). He normally will spend about ten bucks on some produce and organic eggs all while inhaling whole trays of strawberries and pre-made sushi and the like. He really is a wack-job. He comes in wearing thermal underwear with shorts over them and is always out of 'it'. I call him ‘the grazer’ and he is bonkers! I know, I know, innocent right? Nope! Just ridiculous. Pay for what you eat, ass wipe!

The second, much more planned out version of defrauding a store is debit card/welfare account/coupon abuse/unacceptable payment method. People that use multiple manufacturer coupons for the same item, people who know register codes and the like who get you to accept monies that are not acceptable, using coupons from other stores, and so on.  One customer named "shovel face" uses multiple coupons from multiple different stores and we have to normally throw him out. He is an odd duck at best - something is not right with the wiring of these people! In contrast, we have a woman who comes in every three weeks or so and buys about 800 dollars worth of groceries. She had worked as a cashier for 17 years for my company and is now on permanent disability due to a wrist/elbow injury. She knows the ins and outs of the business. She tries to get in and out before a morning cashier has to deal with her as the night cashier is the grocery manager who is not so savvy when it comes to the current scams and shams out in the retail world. She got busted yesterday morning trying to pass off two 500 dollar traveler’s checks for her 600 dollar bill. No doubt they were frauds or counterfeits and she knows we do not accept traveler’s checks in that high of a denomination (notice the 400 cash back she would get). She said she would be back with cash for her 6 carriages of groceries at 9 a.m. The carts are still sitting in the dairy cooler as of 5 this morning waiting for her to come back. She won’t. She is break down, shake down, busted.

On to the most common occurrence that we experience everyday, seven days a week (eight if you are a Beatle): basic thievery, shoplifting (beer runs if you are an 18 year old kid looking to loosen up the chicks!). There are two varieties of this genre: the hard core Organized Retail Crime member and the thrill seeking idiot. Anyone involved in ORC is knee deep in the planning of what, when and how. The Idiot just goes for the gold and is normally amped up on something or just looking for the adrenaline rush associated with getting away with getting something for free.

                                                     (an adreneline molecule)

ORC members set up fake carts with cheap goods (paper towels, john paper, etc.) all around the edges to conceal what they are going to run with. They take notes on who works and when; who the easy employees are and the ignorant ones as well (making note of who the obvious security from Loss Prevention are is a MUST). They come in with lists and know how to get in and out in the snap of a finger, the blink of an eye. Two weeks ago we had a ballsy set of thieves march through the back room and go right for the liquor closet. They proceeded to wheel out 2500 dollars worth of Crystal champagne while pretending to be vendors. The next day a new shipment of the sauce came in. It is suspected to be an inside job. A week later we had two individuals come in at 1 p.m. They went to the locked up liquor cabinet on the sales floor that stores Patron Tequila and LaFrague Scotch (yes, I know my spelling sucks and Google is not giving me my answers this morning!). They jimmied the lock on the door and took off with over a grand worth of booze. Fellow customers are seen on camera watching the two men load up their pants and smiling at them. Lately, we have had five hundred a week of Grey Goose Vodka go missing. If anyone in your apartment complex ever asks you if you want to buy a bottle of high end liquor really cheap: It Is HOT! Sizzling Hot; Paris Hilton Hot! Funny that we have 91 cameras in the store and everything is being recorded. We even have video screens over-head in the liquor department where you can actually look up and watch yourself shop, but nothing is done; charges are never filed, no one is arrested unless Loss Prevention is ‘in tha house’; even then charges are not filed due to the expense.

This brings me to the inspiration for this post: The Idiot (and I don’t mean that fabulous book by Dostoevsky!). I have seen The Idiot in full force, fine fashion, furious fervor; yes, they love to flaunt their stupidity in the eyes of the people that sit idly by. See, we are told, as a corporate policy, that we can not (CAN NOT!) intervene in ANY theft. All we can do is tell a supervisor or management and hopefully, by the intimidation of a watchful eye, deter the act. Yes, that’s right, if you want to get tons of free crap go shoplift a grocery store at about 3 a.m. when nothing can be done - not a God damned thing! I have seen girls come in and play decoy for devious male counterparts dreaming of getting into the illustrious crotch of the distraction in painted pants and button-less boob cover. I have seen the drunk girls who nervously try to get out with a bottle of Absolute and set off the alarm (which is ALWAYS ignored or forgotten about) only to turn around in panic and set the bottle down on the floor and run away. I have watched the guys who come in and run out with an 18 pack in each hand and hustle through the door harder than a runner in the NFL going for the 30 second to death goal that will turn the tables. Deion Sanders at 16 looking for a buzz! The worst are the complete boobs who are in it for the munchies and stupidity.

Last night two boys about 19 came in. One appeared to be on LSD and was singing to the hot dogs at one point. He proceeded to abduct a carriage I was using and commandeer it as a skipping trolley for transportation and distraction around the store as his emo-buddy collected their post-bong-hit snacks. I watched the whole thing go down. I warned management three separate times, but it was 1:30 a.m. and it was only us meager 3^rd shifters. I knew it was going to happen. Sure as shit, there it was: tripping boy was distracting the grocery manager (a.k.a. the night checker) while the tight-jeaned goof-haired kid strolled out with about 30 bucks of food. They were then gutsy enough to eat it at their car in front of the store after they ‘got away’. I went to lunch at the same time and saw the whole thing. Just as I got into my car and started to listen to a bit of ‘Coast to Coast with George Nory’, I looked over my shoulder to see the both of them pulled up next to the curb by the front door. They were clumsily jogging in tandem back to the running vehicle with arms full of pumpkins and then sped off into a night of impending vandalism. Ahhh … what a life kiddos have these days! I ran in and made an announcement over the intercom that was pretty much chuckled at since there is not one damned thing we can do about it other than leave a note for the store manager that we were ripped off once again! Thieves: Five Gazillion; Grocery Workers: Zero, Zip, Nil, Nada, Nothing!

So this is where I am, writing this and pondering it all in a weird array of beginning-of-my-weekend sorts of feelings. I arrived home at 5:15 a.m. and decided that this was a must-post. I was so thrilled that I even posted photos and did the research to find them. I know, I am no Mokie Joe, but I did my best!

I never shoplifted as a child or a teen and I have never shoplifted to this day. There has never been an attraction there. A good friend of mine when I was between 9 and 11 was a compulsive shoplifter and got my step brother Toad involved with a canoe stunt at a K-Mart. The good friend was killed in a car accident. He was knocked from an over pass by a car his twin brother was in after they had had a fight and were going home from the mall where they both worked. That family was never the same, nor was I. That was the first death I experienced as a child. I was 11. From shoplifting, to death, to music-videos indeed!

I hope you found this kind of fun or at least informative if you are going to go rip off an over night joint!

And yes, the limerick was an original, not so good, but an original all the same!

Be good and smile.

Godspeed …