Do You Believe in Life After Retail Theft
Big retailers lose less than 1/1,000th of their revenue every year to theft; guess how much they steal from workers?
It was my night to close at the Rand McNally store in the Century City Mall* (*The Westfield Century City.) There were a few procedures that were must-dos, starting with shutting the double glass doors and locking them right at 9 p.m. This is the first key thing I forgot.
Or rather, I didn’t forget. I just didn’t do it.
The second job was to drop your drawer which meant the manager, Michael, had to key open the cash register, and I had to count my money and credit card slips and fill out a bank deposit slip, and put it in a bank bag. Then he’d do the same to check my work in the back office.
After that, it was various going to the mall storage room and restocking shelves. At the moment, Under the Tuscan Sun was our hottest seller, and we were always running low on neck pillows because harried business travelers would somehow find us and clean us out of the things. The leopard print ones especially were big sellers. You wonder where all the people who are flying coach get them, now you know.
My drawer was on the counter (second mistake) and I was ignoring it. There was a bi-weekly—or whenever it rained—mop schedule and I drew the short straw that night, so the mop and bucket had been taken from the side closest and rolled prominently in front of me by Michael as a reminder which triggered me into not locking the double glass doors in the first place because I didn’t want to bend down and unblock them again. I will always be the most unmotivated person alive when it comest to stuff like that, which, I suppose, is why I was a bad fit for retail.
A person ambled in. He was probably around my age, a little shorter than me, unshaven with longish mousy brown hair. He was in some kind of sport coat and Adidas tracksuit pants combo. He could have been homeless or a mega-star. It was hard to tell.
He walked straight to the counter that I was spraying down with industrial cleaner before getting to my drawer. The music was up. It was Cher’s “Believe,” Micheal’s favorite, on repeat. He was in the back on the phone with Sarah, the GM, going over the day’s preliminary totals and trying to figure out why there was a run on black globes.
The guy came up to me, and I gestured around to nothing, “Sorry man, we’re closed,” I said, then pointing at my Rand McNally apron, which was balled up on the counter.
“Can you bag up that money?” he asked politely. He wasn’t nervous or demanding.
I laughed. “What money?”
“That money.” He gestured to the drawer on the counter between us.
“No.”
He came around the counter and lifted up his sleeve. Like Travis Bickle/De Niro in Taxi Driver, he had something shiny hidden up there. At first, I thought it was a gun, but the serrated blade on one side and the dark handle with what looked like a compass on the end revealed it was a Bowie knife. “Please bag up the money,” he said.
“OK.”
I reached down without looking and pulled out one of our big atlas-sized bags with the handles, and he shook his head. “The little plastic one, like for maps.” I nodded. He was very calming so I wasn’t nervous and felt like the guy really had a handle on this whole situation.
I bagged up the cash from the drawer, probably a little less than a grand total, and started scooping out the change. He shook his head. “That’s it,” and snatched the small plastic bag out of my hand and walked in the opposite direction to the other side of the store.
Those double doors were shut and locked because that was the side Michael was in charge of. He turned back around with ease. Cher’s Auto Tuned voice sang, “I know that I’ll get through this...” and he walked by me again. I remember giving him a wave and wishing him a good evening, as was my customer service-centric custom.
He walked out into the night.
Michael came out a few minutes later as I just kind of stood there wondering what to do next. Initially, the thought had occurred to me that I could probably get off a little early, maybe even get out of mopping. There was no drawer to count, and chores seemed silly at this point. I should’ve gone straight back and told him, but I couldn’t. I just stared at my empty drawer.
Michael: “What’s the hold up?”
Me: “A guy came in here and asked for the money very politely, and I gave it to him.”
Micheal: “You gave a guy the money?”
Me: “He had a knife, like the kind they sell on QVC.”
Michael: “I don’t understand.”
Cher: “I don’t need you anymore...”
Me: “He had like a real knife.”
Cher: “I don’t need you anymmmoooooooore.”
Then we stood there in silence. Micael removed his Rand McNally apron and called mall security which said they were busy because someone was going around robbing places, including next-door-to-us Bloomingdales. Michael hung up and looked at me sympathetically.
Michael: “Are you OK? Do you need some tea? I’m going to go to Coffee Bean. They said to hold tight. The cops have to come by and take your statement.”
Me: “I’m good.”
Michael: “You got robbed.”
Me: “It didn’t feel like a robbery.”
Cher: “I can feel something inside me say. I really don’t think you’re strong enough now.”
Michael convinced me to stay by letting me sip tea in the back with him and play DJ and not mop. I gave my statement. The cameras in the store caught the interaction, sort of; two of them were broken, and one only got part of the guy’s shoulder and my clumsy hands in frame.
In the end, he made off with $672 and a couple of coupons that were already in the plastic bag. He was never caught. I was reprimanded for not locking my door immediately and my “punishment” was not being allowed to close for a month.
A rash of large-scale thefts is happening in urban parts of the country rn. A couple of weeks ago in San Francisco, 80ish folks stormed in and removed product from a Nordstrom; more than a dozen took down a Louis Vuitton store just outside Chicago a week later, a Home Depot in Lakewood, Ca, got hit by 18 people last week.
Trade association the National Retail Federation reports a 60% uptick in thefts since 2015 with an estimated $700,000 for every $1 billion in sales walking out the door, HAHAHHAAAHAHA.
So wait, you’re telling me that’s 70 whole cents for every thousand dollars. Whoaaaaa boy. Now compare that to wage theft and other employee violations by these places The Home Depot alone paid out almost $189 million back to workers (and gotten away with who knows how much more) since 2000, and well, in the words of Rand McNally manager Michael in the wake of that fateful incident, “There’s nothing in here that can’t be replaced, with the exception of my Cher CD.”
Warriors vs. Suns
After dropping only their third game of the season last night vs. the also 18-3 Phoenix Suns (tied for the lead in the Western Conference as well as for the best record in the NBA), the two West Coast juggernauts go head to head again on Friday—this time in San Francisco.
After starting the season 1-3, the Suns are winners of 17 straight and, like the Warriors, leverage the play of a few key superstars along with a deep bench to drag teams with them into the third quarter, where they explode in flurries of points by the dozen to create untenable gaps.
But strange things did happen on Tuesday night to throw both teams off their game. For starters, the Suns lost their bona fide superstar Devin Booker for the entirety of the second half, but that didn’t seem to matter—they were still able to cap off a perfect November.
Should they win Friday night, the Suns will become only the sixth team in NBA history to go undefeated over a full calendar month—the last team to do so was the Warriors in 2015.
Booker, who left with a left hamstring injury, should be back on the court Friday. On Tuesday he left the Suns in the good hands of Mikal Bridges whose lockdown defense on Steph Curry limited the MVP candidate to the worst shooting game of his career when taking at least 20 shots.
That’s right. Steph, with 12 points on 3-14 shooting from behind the arc, basically had the most off night of his illustrious 13 seasons, and the Warriors still only came up 8 points short.
The Warriors’ 18-point fourth quarter was also a season-low showing that when Steph is off, everything hiccups: the ball doesn’t rotate as much, and turnovers (23 for the Warriors in a season-high) are manifest.
Good teams don’t slouch for long though. Through the ups and downs of this current dynastic run—re-gaining steam in its fourth or fifth incarnation since they hung their first banner in 40 years in 2015—the Warriors know the importance and implications of reasserting themselves on their home court for a short series that has Western Conference Finals written all over it.
Take the Warriors +1 vs. the Suns 7 p.m. PST Friday, Dec. 3