Petty theft

[Lace Neil Singer]

What's the pettiest shoplifter you've ever encountered at work? Not the people who steal large, expensive items, but the people who risk it all for a small cheap item. For me, there was either the grown woman caught stealing a pint of milk, or the unknown teens who guzzled down half a bottle each of Tango Fruit Twist and Diet Coke and left the half bottles on a shelf somewhere.

[Hemily]

not personal experience, but, my mom used to work at a shop that sells cheap random stuff, like candles, cheap toys, cheap random trinkets of bad quality, a store called Nille actually.

In this store, the people you always had to watch, was old ladies in fur coats, they'd stuff their coats with cheap crap that costs at most $5...

it's silly...

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I'll go with the teeny-bopper girls who will steal one small makeup item or one tube of lip gloss.

They don't get caught right away, usually only after LP can establish a pattern. But it's really dumb to steal small stuff like that when you can end up paying 50 times its value if you get caught.

[protege]

At camp, we had the idiots who would try to steal sodas from the vending machine by tipping it slightly. Usually, all they did was shut the machines off--most of mine had a "tilt" mechanism that would kill the power and cause the soda dropping mechanism to lock...thwarting their theft attempt.

Even better were the idiots who got *caught* performing said actions. Like most idiots, they couldn't resist that 50-cent can of Coke. They'd tip the machine...and were usually pinned against the other machine, or the store's outside wall. And yes, we sent them home.

[Delacroix]

The moron who totally just RUNS out of the store with the ps3 game cases. I love watching their expressions when they're safely five feet out the door, they open the case to notice there's no game in it.

[Gurndigarn]

(working an arcade) The insanely high number of people... the insanely high number of adults... who shake the coin-pusher ticket games, then look around with a "who, me?" look when the alarm goes off.

Yeah, those extra ten tickets you might have gotten if it didn't have a tilt are so important... it gets so bad that you don't even look over when you hear the alarm.

[nick1091]

From my supermarket days, the worst was people who'd stick our small, hometown weekly paper in their Sunday New York times.

These high rollers could afford lobsters and steak, and would try to rip off a 25 cent paper - pathetic.

[kdruboen]

Back in the 80's I worked at K-Mart electronics, and assisted LP when possible. I saw a man stash a music cassette in his pants, and head to the door. He was apprehended by LP and myself. After being escorted to the LP office, and police were called, it was discovered that this indivdual was a State Trooper!

[Dave1982]

$0.48 pack of pencil erasers. To quote Dan, one of my ASMs, when I brought up this particular five finger discount: "Unf***ingbelieveable"

[Ljt09863]

we have a clearance section all year except christmas time. durng most of the year when this is up, it is our most hit section. the most popular item stolen? they range from 50 cents to $1. i always say, for goodness sake. if you want it that bad, come see me and i will give you the dollar to buy it!!!!! its just a freaking dollar!!!

[RecoveringKinkoid]

Candy bars.

My Kinko's keeps a small box of candy near one of the registers and sells it at an obscene markup. Candy bars and Altoids, usually. Gives the late-night college kids working on that overdue paper a boost.

Panhandlers used to come in and try to steal them all the time.

[Misanthropical]

I went to buy a box of cookies, only to find some pig had opened them and ate some of them and put the box back on the shelf.

I saw a nun grab a big ole handful of nuts out of the nut bin and start eating them.

I have seen old women grab the whole box of cookies at the bakery, that is set out for the kids and empty the entire box in their purse.

I was at a meeting one time, and a woman came in and started drinking my soda, the soda that I had already been drinking out of. I didn't want it back after that.

[Iced Coffee Man]

I've found an empty jar of coffee on a shelf, not smashed or anything, just empty. Which means someone tipped all the coffee into a container of some sort, or they just like to eat coffee granules (unlikely, but possible down here)

[Geek King]

(working an arcade) The insanely high number of people... the insanely high number of adults... who shake the coin-pusher ticket games, then look around with a "who, me?" look when the alarm goes off.

Yeah, those extra ten tickets you might have gotten if it didn't have a tilt are so important... it gets so bad that you don't even look over when you hear the alarm.

Oh, gods. I worked in an arcade with those. One of my managers just stood there one day and yelled, "STOO-PID!" everytime someone set those off. He had to stop when his voice went horse after a couple of hours.

My favorites were the people who complained that their tokens didn't drop, then pointed to the machine with the alarm going off. Then they'd swear up and down that they didn't try to rock it. To top it all off, we had to manually reset the alarms. Half the time, another alarm would start when we were inside one reseting it. Curiously, my managers somehow managed to miss the breaker to turn that block of machines on most mornings.

[MadMike]

(working an arcade) The insanely high number of people... the insanely high number of adults... who shake the coin-pusher ticket games, then look around with a "who, me?" look when the alarm goes off.

Yeah, those extra ten tickets you might have gotten if it didn't have a tilt are so important... it gets so bad that you don't even look over when you hear the alarm.

I saw someone do that at the beach last summer. Considering that the manager was at the prize counter not even ten feet away from the machine, that was pretty stupid.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, right after the guy got kicked out for it, another one, who had witnessed the whole thing, went up and did the same thing again, and seemed surprised when he, too, got kicked out.