fuck-customers:

For about two years, I was a sales associate at a store that sold workout clothes and accessories (similar to lululemon, but they only sold women’s clothes). I loved it there; the manager was amazing, my coworkers and I all got along really well, and I got to wear yoga pants to work every day. Still, retail is retail, and sometimes I had to deal with shitty customers and annoying children. Shoplifters weren’t super common in our store, but there were maybe three incidents over the course of the two years I worked there. One I witnessed firsthand, and thinking about it still makes me angry.

This group of three women came in one evening, around 4 or 5 pm (it was a weekday, so the store closed at 7). I was working the sales floor with another girl, and I went over to greet them and give them the spiel about our current sales and junk. I immediately noticed one of the gals was wearing one of our shirts, so I pointed it out and said, “Hey, I like your shirt!” She told me that they had gone to our other store (about 30-40 minutes away) as first-time customers the previous day, and they loved it so much that they decided to come in and get more stuff. So I invited them to look around and told them to let me know if they had any questions.

The gal with the shirt was looking around and she grabbed two sports bras off the rack in different sizes. It’s important to note that the sports bras she grabbed had a little ruffle design on the front that made them easy to see under your shirt (admittedly a design flaw, but the bras still worked really well). So I saw that she was holding them and I walked up to her and asked her if she wanted me to start a fitting room for her, and she like shrank back and said, “No, I’m good.”

That’s when I noticed that she was holding the bras super close together and close to her, like she was trying to make it look like she was only holding one. I wasn’t immediately suspicious, but I made a little mental note of it. She and one of her friends grabbed a couple more things and then started walking back towards the dressing room, so I followed them in, showed them to their rooms, and gave them my name. I checked on them a couple times after that and brought them a couple more things I thought they’d like, and by then, I’d kind of forgotten about the gal’s weird behavior with the bras.
After about 15 or 20 minutes, the two came out with some stuff that they wanted and I went back into their rooms to get the stuff they left behind while they looked around a little bit more. So I was making things a little bit neater on their hangers so I could put them away, and I noticed that there was only one sports bra when I knew that she had taken two into to the fitting room and hadn’t come out holding the other one. I looked at the bra and realized that there were two hanging tags shoved onto the little plastic piece on the bra (one for a size small and one for a medium). The size tag on the bra itself said small, and I saw that the hanging tag for the medium had been shoved onto the little plastic piece (like the hole was all stretched out and you could see it had been forced on).

So I looked up at the gal and said, “Ma’am, did you take both a medium and small bra into the fitting room with you?” and she said, “No, I just took a small in there.” And I mentioned something about the two tags (very cautiously and as non-accusatory as I could) and she went, “Yeah, it was just like that when I tried it on. Weird.” So I very calmly put down the bra and told my coworker I’d be right back and I walked into the back room. My manager was sending out some e-mails and I very quietly and calmly said, “I’m pretty sure this girl is trying to steal one of the sports bras.”

My manager and I came back out and, sure enough, we could SEE THE LITTLE RUFFLE FROM THE SPORTS BRA UNDER THIS CHICK’S SHIRT. So my manager was very casually talking to them and I was trying to hide the fact that I was shaking from anger and the gal kept sending me into the back room to try to find different sizes of these sales shirts and I could tell that she was just trying to confuse me and keep me busy, but my manager was watching her like a hawk.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t just up and accuse her of trying to steal the bra, because she had shopped at our other store the previous day and was even wearing some of our merchandise. She would have just said that she bought the bra at the other store but she didn’t have the receipt on her or something and there was nothing we could have done about it. So my manager finally rang her up and we got all her information (phone number, address, e-mail, etc.) and, of course, she was only buying like two sale shirts. As a last ditch effort, my manager mentioned the bra the gal tried on and asked how she liked it and the gal went, “Oh, I really liked it. But I’m gonna pass on it today.” And my manager looked her dead in the eyes and said, “Yeah, the only downside to that bra is that you can always see it through your shirt.”

The gal heard this and just stared at my manager and my manager stared back and the gal just silently swiped her card, took her receipt, and grabbed her bag and said, “Thank you, ladies” and walked towards the door. And my manager and I followed her and my manager said, “Come back and see us!” and the gal said all smugly, “Oh, we’re from California, so it won’t be for a while!” And my manager just kinda laughed and said, “Well this company is based in California! We have dozens of stores over there!” and the gal looked super uncomfortable and booked it out of the store with her two friends following behind.

Of course after they left, my manager and I basically exploded because that woman had walked out without paying for a $55 bra. And I was like laughing hysterically and crying and shaking because I was just SO ANGRY and my coworker had no idea what had happened, so she was staring at us like we had gone crazy. We immediately called our district manager and told her the story, and she told us we had handled the situation as best we could because, like I said, we couldn’t have proven that she stole the bra, even with all the very obvious evidence. It would have been the customer’s word against ours. We gave our DM all the information the shoplifter had given us (who knows if it was accurate or not) along with a physical description, and she sent it to all the stores in the district and the regional manager as well.

We only had about an hour left before the store closed and no one came in, so we all just kind of stood around talking about what had happened and how messed up it was. I honestly felt so angry and violated that someone would pull that shit. We never heard anything about her again and she never came back, so who knows if she went to another one of our stores and pulled the same thing; I’d like to think we scared her at least a little bit. All I can do is hope that someday karma will come around and bite that woman in the ass.