The Crooked Employee
11/17/2012 11:26
I always have stories of customers who will do everything they can to keep merchandise without paying for it or they just try to steal it from the start. This is a story of the other crooks that will steal you blind and sometimes with a better success rate than your customers. EMPLOYEES ! I was the manager of a Rent-To-own Store it was one of them kind I referred to as a true rental company, Long hours and hard collections with all customers being due weekly and had to be paid before Saturday night when you closed. The hours were very long and to make matters worse my staff worked on what we called Chinese overtime. I can't really explain it but the way it played out was if I had a employee who worked 25 hours overtime they got 25.00 extra pay on their paycheck it was a long drawn out formula the company had came up with. I never did understand it but I gave every new hire the sheet with the formula on it and told them the same thing ,I told them about how it played out on their payroll check. Nobody liked it but I always went over it with them with the hope I didn't have to hear the bitching later. If They did come to me I would refer them to our conversation and the letter they signed but the bitching still happened and really I couldn't blame them.
I had four employees at the time of this story, 1 cashier 1 delivery guy and a collection staff of 2 people. We had a good store, we had come from worst to first place within a year! The only problem we had was our cash drawers coming up short every other night and of course it would get worse before paydays. The problem had gotten so bad the Dist Manager had started calling me everyday to see where we ended up the night before. The Dist Manager told me "You need to get this shit handled or the auditors will show up and this can cause you to fail a audit, this will affect your job! I told her I had done spot counts during the day and came in on my off day and did drawer audits without any luck. I told the Dist Manager that either I had thieves or stupid employees, I knew it could be both but I was thinking I had a thief. I had several meetings with the staff and laid out how the Dist Manager was getting very tired of the shortages and if didn't stop we will all have to summit to a polygraph. The problem stopped for a few weeks but started up again just before payday, so I was sure someone was taking money from the cash drawers or from customers and not putting it in the cash drawer. The confirmation for me was sometimes we came up over which to me was someone trying to feel better by paying some back at different times. I had my idea who I thought it was, I had a idea it was one of my collectors. This guy was always having stuff shut off at home and always trying to borrow money. The thing about collectors is they have a M.O of stealing merchandise not money as much so I got tighter on the field receipts and confirmed they didn't post there own payments when they came in from a collection run. This didn't stop the shortages, didn't slow it a bit. This went on for a while without much luck tripping up the person. I was part of a team of managers called the star team which meant you could be called to another store with a group of other managers to help when that location had very bad delinquent accounts, the problem was you would have to be at this location from Thursday to Saturday and this worried me to death but you had to go when called. I called my store Thursday night and I could see the weekend wasn't starting off good, again we had come up 140.00 short. I spent the next hour going over the paperwork with my cashier without finding any problems within them. I knew the cashier I had was very smart and she worked hard and I could hear the frustration in her voice also, so I went over again how she had to watch the cash drawer and make sure we were counting back all the change we gave back to the customers. I told her to go on home but the next day fax me the forms to the store I was helping. The next day I had to sit down with the Dist Manager and we went over all the reports and with the same results "It's not in the paperwork! The Dist Manager said if we didn't get this fixed she would be ordering all staff to summit to polygraphs, I told her this might be the thing to do. I was pissed to no end after working so hard on this store to have someone putting it in a bad light by stealing from me. I felt like snatching everybody by the neck until someone confessed. The next night we didn't have any shortages so I came up with a plan to sneak up on my staff Saturday night. I got with my Dist Manager to let her know I was leaving the store I was helping around 8:00 pm to get back to my store in time to close the cash drawers down for the night. Saturday came and I was ready, I knew I was going to end this crap tonight! I got to my store about 8:35 and walked in and told everybody to step away from the cash drawers and I started to count both of the cash drawers down and printed my reports, and sure enough we were $200.00 short! I lost it. I called my Dist Manager and told her I was firing the entire staff that night, she to me to calm down and lets see if they will let me search them I told her they will agree or I will search them anyway. The Dist Manager said NO you have got to ask and if they don't let you then you can let them all go , I told her ok I would call her back. I locked the door and told everyone that I wanted to search their billfolds and purses, they also needed to empty their pockets. The female employee I told her she had to pat down her boobs.They didn't want to do this but I told them if not "Clock out and Get out!" The search turned up some of my missing pens but all together they didn't have 35.00 total on them so this was a bust. Then I told them to go ahead with close down and clean up. I knew that one of them had stole that money and I didn't want this to continue another day! I started walking around the store looking under stuff , I went into the bathroom and looked and as I was coming out I noticed the female cashier going into this small room we had, You see this was a old building we had a bigger area where we kept our large merchandise but this was a small room not big enough to store much but the safe and lamps, so I went up to the doorway but as I did my female cashier seen me and said "oh hey" and hurried out of the room. The fast retreat she and the fact she had no reason even being in that room when I had closed out for the night myself and locked the money in the safe after I counted it. This got me to looking around this room very hard I was looking under all the lamps we had stored in that room but I didn't find anything. I was about to leave when I saw this old adding machine we had it was very old and large, it was on top of the safe when I got closer to it I could swear there was money sticking out from under it so I went over and lifted it up and under it was two 100.00 bills! I got so pissed I picked up the old adding machine and tossed it across the room and it made a hell of a racket. I came out of this room pissed off and I went up to the cashier and said "You got something to tell me? she said I don't know what your talking about. I told this girl don't play stupid with me! I seen you come out of the small room when you had no reason to be in there. She told me she dropped her pen and was just seeing if it was in that room. I started yelling your full of shit ! It just so happens the missing money was in that room, "really" I told her let's see what the police think of it and I picked up the phone, she busted out crying and said please don't I have to take care of my kids! I said "What does this have to do with anything? She told me while crying like a baby "I needed the money to help take care of my kids. I told her the company wasn't her kids daddy! and I damn sure wasn't. The girl just kept crying and saying she was sorry. I didn't care at that moment, I was pissed so I called the police. The time we were waiting for them was tough she was balling her head off then she tried to get out the door which I had locked. The police showed up and I gave them the story and they asked the other staff members who also heard her confession to give a statement and after that is when they put her in handcuffs and took her to jail. you might say I should have felt bad but I didn't it wasn't any different than these customers who try and steal merchandise, but with this case I could have lost my job if I didn't stop it because this is what they paid me to do. I learned it wasn't just the crazy rent-to-own customers you had to worry about and this job was going to get even tougher. The good news with her was the judge ordered her to pay back $775.00 !