On Tue, 23 Oct 2012 08:51:39 +0100, scott wrote:

>> And there are always enough people willing to try stealing something if
>> they think they can get away with it.  Back in the late 80's when I
>> worked retail in a mall, I had a onetime friend try to steal something
>> from my store *while I was on duty* (and when the alarm went off, he
>> returned the item and claimed he was "just testing" the system - hence
>> the "onetime friend" status).  On a second occasion, we caught a guy
>> red-
>> handed using a bag with a shoebox in it (with the end cut off) to dump
>> expensive merchandise in and had him hauled away by the cops.
> 
> And if you wrap a few layers of tin foil around the inside you don't
> even need to worry about removing the security tags in-store :-) My
> sister works in retail and has seen all this sort of stuff too, it's
> amazing how ingenious the thieves are.

Yeah, I forget the name of the shoebox device (but it actually does have 
a name).  The guy didn't remember/know the tags were on the items, 
though, but I remember it was some sort of network device (this was in 
1987 or so, so it was worth a few hundred bucks).

I ended up stuck in the store's office with him waiting for the cops to 
show up.  *That* was fun.  17 years old with an older thief under my 
supervision.  He asked to use the phone to call his wife, his lawyer, etc 
- and I told him that the police would take care of that when they picked 
him up.

The cops, in the meantime, got lost on the way to pick him up.

I worked for "B. Dalton's Software Etc." - the mall had a B. Dalton 
Bookseller in it as well.  So the cops came to the mall and went to the 
wrong store, and it took them a bit to realize that they'd gone to the 
wrong store.

Jim

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