Apprehension II
This one is a little bit different. Now that I was promoted to a regional job, I had about twenty stores in my charge and most of them were in bad parts of town. One particular store called “Hilltop” was getting hit by cigarette thieves all the time. This was back in the days when cigarettes were out on the sales floor and you didn’t need to ask somebody behind a counter for them. Looking at the inventory numbers, in one year’s time, they lost around $45,000 dollars in smokes. Somebody had to put a crimp in those numbers. My boss chose me.
I drove out to Hilltop and met with the store manager. He set me up in an office that was close to the cigarettes and was in between them and the front door. I could see every angle of the cigarette rack from my windows and I had three cameras on the rack, taping the action twenty-four hours a day. I wish I still had those tapes, some of the stuff recorded on them was comedy gold.
The first apprehension I made in that store was on a guy named Jason. Jason was a homeless person who lived behind the store and sometimes did odd jobs for the store manager. He would clean up around the dumpster, sweep off the back dock, collect carts from the neighborhood and do small fix-it jobs. Because he wasn’t an actual employee, the store manager paid him from a store fund that was made out of donations from the employees. Jason was a small time celebrity in the Hilltop area.
So I come in, set up my cameras and then go home for the night. The next morning, I turn on the VCR and watch the playback. Jason comes in the front door with some bags of garbage. He heads up to the service desk and chitchats with the girl behind the counter. He then meanders over to the cigarette rack and puts ten cartons of smokes in his garbage bag—the office girl is visibly laughing as he does this. He then makes his way to the back room so that he can throw the bag of trash into the dumpster. I switched my shift hours so that I can confront Jason the next day. It is obvious that the store fund isn’t giving him enough money to live off of, so he has to supplement that income by stealing cigarettes and selling them around the neighborhood.
The next day, the same scenario plays out, only this time I am waiting with a couple of police officers there just in case the scene gets out of hand. I settle the officers in my office and then I go out on the sales floor to see what is going to happen. Jason comes in with the parking lot garbage, heads over to the rack and stuffs some cartons in the bag. He doesn’t notice the curious fellow standing right near him who is acting like he is reading a magazine. He then wanders towards the service desk to do his usual chitchat thing, but stops dead in his tracks. Finally, he has noticed me.
I take a step forward towards him, my hands at my sides and my attitude totally relaxed. This sort of situation has happened to me before and with guys like Jason, it helps if you are as non-confrontational as possible. They tend to blow up when caught. Jason realizes what has just happened and I can see his body begin to puff up as if he is going to have to defend himself. His eyes are wide and he is beginning to show signs of being angry and wanting to fight. Then he gets a curious, almost sorrowful look on his face. He grabs at his chest and he falls down to the floor in a wild paroxysm.
Oh hell, I get down to help him as he is obviously having a heart attack. I feel a cold trickle of sweat right between my shoulder blades and the hair on the back of my neck is sticking straight up. This wasn’t supposed to happen! I yell at the service counter girl to call 9-1-1 and I prepare myself to perform CPR…which I was fully trained to do, but had never done up to that point. From behind me, a booming voice rings out:
“Jason, get up!”
I turn and look at the cop behind me, I am in disbelief. Jason is laying down and is in obvious pain. He is probably dying right in front of us! The cop yells at him to get up again and when he sees that Jason isn’t going anywhere, he reaches down and grabs the old bum by his belt.
“I said get up!” he says sternly as he hauls the guy to his feet by his pants.
With his act compromised, Jason slumps and allows himself to be cuffed and taken away. The cops knew that this guy would pull this charade on me but had neglected to tell me. Ha ha ha very funny guys. Here I am shitting myself because I think this bum is gonna die on the front end right in front of about thirty customers and I can visualize the front page of the newspaper tomorrow. And they are laughing their asses off as they drive off in their cruiser.
At least I got to fire the service counter girl.
But Hilltop wasn’t done with me yet. A few weeks later, I saw a thing that I will remember to the end of my days. I saw somebody use a bomb to steal cigarettes. There is no depth thieves wont sink to when they want something bad enough and this depth is about as deep as they come. What makes it worse is that I was shopping in the store when it happened and not actually on duty.
Two guys, who at first glance would appear to be around nineteen or twenty, walked into the store and went straight to the household section. They grabbed a bottle of Dran-O and a roll of aluminum foil off of the shelf and then headed over to the soft drinks aisle. There they grabbed a bottle of Mountain Dew off the shelf, chugged as much of it as they could and then dumped the remainder of the soda onto the floor. Once the bottle was empty, they filled it with about a quarter of an inch of the drain cleaner. They then wadded up balls of the aluminum foil and got them ready to drop into the soda bottle.
They didn’t seem to know what they wanted to steal because they wandered around the store for about twenty minutes before they split up. One guy went to the back of the store near the lunchmeat counter and the other guy went up to the front of the store and hung out near the cigarette rack. After about two minutes of fiddling, the guy near the meat puts the balls of aluminum foil into the soda bottle and then puts the cap on the bottle as tight as he can. He sets the bottle down on the lunchmeat counter and walks away very fast. This is the point where I come in. Until that point I had been thinking these guys were just trying to steal the soda. I walked over to where the guy had set the bottle down and then realized my mistake.
When Dran-O reacts with aluminum, it creates a gas that quickly fills the area where the reaction is occurring. If that area happens to be a tight and constricting plastic bottle, the gas will expand fast enough inside of it to explode. As I came up on the bottle, I could see it was bulging out in a funny way. The bottle exploded in a shower of sparks and smoke just as I figured out what was going on.
I put my basket of groceries down and ran to the front of the store. These guys were using the explosion as a diversion. With everybody’s attention focused on the back of the store, they would have free reign to attack the cigarettes…which they did. The other guy had a basket filled with single packs and cartons. The second he saw me coming up the aisle towards him, he bolted. I knew I couldn’t catch him and I also knew that since there had been an explosion, I had to stay at the store.
As luck would have it, a concerned citizen in the store had called 9-1-1 the second he heard the explosion. A cruiser was nearby and they drove over to the store to check out the problem. As they entered the store’s parking lot, they noticed a scrubby looking dude running away from the building with a basket full of cigarettes, single packs flying out as he bounced down an alley at the side of the store. They gunned the engine and raced down the alley, making the arrest a few minutes later. We never caught the other guy and I never got to see the guy who had run down the alley, the cops took him away before I had a chance.
Later, I did get to read the arrest report. He had been charged with “possession of deadly ordinance” and “inducing panic.” Both of those charges were felonies. The minor charge of theft had been dropped, but he ended up getting three years in jail for about forty bucks worth of smokes.
The store lost about eight thousand dollars worth of meat products. The bomb had showered the whole meat case with Dran-O making none of the products edible or safe. When I wrote up my report for my loss prevention boss, I also included a few pictures of the carnage. I stressed in my report that this sort of thing, though outlandish, was the sort of behavior to expect when cigarettes are out on the floor where thieves can get to them. The store manager also sent a similar note to his bosses—the regional supervisors.
A few weeks later, a group of construction workers came in to the store. The first thing they did was remove the rack from the sales floor. The second thing they did was construct an alcove next to the service desk where a person could purchase cigarettes completely separate from any other purchases they might want to make in the store. This alcove had a metal fence that locked down and could not be hopped over. A few months later, that fence was replaced by bulletproof Plexiglas.
The store’s margin of variance for cigarettes the next full quarter of business showed only a 1.5% loss.
It’s getting to be so bad stores might as well put the whole grocery department behind a counter with the bulletproof Plexiglas.
Things that are now “behind the counter” in grocery stores because of theft:
·Cigarettes/tobacco
·Batteries
·Baby formula
·Phone cards and gift cards (I don’t know why…they need to be activated prior to using them)
·Razor blades
·Cold medicines that contain pseudoephedrine (if you can get them at all anymore)
·Liquor (if your particular area allows sales of liquor in a grocery store)
·Claritin, Zyrtec, Prilosec, Osteo Bi-Flex (pretty much any high ticket medicine)
·Film
·Baseball/Pokémon/collector cards
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