A reasonable guide to soft theft.
I am going to give you advice tonight, because it is late and I am in a benevolent mood.
If you've ever visited a bookstore, you may have noted the presence of a "bargain" section where books are sold for drastically discounted prices. If this was at a Barnes & Noble, you may have thought, "Wow, these stickers with the reduced price come right off! I wonder if anyone would notice me pulling the sticker off this book and putting it on a book I actually want to buy?"
Here are a few things to consider when you attempt this scam:
1. Don't be greedy. Saturday night, a guy in a pink shirt got into a dispute with a cashier and, eventually, a manager over the price of a book that had a $1.99 sticker on it. This was a sticker with a handwritten price on it, sans barcode. If you're trying to scam BN by affixing a reduced price sticker to a non-reduced book, use one of the stickers that has a barcode on it and hope that the cashier doesn't notice that the book that rings up is not the book he scanned. The barcoded stickers are generally in the $4.98 - $6.98 range, so you'll pay more, but if your cashier is unobservant you'll still get a substantial discount. This leads us to the next tip.
2. Choose your book(s) carefully. Pink Shirt was arguing about You: The Owner's Manual, a book that, propelled by the authors' repeat appearances on Oprah, is currently ON THE FUCKING BESTSELLER LIST. Now, I know that many of you think that retail employees are idiots, but while not every person working at my store can be as brilliant as I, there isn't a single cashier in the place who would blithely accept the presence of a $1.99 sticker on that book. The very idea that You: The Owner's Manual would be discounted so heavily is preposterous to anyone who has spent more than an hour on the job. We are not stupid. We know what the popular books are. One of the main reasons I am so confident that Pink Shirt was trying to scam us -- as opposed to having just innocently picked up a mislabeled book -- is that he made the ludicrous claim that he'd taken the book from a big stack of similarly marked-down copies of You in the bargain section1. Right.
3. If you're going to try to get your way by being intimidating, don't wear a pink shirt. Eventually the conflict between Pinky and the cashier made its way over to the customer service desk. When the manager on duty politely explained to him that the book was mislabeled and she couldn't sell it to him for the $1.99 on the sticker, he stopped her and said, "I'm going to talk. When I'm done talking, then you can talk." The manager told him to stop being rude, to which he retorted, "I'm not being rude." There followed an account of his taking the book to the registers and being met with skeptcism from both the cashier and her manager, who according to him gave him conflicting reasons for the book not being discounted. None of which matters, of course; the book isn't $1.99, period. But Pinky was either really that much of a dick or he was working with the assumption that if he was not just rude but a massive, gaping asshole, he would get what he wanted. The problem with this approach is that it generally only works when your request is kinda sorta reasonable, like say returning a book for a full refund a week later than is allowed by the return policy. Getting a 92% discount on a current bestseller does not fall into the category of a reasonable request. Also, let me reiterate that pink is not the color to wear when you try this.
4. Don't act guilty. One of the first things Pinky said to the manager was, "Are you accusing me of putting the sticker on the book?" The manager had done no such thing2, so his bringing it up unprovoked can safely be considered what poker players refer to as a "tell". Honestly, I was expecting him to try to play the dreaded "race card" (he was black), especially as it became more and more clear that his plan wasn't going to work.
I really feel like I'm failing to convey what a complete and total asshole this guy was, and that's a shame because I sincerely think that I have never, at any job I've ever worked, witnessed a customer treat the employees at a store so poorly. Just standing there listening to the way he was carrying on, I was getting so angry that I was shaking; if I'd had to actually deal with him in any way, it would have been bad. Really, really bad. To give you an idea of the authority this guy thought he had: once the presence of the cashier was no longer required, the manager sent her back to cash, to which Pinky demanded, "You don't send her away while I'm talking!" Of course, he wasn't in control of the situation even a little bit, and so his impotent command fell on deaf ears, but the sheer unmitigated gall of it still pisses me off, hours after the fact.
You've probably guessed that Pinky did not get his copy of You: The Owner's Manual for the price to which he felt he was entitled. Actual quote: "So, I just waited fifteen minutes for nothing." Awwwwww. Poor bay-beeeeee. Enjoy being followed by the undercover security guards next time you're in the store, moron.
1 The other main reason is that the security guards knew he was stealing but couldn't do anything about it because they lost track of him for a minute and therefore hadn't seen the process of his thievery from beginning to end, as required.
2 Although, as previously noted, it was fairly obvious that he had.
If you've ever visited a bookstore, you may have noted the presence of a "bargain" section where books are sold for drastically discounted prices. If this was at a Barnes & Noble, you may have thought, "Wow, these stickers with the reduced price come right off! I wonder if anyone would notice me pulling the sticker off this book and putting it on a book I actually want to buy?"
Here are a few things to consider when you attempt this scam:
1. Don't be greedy. Saturday night, a guy in a pink shirt got into a dispute with a cashier and, eventually, a manager over the price of a book that had a $1.99 sticker on it. This was a sticker with a handwritten price on it, sans barcode. If you're trying to scam BN by affixing a reduced price sticker to a non-reduced book, use one of the stickers that has a barcode on it and hope that the cashier doesn't notice that the book that rings up is not the book he scanned. The barcoded stickers are generally in the $4.98 - $6.98 range, so you'll pay more, but if your cashier is unobservant you'll still get a substantial discount. This leads us to the next tip.
2. Choose your book(s) carefully. Pink Shirt was arguing about You: The Owner's Manual, a book that, propelled by the authors' repeat appearances on Oprah, is currently ON THE FUCKING BESTSELLER LIST. Now, I know that many of you think that retail employees are idiots, but while not every person working at my store can be as brilliant as I, there isn't a single cashier in the place who would blithely accept the presence of a $1.99 sticker on that book. The very idea that You: The Owner's Manual would be discounted so heavily is preposterous to anyone who has spent more than an hour on the job. We are not stupid. We know what the popular books are. One of the main reasons I am so confident that Pink Shirt was trying to scam us -- as opposed to having just innocently picked up a mislabeled book -- is that he made the ludicrous claim that he'd taken the book from a big stack of similarly marked-down copies of You in the bargain section1. Right.
3. If you're going to try to get your way by being intimidating, don't wear a pink shirt. Eventually the conflict between Pinky and the cashier made its way over to the customer service desk. When the manager on duty politely explained to him that the book was mislabeled and she couldn't sell it to him for the $1.99 on the sticker, he stopped her and said, "I'm going to talk. When I'm done talking, then you can talk." The manager told him to stop being rude, to which he retorted, "I'm not being rude." There followed an account of his taking the book to the registers and being met with skeptcism from both the cashier and her manager, who according to him gave him conflicting reasons for the book not being discounted. None of which matters, of course; the book isn't $1.99, period. But Pinky was either really that much of a dick or he was working with the assumption that if he was not just rude but a massive, gaping asshole, he would get what he wanted. The problem with this approach is that it generally only works when your request is kinda sorta reasonable, like say returning a book for a full refund a week later than is allowed by the return policy. Getting a 92% discount on a current bestseller does not fall into the category of a reasonable request. Also, let me reiterate that pink is not the color to wear when you try this.
4. Don't act guilty. One of the first things Pinky said to the manager was, "Are you accusing me of putting the sticker on the book?" The manager had done no such thing2, so his bringing it up unprovoked can safely be considered what poker players refer to as a "tell". Honestly, I was expecting him to try to play the dreaded "race card" (he was black), especially as it became more and more clear that his plan wasn't going to work.
I really feel like I'm failing to convey what a complete and total asshole this guy was, and that's a shame because I sincerely think that I have never, at any job I've ever worked, witnessed a customer treat the employees at a store so poorly. Just standing there listening to the way he was carrying on, I was getting so angry that I was shaking; if I'd had to actually deal with him in any way, it would have been bad. Really, really bad. To give you an idea of the authority this guy thought he had: once the presence of the cashier was no longer required, the manager sent her back to cash, to which Pinky demanded, "You don't send her away while I'm talking!" Of course, he wasn't in control of the situation even a little bit, and so his impotent command fell on deaf ears, but the sheer unmitigated gall of it still pisses me off, hours after the fact.
You've probably guessed that Pinky did not get his copy of You: The Owner's Manual for the price to which he felt he was entitled. Actual quote: "So, I just waited fifteen minutes for nothing." Awwwwww. Poor bay-beeeeee. Enjoy being followed by the undercover security guards next time you're in the store, moron.
1 The other main reason is that the security guards knew he was stealing but couldn't do anything about it because they lost track of him for a minute and therefore hadn't seen the process of his thievery from beginning to end, as required.
2 Although, as previously noted, it was fairly obvious that he had.
posted by Dktr. Blasphemy at 2:34 AM
2 Comments:
how do i become an undercover barnes and noble security guard?
I think you have to weigh more than 90 pounds.
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