Below is a picture of a Maui Bus driver.  He is very conscientious and wants to make sure that riders are paying the right amount of money to ride the bus-which is a good thing.  He claims that he is scammed all day long by riders and so he wanted to look at the amount of money I was putting into the money slot because he thinks maybe I fit a certain profile of a rider who would want to cheat Maui County.  

He didn't sound like he was telling other riders that he is scammed all day long, and it appeared to me that I was the only rider he asked to physically check the amount of money being offered in payment to the County of Maui for riding the bus. If he did, then I didn't see it or hear it.

I have caught hundreds of dishonest people in my life and not one of them did I catch being dishonest because they looked like they were somebody who was going to scam somebody.  

I once caught a very good looking woman stealing expensive meat and other items from a Lucky store I worked for.  She would travel around the store with expensive meat down at the bottom of her basket and then very quickly she would place this meat into her oversized purse.  She knew what she was doing and had probably stolen from this Lucky store many times before.   

She was planning her exit on the left side entrance/exit door and I yanked the large filled purse right out of her hands before she had a chance to depart.  I thought she would just run out of the store after getting the meat back from her, but she followed me to the store office.  After calling the police out to the store, it turned out this woman had over $1400 in cash inside her purse buried below all the store's meat... it's no wonder she was willing to stay inside the store.  She was a regular shopper and none of the other employees of this store would have even consider her being a thief because they didn't think she "looked" like a person who would steal. 

Repeat: She had over $1400 in cash inside of her purse and wanted to steal the meat and some other items.  She probably needed some of that money to post bail that day after being arrested. 

It's interesting, because in my 30-years of working in the grocery business I remember all the times employees of a store would see a poor looking person coming into the store and then they would follow that person all around the store waiting for the poor looking person to steal. The employees just assumed that because somebody looked poor they were surely to steal... Sometimes a poor looking person would steal but no more than anymore else in a higher income class.   

I caught the grand-son of one of Albertson's biggest stockholders stealing and helping his personal friends steal regularly from an Albertson's store.  Most of the people I caught stealing were well-to-do. 

This bus driver must have thought I looked like somebody who would scam him and the County of Maui---he says he gets scammed all day long by people and so he wanted to make sure I wasn't cheating him.  Was it because I am so thin and so he thought maybe I look like a druggie who might want to scam the County of Maui?  Or maybe he thought I was poor and looked homeless and therefore would want to scam him and the County of Maui? Well he didn't appear to be scrutinizing the other riders after me (from the vantage point I had at the back of the bus), and so I just assumed he was profiling me as somebody who would cheat him and the county of Maui because of the way I looked.

If there is such a huge problem that this bus driver is being scammed all day long by riders, then it seems to me that a simple solution would be that he would be telling this to every rider getting on the bus and giving them the same spiel he gave to me.  But it appeared to me that he only directed his concern for riders scamming him and the County of Maui at me.

I guess the good news is that he's trying to make sure nobody is scamming him and the County of Maui---now all he has to do is direct that same concern to every rider getting on his bus! 

The irony here is that I am probably one rider he can count on that would never cheat him or the County of Maui.  Maybe while I am in public I should walk around with a bag over my head so my fellow human beings would cease with the inaccurate and unnecessary poor judgment I receive from them. 

This probably is one of my best stories of catching a woman shopper stealing from a store I worked for...I have so many but this one stands out. And I caught her stealing only hours after catching a woman trying to steal expensive meat with $1400 in cash inside her purse.

I was a display builder in many of the stores I worked at.  In fact, I was one of the best display builders in the entire company.  I remember being transferred to this store and after a couple of weeks of being there, a woman shopper came up to me and said  "I knew you were now working in this store because I saw the displays that were being built."  This woman knew me from other stores and when she saw the displays at this store she knew I was now working in this particular store...anyway, back to my story.

I was building a display in the back of the store when I noticed a nice looking woman moving around the store with a full basket of groceries.  I glanced at the top of her basket and saw she had around 7 packs of loose cigarettes.  I  thought to myself  "is she going to steal those cigarettes?" I mean, why not just buy a carton of cigarettes (10 packs) instead of the seven packs?  She obviously appeared to be someone who could afford to buy a carton of cigarettes.  However, it is easier for someone to stick seven individual packs of cigarettes inside their purse than it is to stick a long rectangular carton containing 10 packs.

This was a very high volume grocery store and at this time of the day there were lots of customers shopping.  I was called to the front of the store to help check out customers in the only checkstand register not being used.  When I got to the checkstand I kept focusing on the cigarette spinner that was on the sales floor where customers could grab their own loose packs of cigarettes to keep an eye on that area.  There were long lines of customers waiting at all the registers.  I then realized the woman whom I had spotted having the loose packs of cigarettes was now waiting in my line-about 6 to 8 customers behind and thought to myself this should be interesting. 

Finally, approximately 15 minutes later, she is now my customer to ring up.  After scanning all of her items, I didn't notice the cigarettes.  I bagged up her merchandise and she paid for them.  When I gave her the receipt and thanked her for shopping at the store, I asked her what happened to the cigarettes she had placed at the top of her basket???  She told me she had put them back on the cigarette spinner. 

I then told her that when I got to the register I was constantly watching that cigarette spinner and I didn't see her or anybody else put any cigarettes back.  It was at this point I told her that if she didn't give me the cigarettes I would call the police and have them come to the store to search inside her purse.  She still denied taking anything.  I told the head-clerk, who was taking care of customers in two registers in front of me, that we needed to call the police out to the store to have them search inside this woman's purse. 

When I said that to the head-clerk, this woman opened up her purse and took out the cigarettes and gave them to me along with the non-food items she also wanted to steal.  Had she been honest with me from the beginning I would have just rung up her cigarettes and the other items and let her pay for them instead of having her arrested. The store manager (and he really hated me) was coming back from lunch and I told him from the checkstand that we needed to call the police out again to have this woman, who was now detained inside the manager's office, arrested for stealing.  This was the second woman I caught stealing on this day and the second time this manager had to make that call. 

What's the irony of this story?

I was the only employee of this store who knew this woman had seven (7) packs of cigarettes at the top of her basket while she was pushing her basket around the sales floor. 

When she came to the front of the store to be checked out, she could have easily picked any of the other 12 registers to wait in line for 15 minutes and that employee probably would not have known about the cigarettes and she would not have been arrested that day because I wasn't going to confront her while she was being rung up at another register.

Her choosing my register to wait in line for 15 minutes was her only mistake while trying to steal on this day.  This was another regular shopper at this particular store.  A shopper the rest of the employees of this store would have never suspected of stealing because of the way she looked.   And she was probably stealing regularly...

She waited 15 minutes in my line to be checked out and that made it possible for her to meet the police on that day.  I wonder if she ever tells this story to anybody about the grocery store employee and how he caught her stealing?  Right after I thanked her for shopping at the store I then asked her what happened to the cigarettes that were at the top of her basket??? 

She had no clue that I was even aware of the fact that she had loose cigarettes at the top of her basket at the back of the store.  It must have boggled her mind for some time.

Why I worked hard for this guy is beyond me.  Wolfe thought wearing a white shirt and a tie made him smart----but he was mostly, in my opinion, just an idiot who had friends just like him in supervision.  The woman next to him, her name is Marge Harding. Harding was just as rude as he was.  She was a nasty, belligerent and 'very rude" could have been her middle name. The other three employees to the left of her were really wonderful hard working people.

And to think that the Maui Bus Driver seen on this page thought I might want to cheat him and the County of Maui.

This theft took place in the same store where the woman with $1400 in her purse wanted to steal expensive meat and the woman who waited 15 minutes in my checkstand only to find herself meeting the police afterwards.  Oh yeah, the store that Dale Wolfe managed---well in my opinion.....mismanaged!!!

Here is the story:  I was the checker in the "10 items or less" quick-check checkstand.  I happened to look towards the right entrance door to our store (there are two---one on the left side and right side of the store) and saw two young guys come into the store and grab a shopping cart.  When I saw the one guy grab onto the basket, I immediately thought these two guys were going to exit the other side of the store's entrance with a basket of merchandise.  This thought just came over me and I felt a tremendous anxiety shoot through my body.  

My lunch period was to start in less than 10 minutes and I continued to have this very uneasy feeling within me.  I kept looking behind me to see if those two guys were exiting the door on the other side,,,where the door is located and facing the backs of the other checkers in the front checkstands of the store.  Because of where this entrance was located it was an easy exit door for thieves to leave unnoticed. 

I called a management key person and told them I needed to get out of the checkstand quickly and this person wasn't sure what was going on with me.  Anxiety was just shooting all through me.  Finally, my relief checker came up to my register and let me out for my lunch break....when I got out I moved quickly to the other side of the store and as I got there the two guys that I felt were going to exit the door with merchandise were just now exiting the store just as I thought...with a basket of merchandise. 

I immediately caught the attention of another employee and asked this person to follow me and assist me.  This employee did and I stopped the two guys by grabbing their basket right as they were leaving the sidewalk in front of the store.  The guy pushing the basket asked me in a surprised voice "what are you doing?"  I asked him for a receipt for the merchandise sitting in the basket and as soon as he gave me a suspicious look in his eyes and failed to show me a receipt, I told him that we needed to go back inside of the store to clear up a problem and I started taking the basket back inside the store. 

Having the other employee with me was important because he became my extra protection at this point.  The two guys came back inside of the store with me and the other employee.   Management was then alerted to what these two guys were up to and the police were called out to the store.  The police came to the store and arrested them.

The goods inside the basket were beer, chips, salsa and a couple of meat items.  It was Monday night football, and they came into our store to steal their football party food before the start of the game.   They exited the side of the store where the other checkers backs (at the front of the store's checkstands), were facing them and this showed me that they probably had used this exit many times before as their easy get-away for when they wanted to steal. 

I had this anxiety come over me about these two guys who entered our store and the feeling that they were going to steal as soon as one of them grabbed a grocery cart....and they eventually tried to. 

It wasn't because of how they looked or basically anything else. I had a premonition of the theft before it even happened....

Here is great story on how I found a missing $250 box of quarters at Lucky Store #179-Northgate Blvd in Sacramento.  Below is the actual grocery store cash-report-balance receipt for September 15, 1987- nearly 25-years ago.  And this receipt shows a $250 shortage.

My job on this day was to be the closing manager and this store's bookkeeper.  When I started my shift, my first responsibility is to balance the office/safe money.  After counting all monies, it became known to me that the office safe was short $250. When I brought this cash shortage to the acting manager's attention, he ran a checkstand audit/receipt and determined that checkstand #6 was low in money and so he did a $250 loan to that checkstand and that balanced the safe. He knew at the time that he did this loan it was a violation of company policy to force-balance a safe. He could have been demoted from his management position as others have been in the past.  Had I done it, the company would have terminated me.

Later, towards the end of the business day, I counted out checkstand #6 and quickly realized that this checkstand was going to be short $250.  At this point I now know that the office/safe was where this cash shortage originated.  So, I needed to spend all my attention on trying to locate where that missing money was or least try to understand why it was missing.  I recounted the safe thoroughly and once again I couldn't find a problem.  Now at this point, the safe is balanced because the acting manager forced balanced it by loaning #6 $250. 

So I spent the next hour going through the previous days business bookkeeping records trying to find possible problems with the bookkeeping for the last three (3) days.  I had done the three (3) previous days bookkeeping and I saw we had a lot of quarters in inventory the previous day and looked at the bank delivery receipt for this day to see what was delivered to our store from the bank earlier in the day.  

Our store was charged for three (3) boxes of quarters on this day and that would equal $750 in quarters- and I added that to the inventory of quarters from the previous night and I concluded that our store could not have gone through the amount of quarters that we did during this days business based on what we received that day. 

I checked the bank receipt to see which employee signed for it and realized this employee was a new employee to office procedures so I called her at home to ask her if she could could tell me how many boxes of quarters we received from the bank that morning.  She told me she received two (2). I then told her we got charged for three (3)....and this third box of quarters we didn't receive and were charged for, was the reason the office/safe count was short $250 when I started my shift at 2:45pm.

I left a note for the same acting manager that he needed to call the bank in the morning ASAP to let them know we got shorted a box of quarters from the previous days business.  When he contacted the bank in the morning, the bank said they were waiting for a call.  I had to wonder why the bank didn't call us??? ...personally speaking and in my opinion, if our store doesn't catch that missing box of quarters, we never see that $250 again and it becomes just another cash shortage for this store because the bank would not have called us and our employees of this store now would become suspects (again) to the cash shortage---and they had absolutely nothing to do with this cash shortage. 

This store had a lot of checkstand cash shortages.  If I don't find that missing box of quarters, Shelton Campbell, the acting manager who forced balanced the safe (a violation of company policy), would have arrogantly placed every store employee working at the registers under the cloud of suspicion for dishonesty. 

Shelton Campbell was never reprimanded for his violation of company policy. The supervisors liked him so why would he be reprimanded?  He was later promoted to a manager position where he had the power to write-up/reprimand other employees for their own violations of company policy-in which I was told he did many times. 

Sometimes I would run into an employee who worked at the same store Campbell managed and they would tell me how manager Campbell had written them up unfairly for petty stuff.  I then would proceed to tell that same employee how Shelton violated a very important company policy in regards to handling money in the safe/office and he was never even reprimanded.  Nobody even said a word to him. 

The morning after the night I spent looking for a missing $250,  I came into the store and asked him if he had called the bank on the box of quarters we didn't receive, he told me yes he did, and that the bank would credit our store, but he never looked at me the entire day because he knew I watched him force balance the office safe.

He never even thanked me for finding that box of quarters....he couldn't humble himself to do that because he knew that he violated a very important company policy and his personal friends in supervision closed their eyes to his violation. I later learned, after I was transferred to another Lucky Store, that he told that store manager I was an "asshole." And that manager, whom didn't even know me, told the rest of his crew who didn't even know me that I was "asshole." I didn't learn about this until one employee at the store, where I was transferred to, told me that "I wasn't the asshole" that they said was coming over to this store...

Because I found a box of quarters that Campbell failed to receive from the bank early one morning, and got charged for, he was professional enough to tell a manager whom hadn't even met me before that I was an asshole.

I don't believe there was another employee around who would have found this box of quarters or solve the cash shortage problem because most people would have assumed the cash shortage was just another case where a dumb employee mishandled the money or a dishonest employee stole the money, instead of investigating and concluding that the bank failed to give us all of the quarters our store was charged for during that day's morning. The bank used brinks/or/ Loomis-(I forget which one was being used at that time....both have been used...) to deliver the store its money needs and I can't speculate if an employee delivering the money might have been hoping this store didn't catch this $250 mistake and benefit themselves from this money.   

Maui Bus- thank you for reminding me of another great story!!!

This true story took place at a Lucky Store in Carmichael, CA.---store manager Arlene George   

Here is the story:

I had just returned back to work from being on vacation for a few weeks.  I mostly rang up customers grocery orders while I worked in this store. A woman shopper came into my checkstand and I rang up her groceries.  When I gave her the total to her purchase, she proceeded to write me a personal check.  When she handed me the check, I could quickly see that this personal check belonged to a different person.  I told her that I couldn't accept a bank check personalized for some other person.  She told me this person was her husband and that our store takes her checks all the time.  And then I asked her "who takes this check all the time?"  She told me the store manager accepts her check.  There was another management-employee working in a couple of checkstands in front of me, and I asked this person about this check and if they knew this customer.  They looked at the woman customer in my checkstand and told me confidently that this woman's check is OK and go ahead and accept it. So I did.

After this woman left the store, I had an opportunity to get out of the checkstand and then went to the management office to call the bank.  When I gave the bank the account number, the bank told me that this account was closed.  I left the office and went to the management-employee (the same one who told me to accept the check) and told them this woman is writing checks on an account that has been closed.  It turned out it wasn't just our store that accepted this woman's bad checks for a period of time....she was writing bad checks quite frequently at a number of Lucky Stores in the area. 

How was she able to do this?  She was a very nice looking lady.  When she went to a Lucky Store to establish herself as a customer, she would hand the clerk this check with her husbands name on it (different last name than hers)...When the clerk questioned the woman and the check, the clerk would call the manager for a check approval.  When the manager would question the validity of this check, this woman would go on a tirade, make a scene, claim that she shopped regularly at all the Lucky stores and then tell the manager she was going to contact the main office of our company and complain about this manager and the store.

You would have thought that the store manager, being paid a large salary to protect Lucky Stores assets, would have made a simple trip to the office, while whistling the tune "Mr. Bluebird On My Shoulder," to call  the bank and find out if this check was indeed a good check and there were funds in the account to cover it...NO, that didn't happen in our store and didn't even happen in a half dozen other Lucky Stores where this woman made over-paid managers look like fools, there, in those stores too. 

She scammed Lucky Stores out of thousands of dollars because the people they promoted to manage its stores didn't appear to have a brain in their heads.  They all thought that this nicely dressed woman, who threatened to complain to Lucky Stores main office, if they didn't accept her check, was good for the amount of money she wrote on each personal check...The fear of having some customer make a phone call to the main office to complain about them personally superseded them using common sense in dealing with a well-polished, professionally looking woman, paying with a personal check in the name of some other person. 

I don't believe there is a supermarket anywhere in the world that would have accepted a personal check from me while printed in the name of some other person.  Nope-I don't think that would have ever happened.  I know this Maui bus driver wouldn't have accepted a check like that from me.

I don't even know if this nice looking woman ever had to answer to anybody about the easy way she loaded up baskets with Lucky Store merchandise and tapped-danced her way out of the store with a big smile on her face after handing the manager of the store a bogus check.  In other words, I don't even think she was ever caught. This probably came to be just another write-off loss due to theft where eventually Lucky Stores honest customers had to pay for it all in the form of higher prices.

Sometimes I wonder if I had not made a trip to the management office and called the bank that day, would this woman still be writing bad checks at Lucky Stores today, 20 years later? Anything is possible...LOL

Oh-one additional remark about Lucky Store Manager Arlene George.  I came into the store one morning and saw her by the office.  She told me store supervision made a visit and had done a store check.  Before leaving, these supervisors told Arlene everything in the store looked good.  I told Arlene "that is great."  So afterwards, I went around the store with empty grocery baskets and proceeded to put outdated merchandise, which were still on the shelves, inside the baskets. Mayonnaise; lunch meat; peanut butter; salad dressing- just to name a few. 

I filled up two entire grocery baskets with outdated merchandise and pushed them both up to the managers office and left a note on one of them that read "We don't look that good." I probably could have easily filled up two additional grocery baskets with out-dated merchandise. No, probably even a lot more than that.   I am sure that some of the products the bad-check-lady in the story above left this Lucky store with were outdated and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that this woman came back to the store to exchange the outdated item for a fresher one. 

OH---Arlene George was the store manager who graciously OK'd this woman's check featured in the story above...

To hear a short audio with Arlene (from 20 years ago) click on the image below:

In the above audio, you will hear Arlene George tell me that a Lucky Vice President named Terry Privott told her that theft wasn't a problem at Lucky and then she claims Lucky Loss & Prevention Manager Bob McConnel telling her that theft was bad in all the stores.  Now Bob McConnel was the same guy involved in the shoplifting case / Demetri Pappadopoulos - it appears to me that Bob McConnel didn't care too much about Lucky Stores losses after the way he used his influence in this case...

What's ironic is that this woman manager went to great lengths in trying to have me terminated with all sorts of bogus write-ups but was never successful. It was easier for a manager like this to spend a lot time trying to terminate me than it was for them to spend their time earning their money being an efficient store manager.  What most mis-managers don't know is that it is very difficult to terminate an employee who is honest, hard-working and adhers to company policy....all they can do is try to do it by lying and fabricating stories!

Below is a display built in the Lucky Store where this woman did some of her best bad-check-writing while shopping:

Attention Maui Bus: 
Thank-you again for reminding me of another great story.