He Didn’t Manage To Get Away With This One

I work at a family-run department store in a mid-sized city. We take layaways and orders from our loyal customer base. In mid-October, the owners — a lovely couple — hired a new manager that we grew to dislike fairly quickly because he always takes shortcuts.

It’s a couple of weeks before Christmas and the owners have been out of town for a week due to a family emergency. I’m helping a gentleman to try and find his order and have had no luck.

Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t find it here in the system. Is it at all possible that you put it under a different name?”

Customer #1: “No, I’m sure that I put it down under my name. I paid a lot of money for this gift.”

Me: “Let me call my manager and see if he can find it.”

I call up the manager.

Manager: “It must not have been ordered. [Coworker #1] is in charge of putting in our orders; I’ll deal with her.”

After the customer leaves, I ask the manager about this.

Me: “I didn’t know that [Coworker #1] had the authority to use the ordering system.”

Manager: “Oh, she doesn’t; I just told him that so he’d leave. Don’t mention it to her, okay? What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

I’m shocked at first and resolve to tell the coworker about it the next day. Before I can find her, the returning owners call me, her, and about three other employees into the office.

Owner: “I’m very disappointed in you all. I’ve had lots of calls from our customers while we were away, all complaining about you all not doing your jobs. You guys know that as soon as you take the order, you have to put it on the system for [Manager] to order the item up.”

Coworker #1: “I did log it in after they made the payment! [Manager] told me that [Coworker #3] didn’t put in the order.”

Coworker #2: “He told me that it was [My Name]’s job to put in the order.”

Me: “He told me that he just forgot and to blame [Coworker #1].”

We told the owner everything the manager had been telling us and he seemed shocked. He told us to go back to our stations in the store and called up [Manager]. From what we heard from the owner’s wife later, the manager had been taking the payments for himself and just blaming the rest of us. Police were called and the court case is currently pending.