Opening It Indoors Isn’t The Worst Thing You Can Do With An Umbrella

I work for a big-box home improvement store, and this happened on a closing shift. I wasn’t particularly involved in this incident, but it was so stupid I just had to share it.

I work in the garden centre, and we have two additional checkouts so that customers can pay for plants, dirt, etc., without going back into the main store. These checkouts close earlier than the rest of the store for staffing reasons, and at the time of this incident, they are closed for the night.

Our lovely customer walks up to me and asks how to get out of the store. This isn’t an uncommon question in my department, as due to [global health crisis] safety, our store has been set up with several one-way aisles and the checkout in the garden is down a long aisle, so I direct him back to the centre of the store.

He tries to proceed through to our garden centre checkout anyway, which is physically blocked by plants we’ve pulled in for the night, so I direct him to the main store again, and he finally goes that way. Now, a relevant detail is that this man is holding a huge patio umbrella, which I can immediately tell on sight is one we don’t sell in our store, and he’s mumbling something about the “blue store” (our competitor). It’s bizarre, but as I’m tired, I chalk it up to just him maybe being hard of hearing or maybe a bit drunk. Maybe he’s just in the wrong place to return the umbrella (not unheard of for retail), but that’s Returns’ job, not mine.

A few minutes later, our Loss Prevention guy contacts me over the earpiece to confirm that we don’t sell that umbrella.

I later learn that the man stuffed some items into the umbrella and tried to leave with them.