I used to work for a large office supplier. Once, at a party, I was commiserating with another attendee who also used to work for the same place. During our swapping of horror stories, he relayed this wild ride to me.

His store had a spate of stolen printers — expensive ones. Hundreds of dollars per printer were apparently just walking out the door, and no one could figure out how. They watched for any break-ins on the camera or for any customers making a suspicious number of trips to the store, but nothing stood out as out of the ordinary.

Finally, they caught a break. One of the cashiers went on maternity leave, and the thefts immediately stopped, only to resume as soon as she returned. So, they had their culprit, but how was she doing it?

Relevant to this story is that this chain offers protection plans for hardware, especially printers. They really want their cashiers to push those protection plans, and they offer incentives for selling them. However, the way this is tracked is by having the customers sign a contract and putting that in the till with your name on it; it’s not actually tracked by the POS system. This is important.

Management started watching this associate closely, and when they saw how she was “stealing” the printers… Well, it turns out she wasn’t stealing at all.

Apparently, she really wanted those incentive payments for the protection plans, and she was pushing them just as hard as management told us to. (Most of us didn’t because, frankly, most customers didn’t want them and got mad when you tried to sell them on it.) The problem was that she got so focused on selling the protection plans that she forgot to actually scan the printers they were attached to. So the customers would purchase the protection plan but walk out with free printers. 

Had this been caught after just a few instances, she just would have been retrained, but by that point, she’d lost the store thousands of dollars in revenue, so she was let go instead.

Honestly, I sort of felt bad for her.

I work for a fairly small, newer branch of a much larger company. One of my coworkers — a low-level manager — has a habit of asking people to purchase things for the company and then “forgetting” to send them along when payroll comes around. This results in a whole circus of arguments and frustration from everyone.

One day, he reaches out to me via the company messaging app.

Coworker: “Hey, can you go get [specific expensive ink]? I’d go, but I have a mountain of work to do.”

Me: “Did you place an order?”

Coworker: “No, just go pick it up for me.”

Me: “And you’ll pay me back?”

[Coworker] calls me.

Coworker: “Are you going or not?”

Me: “Are you paying me back?”

Coworker: “It’s for work!”

Me: “So, just say, ‘Yes, I’m going to approve the expense,’ and I’ll go get it.”

Coworker: “Jesus, [My Name], just go!”

Me: “No.”

I hang up. He goes back to messaging me.

Coworker: “We really need that ink.”

Me: “Then you go get it. I’m done with this conversation until I have it in writing that I will be reimbursed.”

He stopped talking to me. He convinced someone else to go instead and “forgot” to tell payroll. Several people have gone to Human Resources about his forgetfulness, but nothing has been done yet. I suspect it’s because every time he doesn’t submit an expense, the company hopes they will be able to keep the money and [Coworker] looks like he has a great handle on the budget.

I work at a bank, and if you didn’t know, banks do not keep a lot of cash on hand like you see in the movies. Otherwise, we would be robbed every week, which is bad for business. We don’t issue cashier’s checks for non-customers or brand-new account owners.

A man in his thirties comes in and hands me a check.

Man: “I’d like to cash this check, please.”

Me: “Okay, do you have an account with us?”

Man: “No, I don’t.”

I look down at the check. It’s for $210,000.00!

The check is from our bank, and I’m able to verify it with our customer who wrote it, but as I stated, we don’t have that cash on hand. Even if you totaled the cash at all the branches in our area, we couldn’t cash the check for him.

I explain that to the man.

Me: “Sir, the earliest we could get you that much cash would be a week. We’d have to order it in.”

Man: “Fine. Then I’ll open an account and close it in a week.”

We were hesitant to order the money at all; it is a big risk to have that much money coming in and for him to have that in cash.

It took an hour to get him to understand that there was no way he was getting cash for his check that day.

I wanted to buy a gift certificate for my in-laws at one of their favorite local restaurants.

Me: “I’d like to get a $100 gift certificate, please.”

Cashier: “Certainly. That’ll be $108.”

Me: “Wait, what? Why is a $100 gift certificate $108?”

Cashier: “Well, you also have to pay for the tax.”

Me: “Hmm, I’ve never had to pay tax on a gift certificate before. Does that mean that there won’t be tax charged when the recipients use the gift certificate?”

Cashier: “No, of course, they’ll have to pay tax.”

Me: “But that means that you are charging tax twice.”

I could not make her understand the problem, and when I called later to speak with the manager, he couldn’t understand the problem, either. I haven’t gone back since.

Related:
Taxing Taxing, Part 13
Taxing Taxing, Part 12
Taxing Taxing, Part 11
Taxing Taxing, Part 10
Taxing Taxing, Part 9

I’ve just finished being yelled at by a customer for not being able to give her a discount on a clearance item. Another customer comes up to my register and starts hassling me.

Customer: “I know this cookie cutter isn’t worth two dollars. Lower the price for me.”

Me: “Ma’am, it’s already on clearance. I cannot lower the price for you.”

Customer: “Then get me your manager and make them lower it!”

I did, and she continued to argue and nag us for not negotiating on a CLEARANCE ITEM. She proceeded to walk out of the store with half her cart because she “disagreed” with most of the prices.