Was Not Egg-specting That!

Many years ago, I worked at a now-defunct big box store. We hired a new employee to work at the service desk. She took every opportunity to tell us that she was a struggling single mother of a young daughter.

It was around Easter time, and the plastic fillable eggs were quite skilled at escaping their packages and rolling all over the store; any damaged items were brought to the service desk to be written off and disposed of. The new hire asks the manager:

New Hire: “Could I have the plastic eggs that fall from the packaging? I can’t afford anything for my daughter’s Easter basket, being a struggling single mother and all.”

Manager: *Taking pity on her.* “Yes, of course.”

So, for a week or so, she dutifully collected all of the plastic eggs and took them home.

That same week, we noticed that the registers at the service desk were coming up short – hundreds of dollars every day. Loss prevention watched the security tapes:

The new hire was pulling bills out of the register and putting them in the plastic eggs, then walking out with the bag of eggs at the end of her shift! She made off with thousands of dollars.

She was fired and had charges for embezzlement pressed, despite the whole struggling single mom thing.