I rarely think crime is nifty but you have to give it up for two women who made off with a Samsung flatscreen TV at a Joplin Wal-Qaeda over the weekend — because of how they went about it.
The Joplin Globe has all the juicy details:
The women got away with a 52-inch, flat-screen Samsung television worth $1,300 on Sunday night, said Cpl. Chuck Niess of the Joplin Police Department.
Niess said a woman dressed as a Wal-Mart employee in tan pants and a blue shirt, with a portable communication device on her belt, entered a back room of the store at 2623 W. Seventh St., and recruited some employees to assist her in loading the television on a cart. The woman then wheeled the TV out to a second woman, who was posing as a customer in a sport utility vehicle in the parking lot.
By the time any true employees of the business became suspicious, both women were gone, Niess said.
WWWWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, that’s awesome. Talk about hiding in plain view…do the Wal-Qaeda workers there never pay attention to whom they are on the floor with at any given moment? Did they happen to think for one moment that the “workers” weren’t from their department and they had better call a manager?
Here’s more.
The woman posing as an employee was described as having dark brown hair. The other woman was about 5 feet 3 inches tall, with frosted blond hair and wearing a sun dress. She was driving a white SUV with Oklahoma plates that was pulling a U-Haul trailer.
Niess said the Pittsburg (Kan.) Police Department reported suspects matching the descriptions having pulled off a similar theft at the Wal-Mart store in Pittsburg.
TWO STORES!?!?!?!? If I were the manager of the Wal-Marts that were hit I would let the women keep the TV and fire my inattentive crew. No questions asked…I’d know who the real criminals are.
I could turn this into an anti-WalQaeda rant but let’s just focus on the hilarity of the situation.
Holy cow, I need to wipe my eyes.
I used to work the backroom at a Target, so I find this doubly hilarious. The day I applied for a job there, I just happened to be wearing a red polo shirt and khaki slacks – which is exactly the uniform they wear. In fact, in that single visit I was approached several times by customers and even by managers, who asked me to perform tasks. The corruptive potential of such was not at all lost on me.
I wouldn’t call that backroom crew inattentive, though; we were approached all the time in that very fashion, and I didn’t always recognize the people, because they didn’t mix with us very much. If anything, the theft is an indictment of a faceless, overworked big-box culture. Not that I support shoplifting, but that is awesomely hilarious!
It is hilarious. I read this out loud in the multimedia room and couldn’t stop laughing mid-sentence because I couldn’t believe the absurdity of it.
What’s even better is that I used to work for AT&T so I’ve spent time at Wal-Mart electronics sections helping their employees sell phones and all that jazz. Routinely the same people that sold the TV to the customer carted it out, scanned it with something and they always called the service desk announcing that ticket number whatever was headed out the door, and the door greeter would check off the receipt. Voila.
The fact that none of the above took place and the Wal-Mart employees were oblivious to it is hilarious in the worst way, because you’re right — it is about a severely overworked big-box culture that does not value its employees (according to many of them I know), so why should the employees care?
Still though the store associates should value the fact they have a job and do their best to prevent stuff like this from happening. AP wire will get a hold of this soon, I am sure, and that store manager is gonna bury his head in his hands every time he reads it. Poor guy, and I don’t mean that jokingly.
http://twodiddle.blogspot.com/2009/05/who-am-i….