Employee Filled Her Bag With Embarrassing Items After Her Workplace Demanded That Bag Checks Were Mandatory
by Matthew Gilligan
New rules come and go at places of business, but there are always the ones that just don’t seem to make a lot of sense…and all they do is slow everything down.
So what should a worker do in that situation?
Maliciously comply, of course!
Take a look at what this woman did when she got fed up with a new rule at her job.
New purse check rule “absolutely mandatory”.
“I work 3 jobs. The hours and days vary. My full time job is in an office space on a very fancy modern officer with a great company.
They have some great amenities on site too, a full gym, lockers and showers, full cafeteria, etc. My second job is close to full time (ft depending on other employees availability, no set schedule, very chaotic and not well ran) it’s a boutique just a bus ride from my office, and it’s all in a very busy downtown tourist port city by the ocean.
The thing is, it’s a tourist boutique. It’s all city branded trinkets, shirts, postcards and gifts. There’s really not much any locals would want, unless buying it for out of town family. 3rd job is a fast food place.
Time is tight and she’s very busy.
I’m often between these two jobs and don’t have time to run home between. I carry a gym bag with me, with my tiny purse/wallet inside, along with clean business professional clothes, gym clothes, and work uniforms to change in and out of, extra underwear, it’s summer and extremely hot and our buses don’t usually ever have AC so if there’s time I’ll shower at the office and I have travel size shower items. A book for the bus rides I don’t have a car, lunch and snacks, hairbrush.
Apparently the boutique has experienced a lot of loss, something we had previously brought up being an issue because our boss the owner will have big tables and buckets of items outside by the sides of the door where we can’t monitor them especially if we’re inside with customers.
People definitely take advantage and we’ve seen a lot of people grab things and just talk off. These aren’t the cheaper items in the store either, we’ve lost an entire display of mid priced sunglasses, handfuls of bikini separates, and at one point the entire table was emptied in a snatch and run with about 5 younger people.
The boss is suspicious…
But he thinks it’s us stealing things. His wife runs the store, she’s always in. She said we have a new mandatory bag check and every employee in the store is a woman who usually carries a purse or bag. It’s not just a quick look through the bag, she wants to remove the items and feel around the sides of the bag and make sure we aren’t taking any trinkets and items.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t seen ANYBODY on staff (there’s 4 of us) ever steal anything, and I don’t even think it’s because they’re all stand up employees I think it’s because they don’t care to own any of the cheap tacky tourist items.
This has led to some issues.
Because my bag is bigger it’s been kind of a nightmare for me. She wants me to take every individual item out of my bag and show there’s nothing wrapped up inside of it, lay it out across a table by the register. The first day of this I was late to work because she wouldn’t start checking my bag until I clocked out and then she took her time with a customer causing me to be almost a half hour late to my other job.
I considered that I could just continue getting lockers at my office but they’re day use only, so depending on my schedule I’d have to make a separate trip to get back to the office before the building closed to remove my items and it wouldn’t be feasible with my other jobs.
I’m honestly pretty sure the staff who cleans the lockers at the end of the day probably wouldn’t mind and would work something out for me but I don’t feel like I need to go out of my way to keep a steady rotation on a locker. If my boutique manager wants to make things awkward and difficult on me I’m going to turn around and do it right back to her.
She came up with a big plan.
She is a very tightly wound conservative lady, so I added a few extra items to my gym bag. I don’t get my period, but I picked up a menstrual cup (period talk makes her absolutely faint). I included some new reading material, old 70s playboys I keep at the house, for aesthetic purposes (and I just like them).
I swapped in some of my most attractive and functionally impossible underwear but also one of my granniest of panties. I also for no reason at all included condoms, furry handcuffs (a gag gift at my sister’s bachelorette party) and I picked up a pamphlet at a nearby community center for their group therapy for bereavement.
It went off perfectly at the end of my shift. There were customers in the store and she made me go through my bag item by item opening them up and holding it up so she could check to make sure there was nothing hidden. I carefully fanned out my old magazines to show there was nothing between the pages.
This turned into quite a spectacle.
I pulled out each set of panties like a creepy fashion show holding them up to the light so she could see directly through the lace. Every item we pulled out of the gym bag made her more and more flush, she was uncomfortable she could barely perform the check. She nearly had a panic attack when I pulled out a little sandwich baggie with a menstrual cup in it.
I even pulled out the pamphlet and set it aside slowly with intent to seem affected by it, and she looked at me quizzically and kind of confused asked what’s this about and I said solemnly “oh I haven’t lost anybody, but it’s a great place to meet new people.” I pulled the condoms out right after saying that.
My second bag check was definitely faster than the first and I was finished and out the door in time to catch my bus and arrive to work early actually! speed running the bag check wasn’t my initial plan but it was definitely an unconsidered plus to the situation.
I think these folks got the point…
I honestly don’t mind doing a bag check if they really feel like it’s so necessary, but the invasiveness of making every employee pull out inside everything in their bags on a table where every customer in the store has a plain view of everything they have is a little much, and purposely making it take so much time that it’s interfering with our other jobs and personal lives is crossing the line.
But now I’m kind of excited to see what other items I can include in my gym bag just to keep her on her toes. I don’t want it to be too obvious but just enough to make her consider that a lady’s bag is usually private, and upending that for all our customers to see might not be great for business.”
Here’s how people responded.
This person had some advice for her.
Another Reddit user said this was wage theft.
This individual talked about how this goes where they used to work.
Another reader said this went way too far.
And one Reddit user did something like this before…
Seems like a pretty silly policy.
I’m glad they got rid of it!
If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.
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