Kids can be sneaky, but sometimes the best lessons come when they’re caught in the act.

What would you do if you saw a child trying to pocket something while his parent wasn’t looking?

Would you let him get away with it?

Or would you step in and say something to his mother?

In the following story, one retail worker finds herself in this situation and opts for the latter.

Here’s what she did.

Caught a kid trying to steal candy tonight

I caught a kid trying to steal candy from work tonight. And that little kid knew what he was doing, too.

So, I was working in the self scan right, and there are 8 units I watch over, so I pace a lot.

I saw this little kid grab some candy from the shelf.

Still, I didn’t think anything about it until he saw me walking that way because, like I said, I was pacing back and forth from machine to machine.

He turned tail and ran the other direction, and out of the self scan and around to behind a wall that separates the self scan from the main hall of the store.

The mother was upset and didn’t buy him anything.

So I walked back that way, and when I looked around there to see why he high-tailed it behind there, I saw that he no longer had 2 things of candy in his hands; he only had one.

And when he walked past me I saw him fiddling with something in his coat pocket, and since I was so much taller then he was I was able to see it was the other thing of candy.

So I followed him to his mother and told her what he had done. Then she looked at him and said, “Oh boy, this was his first time doing something like this.”

He pulled it out of his pocket and tried to hand it to her. She made him put both back and gave me a bag of chips she was going to buy him. She told him to go sit on a bench near by.

Wow! Hopefully, he learned from this situation.

Let’s see what the readers over at Reddit think about this whole thing.

This reader did something similar.

Yet another person who tried this very thing.

For this reader, it’s a lesson best learned young.

According to this person, their mom made them do chores to repay for stolen candy.

She did the right thing!

It’s better to let the mother know what her son was doing than to let her figure it out the hard way later.

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.