When a corrupt manager runs a store with no supervision, things go terribly wrong, and that is exactly what happened in this story.

When it was finally discovered, two new managers were brought in to try to clean up the mess, but what they found was unbelievable.

Worst Case Scenario

For setup, I had been hired on as an Acting Store Manager.

Wow, that is a big job.

Basically, for an entire six state region, I’d fill in whenever a manager was out of the store for longer than 48 hours (vacation, sickness, maternity, etc).

We were basically substitute teachers of the retail world. This was only temporary, and when a store manager position opened up, I could step in with zero probation period. There were three of us in this role.

She seems like she loves the job.

I was the first hire of a rather ambitious new district manager, Callie. I interviewed her third or fourth day in the job and she was psyched about everything in the company, and talked at length about her plans.

Of course, all this ambition meant she bit off more than she could chew, and within six weeks she was burning out.

You can only do so much.

Callie had originally planned to visit every store in her district over her first three months. But according to rumor the previous DM, knowing he was retiring, had sort of slacked off so all the stores had issues one way or another. She ended up spending far more time at each location than she wanted.

Which is why she hadn’t made it to this one store (I’ll call it store 333) at all.

Surprise visits can help to get an honest picture of what is going on.

So, Callie sends an email that she’s heading down to check up on them just before she leaves, a semi surprise visit.

We get an email not long after, saying that she needs an Acting Store Manager there ASAP, asking for one of the two of us who were free, Victoria and I. Not five minutes later there’s a revision. She needs BOTH Victoria and I.

Something must be very wrong here.

So, knowing we’re heading into disaster, we each drive four hours to the store. Walking in the place is a mess.

Not just normal retail mess, but actual dirty windows, literal dirt caked in the corners of the floor, burnt out bulbs, etc.

The store manager likely knew she was going to get fired, so she quit.

Callie is just sitting at the manager’s desk looking like someone hit her with a brick. She tells us that she walked in, and the previous store manager, Jane, handed in her resignation and walked out.

The only full-time employee was gone, too. And there was a lot wrong with the store.

Wow, what is going on at this store?

So, Victoria and I take over registers, finish out the day, and then the part timer hands in her name tag and says she quits. This was, sadly, just the start of it.

That night we literally spent the entire night at the store. I can’t tell you what order we found out the mess there, but over the next few days, it all unfolded.

Jane could be facing some legal issues here.

The old system in place wasn’t really integrated between cash registers and accounting, and there was a step in there where managers would transcribe numbers. It seemed that Jane had been faking the numbers for cash.

Oh, and the last four deposits? Disappeared. Never taken to the bank, and nowhere in the safe.

I wonder how long Jane had been running this scam.

Plus, there were these mysterious bins in the front with heavily discounted “manager sale” items, marked as cash sale only. We puzzled over this for a while before finding that occasionally Jane would mark shipments as coming in damaged and unsaleable. Items which mysteriously were the same as those in the bins.

So, cash fraud. Great.

Was the whole store in on the scam?

Then the next morning, NONE of the morning staff showed up. Victoria and I are running the store solo for a while, while Callie sat in the manager’s office shifting through paperwork trying to figure out all that was wrong with the store.

An employee shows up, but just to hand in their badge and tell us she quit.

The staffing was weird too.

One of the weird things we had noticed was that there were far more people staffed for this store than made sense. Jane had one full time employee, then a ton of part timers, mostly each only working 4 hours a week.

This didn’t seem the weirdest thing about the store, but we later suspected she wouldn’t have anyone there long enough to figure out things were shady.

She wanted employees who wouldn’t care enough to report her.

Almost all of those employees were high school kids, or people who were there to earn spending cash rather than a living. None of them were really invested in the job.

When we finally had an employee show up, she tells us the full time employee had called her and fed her this line about how Jane (who apparently was very well liked by the staff) had been cruelly fired, corporate was screwing them over and how they need to make a stand.

What? This doesn’t even make sense.

If all of them quit the store would go under and they’d benefit…somehow. Apparently a really good number of them decided the statement was worth more than the job and had decided to quit.

Callie ends up telling me to call the entire staff one by one and asking if they planned to continue employment.

What bonuses did they think they were entitled to?

I spent an hour with everything from slammed phones to cursing to lame excuses. Most talked about how they hated our corporate who was mean. And a few mentioned how corporate wouldn’t even give them their bonuses.

What?

Oh, they were supposed to get bonuses. This is getting interesting.

Now end of year/Christmas time, all employees who had worked more than six months would get a Visa gift card, value dependent on number of hours worked. I hadn’t HEARD of any problems. Neither had Callie, who forwarded it on to accounting.

I bet a lot of employees jumped at this opportunity.

Meanwhile, knowing that we had basically no one to work the store, we sent out an email to the closest stores. If they could spare a few employees, we would pay for their transportation, meals while working, if travel was more than an hour we’d pay for a hotel room, and they would have a 50-hour week at DOUBLE normal pay.

This was during summer when there were a lot of college kids, so people jumped at it. By close, we had locked in about 12 people from 6 or 7 different stores to work staring the next day, and staying for at least 2 weeks.

This in addition to the 4- or 5-part timers who hadn’t quit on us.

I bet this is overwhelming.

Meanwhile, all day its calls from corporate, from the corporate lawyers, etc to Callie, who looks like she’s ready to cry. We get word corporate is sending two representatives into town.

Again, my timeline isn’t entirely straight here, but in the next days Callie finds out that all the bonuses were given out, sent to the store signature required. All appeared to be redeemed.

I can’t say that I’m surprised.

Then later I heard all were redeemed at the same Walmart… Oh yeah. Jane had stolen from her adoring employees.

We later heard from the next-door sub place that just before Callie showed up, Jane and the full-time employee had been loading boxes in their car out of the store. Wait “their” car? Oh yes. The two were dating! And who knows what they had just stolen.

Jane was running quite the scam, and likely for a very long time.

We also found over the next days that inventory was just a nonexistent thing. According to the system, we had more negative quantities than positives, and none of our stock was made from anti matter.

We task a few employees to re-inventory the store headed by Victoria, while I handle store operations and hiring a new staff.

Were the old employees making things intentionally confusing?

She finds out that there’s just boxes of stuff everywhere, tucked in nonsensical places, still in packing boxes, mixed in illogically.

Inventory was this nearly impossible thing as they kept finding stuff. A box in the bathroom. Shipping boxes stacked in the backroom, used as a table. A box stuck up in the ceiling tiles, found by the electrician.

I’m not sure I would want to keep any of the old employees.

I’m trying to retrain the old part timers, meanwhile. Some realized they needed to basically erase how the store was run and start over.

Others insisted that “this is how it’s always been done!”. Like layaway. Our company didn’t do layaway. We never did layaway.

I’m sure this layaway system was something of a scam as well.

Apparently, Jane did layaway, but that’s wrong, and I have no way of verifying what those customers spent. (Lots of confusion, and issues forwarded to corporate). One or two employees just had to be let go because they insisted doing things “Jane’s way”.

The backroom had been a mess, and I was sparing man hours just to clean. Cleaning up back there, they found a door that had been covered with empty boxes.

What could be behind this door?

It was locked and Victoria and I were debating whether it was “ours” or lead to the adjoining store somehow. Then one of the part timers chimed in something along the lines that “that’s the trash room, they locked it up when it got full.”

Now, that employee was high school aged and I think this was her first job, and she said it like this was a sane and logical comment. As though every business had a full trash room.

This is repulsive. And unhealthy.

So, not really wanting to know the answer, I asked what a trash room consisted of. Apparently, if it was raining, or they didn’t want to go out to the dumpster, they’d just throw their trash in there.

Callie had just sat down with the corporate guy when I walked up to the office and informed them of this. They both just stared at me like I pooped in their Cheerios.

What kind of manager does something like this?

A locksmith was called in to open the door, and we found a 15 ft x 15 ft room chest high full of boxes and trash bags and stuff. The only saving grace was it was closed up long enough to be not fresh garbage smell, but old musty garbage.

At any given point over the next few days, we would have an employee wearing gloves and digging through it –a bag of receipts, kept for evidence. A bag of trash from the bathroom. A box of unopened merchandise, covered in fluids leaked from a questionable bag that may have contained food at some point. Inexplicably a busted up bicycle.

At least the employees were getting extra pay for this.

The employees would come up shell shocked on break describing the weird horrors they found.

All this time, I’m hiring a whole new staff. Normally, we did background checks and a lengthy interview. This was shortened to my fifteen minute judgement calls on someone and “can you start training tomorrow?”.

Sadly, I bet Jane got away with it.

As far as the thefts, etc, I can’t tell you the end conclusion. Callie and the corporate guy kept that bottled up, but there were lots of calls to the lawyer. But the end result was that store needed a new manager!

Someone who could finish training the random new hires, handle the upset customers who suddenly saw their store turned upside down, handle inventory, and of course, the angry ex-employees.

There is no way I would want that job.

Thankfully, they picked Victoria, and I went to my next, less stressful assignment.

Wow, this is unbelievable. I can’t believe a store could be run so poorly for so long. I wonder if the old manager ever got in trouble.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

A true retail horror story.

I agree, I would not want this job.

Yup, she was just the worst.

I sure hope she did.

This commenter makes a good point.

This level of retail fraud is unbelievable.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.