If you’re up to no good, it’s probably best not to bring attention to yourself.

So, what would you do if a customer spent hours piling items into a cart and then started filling a suitcase full of clothes?

Would you assume she could afford everything? Or would you consider that she might be trying to pull a fast one on you?

In the following story, a thrift store worker encounters this situation and can’t believe what happened.

Here’s the full scoop.

‘Customer’ got way in over her head.

I work at a thrift store.

I was coming back from my last break, maybe an hour before close.

On the way back to the registers, a woman stares me down and asks me if I’m good at multiplication, because she’d like to know how much 43 pairs of jeans are.

I’m not exactly working here because of my skill with math, so I tell her I’m unsure, but she really wants to know and encourages me to go find out. Okay.

The woman was taking clothes off the hangers.

I go up to the registers, and the asst. manager (AM) is pulling one of the other cashiers to go home. I tell them what just happened, and they say they’ll tell her on the way back, and that it came to ~$300.

Closing time rolls around, the last few customers get rung out, but I haven’t seen her in the last hour, and I figure she’s either still shopping despite the warnings of closing for the past 30 minutes, or she left, either with the cart or without.

On a whim, I go take a looksee and spy a lone cart full of clothes, and grab it.

On the way back, who do I see but the woman from before, now in the suitcase area, pulling clothes off their hangers. Hmmmm.

At the register, the woman’s card was declined.

I go back, tell the AM, who gives another warning over the intercom that the store is closed, but then just decides, screw it, and goes to get her. I hear them talking, but can’t make out what they’re saying.

Then the AM comes around the corner with the biggest suitcase we have, and puts it on the floor, open.

It’s about half full of clothes. The lady comes with her cart, her cart brimming (the cart I grabbed was also hers), talking about how she’s treating herself with her stimulus check.

Between the AM scanning and me bagging, it still takes about 20 mins to get through it all. All in all comes to $899.

Lady puts her card in, and it is declined. Tried two or three more times, but all declined.

When she didn’t reappear, they went ahead with closing.

She says she needs to go out to her car to get her purse. So she leaves. AM says we’ll wait a few minutes, then lock the doors.

She tells me that some of the customers who had come through her register at closing time pointed out the woman and one other person as having a conversation about stealing it (with our lady bragging about having $300 worth of jeans).

We didn’t catch the other person.

Oh, and that was when AM found the woman in the suitcase area. She was stuffing it, but when she was caught, she told AM that she was just ‘counting it for us.’ Riiiight.

After a few minutes had passed, AM assumed she was gone for good and went out to grab carts.

Supposedly, the woman was coming back the next day.

No car out there, but the lady came around from down an alley, saying her sister must have taken her purse to the casinos and wants to know if we can’t split the clothes, and she’ll pay for half of it now.

At this point, it’s 30 mins past close, so AM says no, not happening, and she can come tomorrow (today), by a certain time, or we have to put it all back up.

Surprise, surprise, guess who never showed?

And you know, if she hadn’t called out to me, it probably wouldn’t have drawn our attention to her.

And if she hadn’t waited til closing to try to get out with it, she might have actually made it through the doors without us being able to stop her, like her friend.

Yikes! That would’ve been a lot of clothes to steal.

Let’s check out how the readers over at Reddit would’ve handled it.

This person never expects the people to come back.

Here’s a good thought.

This reader seems excited about what they’re saying.

According to this person, that’s usually a tell.

She had some nerve!

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.