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Inventory checks only work when reality is allowed to disagree with the computer, which was apparently one manager’s least favorite concept.

One retail worker keeps finding missing stock, but the boss insists the system must always be right. Therein lies the rub.

So the staff starts scanning the same items repeatedly and hiding anything the computer claims should not exist.

That should go swimmingly well.

No, the stock take must agree with the system, look again.

Years ago, I worked for an office supplies chain store.

It was an OK job for a student on the weekend.

The store manager would occasionally ask us to do a stock take.

It involved going around with a hand scanner and making sure that what we had in the store agreed with what the computer system said we had.

Unfortunately, we had a lot of theft in the store and so frequently there were missing items, lots of them.

The IT system was also a complete mess so we would frequently find items that the system said we didn’t have.

The store manager was of the firm belief that there was no theft and that the stock system was completely infallible.

If you went up to him and said, “Hey SM, the system reckons we’ve got 37 of these 19″ CRT monitors. I found 3. I think there’s an issue.”

The manager should’ve been more careful with his words.

He’d brush it off and say we weren’t looking hard enough and that we’re not leaving the store until the hand scanner agrees with the stock system….. cue malicious compliance.

We would scan the same monitor multiple times until we had 37 of them.

If we found something that the stock system said we didn’t have, it either got hidden behind the stacks of office paper, on top of one of the offices, or more frequently it would end up inside the paper and card compactor.

We made sure that the hand scanners would always agree with the stock system, and we got to leave the store on time.

A few years later, I found out that the store manager had been fired by the company.

They had done an external audit of the store and found a stock system that said thousands of items weren’t there, and the stock takes must have been falsified.

Yikes! That didn’t end well for him.

Let’s see how the readers over at Reddit feel about it.

Stores doing this never last long.

It seems K-Mart employees used to do something similar.

The manager being fired made this external auditor happy.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a researcher who complained about being excluded from a trip only to watch the university cancel the whole thing.

This person isn’t wrong.

The manager refused to believe the store had theft or inventory errors, so every stock count had to agree with the computer.

Employees complied by rescanning products and removing anything the system said was not there, which kept the numbers beautifully wrong.

Years later, an external audit exposed thousands of missing items and the manager was fired over the falsified stock records.

He wanted the inventory to match the system, and eventually the audit matched him perfectly…

…with the exit.