It’s frustrating when you know someone has broken rules, but you can’t prove it.

The kind of person who does that can’t be trusted, but they’ll get theirs eventually.

Check out how it happened in this story.

Thieving manager tries to frame me for their theft – it doesn’t go well for them.

Parties involved: the Store Manager Mo; the Thieving Assistant Manager Jay; Lead Assistant Manager (BBF with SM) Travis.

This happened around 6 years ago, when I worked for a retail company I will call no-op.

Jay was well known to be a thief by the base staff and some of the lower levels of management.

Here is her scheme.

Unfortunately, she was a golden girl to Mo and Travis and we never had any solid proof.

We also didn’t get pay docked etc unless it was over a certain amount (which it never was), so staff never had a real incentive to try and find proof.

One of Jay’s favourite things to steal were vouchers for money off products or shopping because you were just supposed to rip them up and put them in the safe.

There was no official way of counting these to return them to the company so she could use them again in a different store and get away with it.

This was Halloween and I was on ’till 4′ – the only till with no cameras on it.

Mo came up and paid for her shopping with some gift vouchers she had received at a Store Manager’s meeting because the store was doing really well.

I served her and no one else touched my till all day because I was the main person on the tills for this shift.

We closed up for the night and Jay took the registers to be cashed up.

I went out to the pub with friends and had a good night not knowing what was coming.

The next shift I’m on, Mo calls me into the office and tells me that the vouchers she used were not in the safe and she knew that it was my till.

She wanted me to return the vouchers and would not press charges or put anything on my file if I just returned them immediately.

I of course did not have them and testified as such but she didn’t believe me.

I went looking everywhere: the bin under till 4 and the bins outside, under the tills and on the floors around the tills – just in case I had dropped them or put them somewhere dumb while trying to sort out cash etc.

Roughly an hour later Jay comes in, hears what’s going on and offers to look as well.

She ‘finds’ them in 30 seconds flat, somewhere I had already looked.

Justice seems impossible now.

I essentially hissed out “what a coincidence that as soon as Jay looks there she finds it immediately, how coincidental,” seething with white fury.

I knew she was now framing me for her own theft.

She could have ‘found’ them in the office and made it a simple mistake but no, she made me the fall guy for her own idiocy.

I tried to plead my case to Mo and Travis, stating that I wouldn’t be dumb enough to steal vouchers that I knew were Mo’s because I was the one who served her.

One of the other Team Leaders (Paul) knew fine and well it was Jay and tried to tell Mo and Travis that I was being set up, but she was the golden girl and could do no wrong while my name was mud as far as they were concerned.

Heck, they thought Jay had caught me in the act.

This meant war.

Over the next few months I got really friendly with Jay, flirting outrageously with her and basically pretending like I really respected her and that we were good buddies.

It took me a while to work my way into her trust, but once I was there I knew I could catch her stealing and prove it.

We wasted off a load of Christmas chocolate products that hadn’t sold and I put them in a bag to be put in the bin.

Jay said we should take them home (against company policy and seen as stealing) because they were just going to waste otherwise.

We were stood underneath a camera, just outside of it’s range so I said “I don’t want any, but if you want them you can have them” and put them on a trolley just inside of the camera’s range.

(I had studied the camera angles in great detail preparing for a moment exactly like this).

I saw her look at the camera, down at the trolley and back to the camera before walking off to get her stuff.

I warned my colleagues not to take any of the chocolate even if offered and had an evil grin on my face, which my colleagues commented on.

When Jay came down she nonchalantly picked up the bag as if it was her shopping, offered chocolate to everyone and walked out the door with it.

Gotcha.

But things will resolve soon.

The next morning I arrived for my shift and put on the most sombre face possible as I approached Travis.

“You should check the cameras on the back door at approximately 22:21, I think you’ll find what you see very interesting.”

He asked me to explain further and I looked over towards where Jay was (not even 5 metres away) and looked back.

“I can’t go into further detail right now but I would strongly suggest you go and look at the cameras for that time now.”

Travis begrudgingly walked off to do just that and within 10 minutes Jay was called into the office and her bag was searched, within the hour she was suspended pending investigation and within the week she was fired and barred from the store.

I got a full apology from the managers who didn’t believe me, who explained they genuinely believed it was me and had no idea Jay could have possibly been a thief.

Their jaws hit the floor after I explained that every member of staff knew she was a thief but that we didn’t feel like we could do anything about it.

After going around asking people if this was true I got another apology.

Six months later I was offered training to become a Team Leader myself, I took it but ended up quitting for a white-collar role in a different company before I finished my training.

Here is what folks are saying.

Excellent point. You can trust them.

Same! It seems rare.

People like the more dramatic option, I guess.

But how?

That part confused me, too.

I’m glad I didn’t work in retail.

People are entirely too much.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.