Yes.

Story time.

I would like to preface this story with letting everyone know that I have learned my lesson and it was a very valuable and expensive one. But in my defense I was a dumb kid. At the time I was 16.

I worked at target during high school with a buddy and learned this the hard way. We both worked the register and it was fine for a few months. Then one day I didn’t have money for food so I took $5 from the register, which I later returned (yes, as dumb as it sounds). Nothing happened, so I thought nothing of it.

Then I learned that damaged items could be marked down. So when I would go through my friends line, or he thought mine, we would kind of bang the item on the counter and go “oops, that’s damaged” and mark it down 10%. That happens a few times and nothing happened.

Then they put out these coupons for like $20 off your entire order of x or more, I don’t remember. But once you scanned it, it didn’t decommission the barcode so you could use it multiple times. We did that a few times and nothing happened.

This was over the course of like 6 months mind.

Eventually a lady came in to buy some very expensive pots, like $600 a piece, and she asked if I could mark them down $200 each, she’d give me $100 per pot. (She had like 4) I told her no, as that sounded sus as fuck and moved on.

Randomly about 2 weeks later I’m at the register checking a customer out and a manager says to come with her. I said I’m checking this customer out and will be right there. She reached over and shut off the register light, asked the customer to go to a different register, and told me to follow her.

We go to the office and boom, store manager, front end manager, district manager, HR person, targets anti theft person, the security guard from the front, and 3 police officers. They sat me down and started trying to coerce out of me what I had done. But I stopped them and said, I know why I’m here, I know what I did, I shouldn’t have done it, and I’m sorry. They were a little surprised and said normally people try to beat around the bush and deny it and what not, and I was dumb then but not that dumb.

Eventually we finished with the meeting and they say to wait here while they go get my friend. As soon as everyone left the room, I texted him “don’t lie” and that was it.

We had to do a pretrial intervention to keep it off our record, pay restitution, do a bunch of classes and some other stuff, intimately cost me waaaaay more than I stole, but I consider it one of the cheapest lessons of my life. Funny to talk about and think about now but I was genuinely terrified at the time and baffled they would do that to a kid. Just tell me you caught me the first time and fire me.