Archived Have you heard of people getting fired for this?

[redeye58]

I remember as a GSA watching one of my cashiers during a lull scanning all the giftcards in her supply drawer.
When I walked up she quickly put them away.
Not long after she was termed for giftcard theft.

 

[Retail Girl]

There isn't one single thing that makes sense about this story.

You are trying to tell me your friend scanned a gift card to put the $25 on it, and then somehow put it with the unused gift cards (shouldn't those be in a drawer under the register). What cashier doesn't either give it to the guest or put it on the counter for the guest to grab when they are done unloading? Then they magically knocked all the gift cards together, and instead of figuring out which card was the right one, they just shrugged their shoulders and gave a random card to the guest thinking it was fine?

Uhh..no. Not buying it.

See, what happens after that, in the eyes of ap, is that your friend doesn't grab the right gift card to pocket...that would be fishy. Instead, another TM would come along and check those gift cards, find the one with the balance and pretend to throw it out while pocketing it...either for themselves or the original TM.

 

[ChecklaneChica]

There isn't one single thing that makes sense about this story.

You are trying to tell me your friend scanned a gift card to put the $25 on it, and then somehow put it with the unused gift cards (shouldn't those be in a drawer under the register). What cashier doesn't either give it to the guest or put it on the counter for the guest to grab when they are done unloading? Then they magically knocked all the gift cards together, and instead of figuring out which card was the right one, they just shrugged their shoulders and gave a random card to the guest thinking it was fine?

Uhh..no. Not buying it.

See, what happens after that, in the eyes of ap, is that your friend doesn't grab the right gift card to pocket...that would be fishy. Instead, another TM would come along and check those gift cards, find the one with the balance and pretend to throw it out while pocketing it...either for themselves or the original TM.

Exactly. There are three sides to every story- the store's side, his side, and the truth... but in this case, there's probably just two, as I'd be willing to bet AP's side and the truth are almost exactly the same.

 

[Rock Lobster]

You wrongly paint this situation as a theft. It's not. I have already conceded, multiple times, that there were obviously things that could have been done better here. I am not defending him from that. I've made that point. All I'm saying is that this situation was not deserving of termination, and it baffles me that you think it is and go so far as to call it theft. No rational human being thinks this kind of mistake is theft. Theft is a criminal offense defined by statute and with a specific definition. This situation does not fit that definition.

Great cop out though. "None of your points are worth acknowledging."

The point is that this story is definitely not complete. If a promotional gift card is stolen from a guest (and redeemed by the TM) then it results in a Final Warning. If a gift card is made at a loss to Target (using K4 Discounts, changing prices, adding tenders but not actually taking them etc.) then it results in AP pulling for an interview, getting an admission from him, and then terminating his employment. If AP terminated him for theft, then they had approval from the APBP and strong documentation to work in conjunction with his admission.

So either he isn't telling everyone the truth about what happened to the gift card OR he was already on Final Warning for similar problems. My guess is that since he is using the classic "Oh it was on a pile of other gift cards and I mixed them up" excuse, that its the theft one.

 

[Flabbergasted]

Well I don't know what else to say. I guess the only conclusion we can reach here is that there's more to the story, and the GiftCard was probably stolen. Fine. I just wish someone else at that store could corroborate that. Even my old GSTL says it went down exactly how I said it did in the OP. I don't know what to think anymore.

I mean I don't even know why I care because I don't work there anymore.

 

[anathema]

Every term requires strong documentation and in a lot of cases, pattern.

 

[Bosch]

The not checking til he found the one with money on it was the nail. Cause I have done something similar. I pulled all of them out of the trash where I thought it landed and went through them all until I found it. Told the GSTL what happened and all was good.

 

[redeye58]

This particular incident involved a promotional GiftCard for $25. This cashier accidentally mixed up the $25 GiftCard he scanned for a blank one, giving the guest the blank one and putting the one with value back in the pile of GiftCards. I guess he set the one with the value with the other blank GiftCards, foolishly, and he knocked them all down so it all got mixed up in one big comedy of errors.

Seems planned.
As soon as a giftcard is scanned, he should've immediately handed it to the guest.

 

[carramrod]

So, long story short. I found out the other day that one of my old cashiers from my days at Spot was recently terminated for an honest mistake he made involving a Target GiftCard. Now, we've all heard the unfortunate stories of people getting themselves fired for stealing GiftCards, switching them deliberately (such as giving out blank ones to guests and keeping the one with value), etc. In those cases, a firing is justly deserved in my opinion. You can't be stealing from your employer, or anyone else for that matter. That isn't what this guy did, however.

This particular incident involved a promotional GiftCard for $25. This cashier accidentally mixed up the $25 GiftCard he scanned for a blank one, giving the guest the blank one and putting the one with value back in the pile of GiftCards. I guess he set the one with the value with the other blank GiftCards, foolishly, and he knocked them all down so it all got mixed up in one big comedy of errors. So the guest walked out with a blank one, and he was fired a few days later. I'm completely baffled that they let him go for this. This guy was one of their top cashiers, had worked there for 2 years and was amazing at getting REDcards and good survey scores when I was there as GSA. Leadership loved him and there were rumors of him potentially being the new GSA after I quit. That didn't happen but he remained an excellent cashier going off what everyone I've talked to has said. Even my old GSTL was baffled they fired him.

Maybe I'm missing something here but to me, personally, this is just more evidence that my old store sucks big shit and to an extent so does Target as a company. Should this cashier have made this kind of mistake? No, of course not. He created a loss for the company (though $25 is not a big loss for a multi-billion dollar company like Target), and he should be given some sort of punishment. A CCA for 6 months would have been good for me. I don't think it would be deserving of a Final, let alone instant termination, especially when it was an honest mistake that he had never made before. Again, he didn't steal the $25 GiftCard. It was eventually found in the pile of blanks and returned to the guest. The guest herself was reportedly not that upset about it, and was understanding of the fact that it was a mistake. Why couldn't Target be? What the hell is wrong with this company, when cashiers are expected to be perfect REDcard getting robots 100% of the time with no human flaws whatsoever?

As others have mentioned, I don't think you're getting the full truth here. Nobody gets fired for internal theft unless we have a really, really good reason to do so. I can say for sure that if this is really what happened, he would not have been fired. There would have had to be a consistent pattern of behavior to get a solid internal case and termination out of this. Target just doesn't go around willy-nilly accusing people of theft and firing them. This honestly reminds me of a case in my store. To make a long story short a GSA got fired for a pattern of fraudulent behaviors involving family members. I saw solid video proof of everything. Everyone likes said GSA and still talked to her after she was termed. She then proceeds to tell everyone that she just made one mistake and that my ETL-AP just had it out for her and we fired her because we were jerks and we wanted to. So basically for the next few months, everyone in my store gave me dirty looks, refused to talk to me, and talked junk about me and the rest of the AP department behind our backs because of the lies this girl told them, and there wasn't anything we could do about it because internal investigations are confidential material, so we couldn't tell them what really happened. I just encourage you, and everyone else for that matter, to look a little deeper and not necessarily accept everything at face value just because the cashier seemed like a good guy.