TTOG: At least try to be a little bit more smooth next time. You're just embarrassing yourself.
Here's the story:
Sketchy, drug-addict type comes into our store and returns $130 worth of cosmetic items. He didn't steal it off our sales floor, so we didn't deny the return, he got his gift card, and went on his merry way. Twenty minutes later, we notice he's back in the store, trying to purchase different gift cards with the return gift card, which he obviously can't do. Another TPS and I watch him approaching random guests near the registers and realize something is up. I throw on my winter jacket over my uniform shirt so I appear a little less conspicuous and make my way over to see what this guy's up to. At this point he approaches me and says:
"Hey man, I've got no money and I need gas. I've got this gift card for $130. If you give me like 50 bucks you can have it."
Recall that I did put a winter jacket on, but I'm still wearing Khaki 5-11 cargo pants and black law enforcement uniform boots, with a walkie earpeice in my ear (don't judge me, I'm in a super sketchy store and all the other TPS's dress the same way). Clearly I am some sort of law enforcement or security. He was, for some reason, absolutely astounded when I told him: "I'm security, and you can't solicit in here. You need to leave now and not come back, or we will contact the police." He left, clearly dejected, with his gift card in hand, probably quite sad that he couldn't get his heroin fix just yet. An interesting side note is that I watched him exit the store, get in his car, and drive away. So clearly his "I'm out of gas" sob story is a lie.
I pieced together his whole story later. Apparently, the supermarket across the street from my store has a machine that will give cash for gift cards. This was causing us a lot of problems because druggies were stealing from us, doing no-receipt returns, cashing in the gift cards, and using the money for heroin. Apparently Target and some of the other retailers complained enough and the machines no longer accept the gift cards that we give for returns, which are apparently somehow encoded differently than normal gift cards. So when the machine rejected the return gift card, he came back and tried to buy different gift cards that he would be able to cash in. When he couldn't do that, he decided to just try to sell off the gift cards to random guests. This is when he chose to approach me, out of all the people in the store, to try and sell off the card and got booted. All in all, definitely not the smartest criminal I've had to deal with. I'm sure I haven't seen the last of him, but I'm actually kind of interested to see what he comes up with next...