Security Guard Stories

I have a brother in law who used to work as a security guard at Sears.  When we got together we always asked him to tell us about the things that happened to him at work.  He had lots of funny stories, but some of them were just sad. 

He told us how hard it was to watch people shoplift things. Once he was working the floor (he always let his hair grow a little long, wore normal clothes, and looked kind of scruffy so people wouldn’t recognize him as a security guard) when a kid he knew from high school picked up some merchandize and put it in his pocket. My brother-in-law knew he was shoplifting, but it made a real dilemma for him to have to be the one to stop him.

He was really angry the day he told us about a mom he watched coach her little boy through shoplifting some things from the electronics department. They were watching the security cameras when they saw the mom pick up something and give them to her son. Then she walked out of the store and the kid followed her.  When they stopped her outside she swore that she hadn’t known her little boy had even picked the things up.

One of his funniest stories was about a very heavy-set black woman who tried to shoplift some clothes.   My brother-in-law said there were a bunch of black women who would shoplift by wearing long mu-mu’s and hiding the merchandize under their skirts. Whenever they saw a large black woman wearing a mu-mu come into the store they would watch her on their cameras. One day a lady came in and they were pretty sure she was going to shoplift some clothes, but apparently it was her first time because she wasn’t very good at it. They watched as she chose a number of garments, hung them on a low rack, lifted her mu-mu, walked up to the clothes, grabbed them between her knees, let her dress fall down over them, and then started to walk out of the store. The clothes must have been hard to hold, though, because the farther she walked the more she waddled and the shorter she got. Soon clothes were trailing out behind her as they fell from between her knees. They couldn’t arrest someone for shoplifting unless they actually took the merchandize out of the store, so all the security guards were standing around the monitor upstairs, shouting, "Come on, lady, you can do it, you can do it!" And she did eventually make it out of the store with some of the clothes, so they arrested her.