Stealing from work

So I have this coworker who I've caught twice stealing from work. I don't want to report him and get him fired for stealing drinks from the cooler but he acts like it's not really a big deal. He says that the company won't miss $1 every few days. He also makes it seem like stealing from work is something that everyone does from time to time. Do any of you steal from work or know someone who does? Just curious

I don't know for sure but there was a head of department who left the company. I think he got fired for trying to steal company data but that's a rumour I heard - I don't actually know if it's true or not. Pretty interesting though as a replacement had to be created in the interim to fill his role.

Nothing apart from that potential case.

Fwiw, I don't think what your co-worker is doing is a big deal and in my experience, I agree with the idea that almost everyone takes stuff from their work in one way or another. I also agree with what he says about the company not missing the money - it simply won't if it's just one person doing this stuff occasionally. When I previously worked as a barman, we swiped drinks from time to time. At one place (the other was far tighter on this but soft drinks were still fine), if someone ordered a drink and left without paying for it, it was ours as long as we drank reponsibly. When I worked in a music store, if you needed new guitar strings or picks you just took them. In our lab, I use some of our reagents for myself - 100% ethanol is a brilliant computer screen cleaner. Strictly speaking, if the lab paid for it and it's not being used for research, it's theft. But we all do it because we can, my supervisor included. When you've got access to nice things through your work, go ahead and take them if it's not gonna be a big deal - which in many cases, it isn't.

It's good of you to not report him, by the way. Morally, okay, he probably shouldn't be stealing but as I say I can't see it as a big deal and it's really not something worth losing someone their income and potentially damaging their employability in the future over. Way I see it, no-one's getting hurt, it's costing the company an impossibly insignificant amount next to the total that they probably take, and it's not one of those things that it's worth getting bothered over. There are probably far bigger injustices going on "higher up" in the company or elsewhere than a drink getting swiped occasionally.

colours said:

I'm actually legitimately curious why you feel this is an okay thing to do. Like, sure, the company Chase is working for can most definitely eat a doller every now and then; it isn't a huge deal. But in my experiences, the companies I've worked for, even if you stole any kind of merchandise, no matter how "cheap" it was, you'd be grilled alive.

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Maybe we've just worked in pretty contrasting environments. All of my jobs have been quite laid-back, everyone including the bosses has been friendly with everyone, and everyone knew what everyone was taking and how much of it. The specifics were never there like - no-one'd explicitly say to the bosses "yeah, we take new guitar strings when ours break" or whatever - but the understanding was there and even when people got caught there was never any trouble. Could be that your working environments have been much more rigid and more impersonal than mine have.

I had access to tons of nice things--but I'm firmly of the belief that one of the reasons companies hire you in the first place is because they trust you not to steal--and doing so anyway kind of creates that rift in trust between you and your employer in a way, y'know?

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That's a fair point, I suppose, for some jobs. I know that my current one 10000% did not even think about theft when they gave me my position, but ofc I don't work in retail or anything any more. I did in my previous two jobs, but again, very different work environments. Maybe that's what it all boils down to. Had I been working for massive chains instead of small franchises or independent places, it could well've been a different story.

Then again, this is all anecdotal stuff. The way that I see it, it really depends on the cost of the product as well as what the product even is. I've always worked in high security areas (for the most part, anyway), so I've never seen this behavior from anyone else except on one occasion where, in the past, I saw one of my co-workers slip by with a $15-20 Minion cup and she wanted to gift it to her kid for their birthday because they really love Minions, and I would've felt horrible if I actually threw her under the bus for that reason.

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That's completely unacceptable in my book. For some reason I draw a line under disposable things - a drink, a guitar string, a few millilitres of ethanol, etc. are all tiny, cheap things that you just use once and then you're done with them. Not unlike how people working at restaurants often help themselves to leftovers for lunch. I'm not sure exactly how I justify this distinction but it seems more like... idk. Less theft-y. Stealing something that expensive which isn't disposable is totally out of line for me - it'd be like outright stealing, I dunno, an amp lead for a guitar or something. Not cool.

I have really weird moral values, eh? 8D

By the way, I don't want this post to come off as me taking the moral high ground against you or anything, that's silly. I'm just curious as to what really makes it okay to steal.

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Naw, it's cool. The differences probably just boil down to differing work experiences rather than any moral highgrounds.

Not really stealing, I suppose. We stock food and candy every now and again, and occasionally something will leak or pop open. Now, since we generally just throw this stuff away rather than marking it down like we would most things, I'll usually just eat some of whatever we're losing.

This doesn't happen often, and I don't go out of my way to destroy merch so I can satisfy a sweet tooth, of course. I feel like that goes pretty far past unethical, for obvious reasons- not saying I haven't considered, if only because of my terrible breakfast habits and the labor involved with the job doing a number on my energy levels and overall hunger. But this is the closest thing to that, certainly.

When I worked at the book store I used to steal coffees and handfuls of sugar packets from the cafe all the time but that's about it.

At my workplace, the workers do get in trouble if they steal any merchandise from the company. Even if it's something like a 89? bottle of water on the hottest day of summer, the worker has to pay for it first.

Then again, my workplace is really stingy when it comes to keeping an eye on what they're making profits with. We're not allowed to sign out anything from the shelves for store use, like cups for the water cooler or even pens for my office. Vendors used to leave damaged product in the break room for workers to grab for a snack, and that's not allowed. Everyone is so afraid in my place that they're going to get fired, and it's not a great work environment.

With your coworker, Chase, I'd wrestle with myself about telling someone in charge about the person stealing. On one hand, it is only a $1 soda (which technically adds up to almost $30 lost profit for the store and a messed-up inventory for the store so they won't get automatic deliveries when they need it). On the other hand, my position at my store means that I'd have to tell someone in charge if a coworker is doing something wrong, and I wouldn't want to lose my job over a coworker.

I used to be the worst with stealing from my jobs. When I worked as a janitor for banks I would steal cleaners, mop heads and toilet paper all the time that way I had them at home for myself. Also when I worked at a BP gas station I used to eat and drink maybe 20 dollars worth of products everyday, probably even more than that. I used to take scratch offs and play them then cash them in if I won and grab cartons of cigarettes. This was all possible because they had really no inventory system like most places. I know I shouldn't have done any of that but it's whatever to me, they never paid holidays and always made me work them and always tried to make me not get my overtime pay so I never felt bad about doing any of that since they got what they deserved for shitty treatment.

When I'm working it's at a dance studio. I don't think stealing from my work is even possible.

I never have, I have pigged out on food when they brought it in though ;3

gimmepie said:

When I'm working it's at a dance studio. I don't think stealing from my work is even possible.

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Steal the fellow dancers' hearts!

Joking aside, situations from the op's had happened before. My old company was crazy strict when it comes to thievery, I scolded the ex-co-worker who had stolen a bottle of drink. XD But I simply marked the stolen drink as 'tester' from the stock sheet, haha.

the place i used to work for i still steal from i stole a 16GB sd card from them maybe 3 or 4 years ago and they still didnt even realize they where missing an SD card from there invetory (these guys are bad at keeping track of inventory) and one day i taken out the trash for them i taken a harddrive out of a computer that used to be my office computer even though i ran a dban against the drive i still think with the right tools they could recover the data and they dont know i stole its harddrive (they just think it didnt have one but they dont even use it anyways) and i even taken a broken external hard drive (i still take trash out for them occasionally) and i take cellphone chargers from cellular displays that they forget to remove the chargers from when they no longer need the display