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I worked at the local Home Depot after getting laid off. I was there full-time for a year or so and then continued part-time after getting back into my regular gig. We were getting hit 3 or 4 times a week, the majority were white, trailer park meth addicts. Some tried being sneaky about it and some would just grab a couple of higher end cordless drills under each arm and run out the door. The HD policy is to not be a hero, let them go and if you happen to catch a license plate number then great.

I stood there one evening with the cashier in the garden center. Business was slow and we were standing there facing the parking lot. It was dark but we heard somebody running down the front apron of the store from the main door toward the garden center. It was dark but when he emerged from the shadows, we saw this crack addict huffing and puffing with a Dewalt drill under each arm, heading for an idling car waiting just beyond the street lights. The cashier said, “Oh, my God, he’s stealing those drills! Grab him!”

I watched him go by within arms reach and looked at her and laughed as I pointed to my chest, “$9.25 an hour, baby. Find another hero.”

Anyhow, as there are a number of HDs and Lowes in the area, the managers began alerting each other after a store was robbed and descriptions of the thieves were pretty consistant from store to store.

But we did have a pretty creative and sneaky gentleman known to everyone as Spiderman. It took a while but they finally caught him. He looked like an outdoor worker (construction or farming) in his late forties to early fifties, clean-cut graying hair, trim build and pretty athletically fit. Fit in a spry and agile way.

Spiderman would walk in the store wearing a short jacket and head to the power tools and sometimes to the electrical department (for some of the more expensive electrician tools), grab a few items and head to lumber where he would turn up an aisle and promptly disappear. A few weeks later one of the lumber associates, while packing down a stack of lumber with the forklift, would find the discarded packaging which contained the shoplifting sensors. The key being that the packaging isn’t discovered until the security tapes have been written over a time or two or the footage is lost among a few hundred hours of tape.

The last few times before he was finally caught, we actually zeroed in on Spiderman when he walked in the door and followed him from a little distance and lost him in the lumber aisle again. He would jump behind the stacks of lumber and climb up through the sprinkler voids between the aisles to the top rack. One guy saw him going into the racks and when we looked all around and on top... nothing. Somehow he managed to get across to another rack, two aisles over, shed the packaging and stuff everything in his jacket, casually hop down and head out the door. One of the associates (after we had lost him) spotted him 10 minutes later walking to his pick-up at the far end of the parking lot. The associate got his license plate and a description of the truck and the HD security team caught him at another store a week later.

Oh, by the way?... if you’re ever greeted by multiple associates on after the other to the point of being obnoxious? You are a suspected shoplifter. It’s called tag-teaming. They want you to know without accusing you, that they are watching your every move. :-)