Department stores suffer serious losses through the operations of other classes of criminals who make a practice of preying on such stores. A large department store of the present day may have on its list from one to two thousand customers, who have with the store what are known as charge accounts. Such customers may visit the store, make a purchase, and have the amount of same charged to their account. Often they make such purchases by telephone, or may send a maid or other person to the store to make the purchases. A certain class of store swindlers make it a point to ascertain the names of persons having such accounts at stores after which they visit the stores, impersonate the customers, and very frequently secure and make off with goods of great value.
Usually such swindlers are not discovered until the end of a month, when the customer receives his or her bill, but by which time the swindler may be in some distant city preparing to victimize another store. Dishonest employes and discharged employes are usually responsible for giving out information regarding customers’ charge accounts. The swindler, however, can easily secure such information in many other ways. We have also the store swindler who goes to some large city and purposely registers at a leading hotel. He then visits a department store, purchases an expensive suit or overcoat, in payment of which he tenders a bogus check. He requests that his purchase be delivered to his hotel, which may be done, but the swindler will be gone long before the store discovers that it can not realize on the check.
One may ask how stores can be so easily victimized. There are two reasons, and they apply not only to this class of swindle, but to many others as well. The swindler may have, by his smooth and suave manner, impressed the management or clerk that he was all that he represented himself to be, and they, in an unguarded moment, allowed themselves to be swindled. On the other hand, it may have been the anxiety of making a sale at a good profit with an apparently good customer that may have caused them to overlook ascertaining the genuineness of the swindler’s check before delivering the goods.
Another source of loss by department stores is through dishonest clerks being in collusion with outside parties. A clerk, for instance, employed at a silk or lace counter, will have a friend or confederate call at her counter during the day. A yard of silk may be purchased and paid therefor, but it is quite an easy matter for the dishonest clerk to cut off and have wrapped a yard and a half or two yards of the material purchased. I have known respectable, well-to-do women enter into such arrangements with clerks at stores, seemingly treating such matters lightly, and even telling their friends about such transactions.
There are innumerable other ways by which employes steal from stores. Some clerks inclined to steal become very bold and very often carry out openly stolen goods that they claim to have purchased. At thoroughly up-to-date stores all clerks and employes, when leaving the store in the evening, are required to leave by some certain exit, where there is stationed a watchman who examines all packages that are carried out. The watchman holds up all packages that do not bear the O. K. of some floorwalker or other official of the store.
During such times as the Christmas shopping season, which in large cities begins about November first, the management of large stores find it necessary to double their detective forces, and well they may, as November and December are the months during which shoplifters, pickpockets and others figure on reaping their harvests. Pickpockets in stores must also be given attention by the store detective. Customers do not relish having their purses or pockets picked while in stores, and when it does happen to a customer, he or she usually remains away from that store in the future. Much more might be said upon the subject of department store detective work, but I believe what has been gone into will be sufficient to guide the average person in this branch of the work.