I am a Manager for a big box retailer whose philosophy is that good customer service is the best deterrent to theft. This happened at about 9pm pst last night.

It was a very busy night tonight and the cashiers were having a hard time driving the lines down, so I stepped in to help with the customers by opening another register. The very first person that I pull causes a chain reaction of customers flocking to my register area.

The store has a ton of acronyms to help cashiers remember what to look for in every transaction. As I continue to scan the items, the very first customer that I help begins to get a little shifty, making small talk and asking a ton of questions to try and distract me. As I continue to go through the motions, I finally get to the last acronym, which is “LISA” (L)ook (I)n(S)ide (A)ll. The customer has a handful of sealed items save for three trash cans stacked inside of each other, but the middle one is sticking out much more than the other two, which stands out to me. Noticing that, I begin to pull each one out to inspect the contents. As I pull the second trash can out, there is two drill sets inside.

(This is where the “good customer service” comes in.)

At this point after working retail for as long as I have, I KNOW the customer has no intention of buying them but I know I also can’t accuse anyone of anything either so I try to play it off with the biggest smile. “Hey sir! it looks like I almost missed these drill sets, Did you want to add these to the order as well?” As soon as I looked up to the customer, he begins pepper spraying me for what felt like an eternity creating a cloud large enough to engulf myself and at least 10 other customers in the cloud. He successfully ran off with the small cart of items, luckily for me I had already pulled the high ticket drills and had them in my register area. For at least 30 minutes after the incident, any customer that came in or out of the entry nearest the register I was manning suffered the effects of the residual spray.

TL;DR I offered “good customer service” by thoroughly checking a customers basket and got myself and many others pepper sprayed.