A Walmart employee in Wichita was fired for saving the company a $600 shoplifting loss. Heather Ravenstein saw a man walk out with a computer he hadn’t paid for, accosted him, grabbed the computer and held on until he fled, despite being kicked and punched.
Heather then was fired because company rules say only a manager or a security person may follow suspected shoplifters out of a store and demand to see proof of purchase. She put herself and others in danger by her actions, the company explained.
Well, sure. The thief could have shot or stabbed her. Maybe bullets would have hit others. To be as safe as possible, it is smarter to let thieves steal.
Heather apparently wasn’t brought up that way. She did what she thought was the moral thing to do. She succeeded. Then was punished for succeeding. She is a 30-year-old single mother of a four-year-old. If the story is well broadcast in Wichita, another employer will step forward and hire her, knowing they will have lucked in to an unusally self-reliant employee they can trust to serve their business well.
Walmart, in the meantime, should probably keep its anti-vigilante policy in place. Shoplifting is a cost today’s self-service retail industry factors into its operations. People steal from chain stores because they think the odds against getting caught are slim. And they are. The stores don’t hire nearly enough employees to come close to watching what customers do.
And chasing after a customer after he or she has left the store is fraught with potential dangers. Not only could a thief turn violent, a challenged customer may have paid for the merchandise, decide never to shop there again or, worse yet, decide to sue for being harassed.
That said, Walmart managers and assistant managers should be counseled to listen to their own inner wisdom before they act. Rather than fire her and persuade the hundreds of others who work there to turn a blind eye to thefts, Healther should have been loudly chastized, put on probation — and then found a $100 bonus in her next pay envelope.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
