Years ago, I worked as a Dressing Room Checker in Ladies Casual Wear in one of the large department stores in St. Louis County.  It was my job to make sure the female patrons entered and exited the dressing rooms with only four items of clothing.  Some ladies obligingly allowed me to count the assorted skirts, blouses, and sweaters that they wanted to try on.  Then there were ladies who couldn’t understand that each piece of clothing counted as one item.  One lady gathered clothing from several racks and tried to explain that she was putting together suits.   I tried to explain that, even thought the three skirts, three blouses. three sweaters and one beige and red sued vest (with flowered lining) might work very well together as suits, each piece had to be counted separately.  After much discussion, she agreed to try on one suit at a time, while I held the rest of the clothes at my station.

     Every now and then, a shoplifter or two would visit the store and relieve us of some of our inventory of clothes and other items.  Some of them could be very polite.  As I stood at the entrance of the dressing rooms one night, I watched ladies looking at the skirts and blouses.  One young girl was looking at the price tag of an expensive white silk blouse.  Suddenly, she approached me and in a whispery voice, asked,

  “If I steal this, you won’t tell on me, will you?”

I was caught off guard by the question, but I recovered enough to tell her,

  “That blouse isn’t worth your freedom or my job, let alone the price.  Why mess up both of our lives?”

She looked at me in surprise, put down the blouse and whispered,

  “Okay, just forget it, hear?”  Then she left the department, empty handed.

     Some of the female shoplifters came so often, security recognized them, right off.  One night, two young ladies named Anne and Nicole (not their real names) came to the department wearing slightly baggy blue jeans.  Anne looked to be about 25 years old, tall and slender, with a pleasant smile.  While she looked at clothes near the dressing room, her buddy Nicole (also tall and slender, and wearing glasses) stationed herself at the farthest end of the department, stuffing clothing down her pants.  Anne and I exchanged pleasantries before she moved to another department.  Since the dressing rooms were empty, I walked to the register and told the manager that I was getting some water, and pretended to give them a lost price tag, saying,
Take care of this.”  The manager was a bit indignant until she discovered that I had written on the  tag, “Shoplifter in corner.”  I even gave a brief description.  Well, the good news was that the girl was caught.  The very good news was that no one told me, until much later, that the girl had been carrying a loaded pistol.