Clermont Walmart employee arrest underscores retail losses from theft - Daily Commercial

Frank Stanfield  |  Special to the Daily Commercial

CLERMONT — Lake County Sheriff’s Office deputies on Tuesday arrested a Walmart Supercenter employee and charged him with making a super grab of cash from registers – totaling more than $76,000.

The employee, a 38-year-old resident of Clermont, was charged with grand theft after the store’s security manager told investigators he saw him on camera taking cash from registers and taking it behind the customer service desk instead of the accounting office. It was a breach of “cash-handling protocol,” according to the arrest affidavit. The manager became suspicious after the store reported losses the day before.

The report said he confessed to the manager and to sheriff’s investigators.

A Walmart spokesman declined to comment, saying it was a police matter.

Employee theft at retail stores is nothing new, though $76,000 is an attention-getting amount. Insider.com reported on July 14, 2020, that retailers were hit with $62 billion in retail theft losses in 2019, up from $51 billion the year before.

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On average, losses "which retailers refer to as shrink – represented about 1.6 percent of sales last year, up from 1.4 percent the previous year,” Insider reported. “For a company the size of Walmart, which generated more than $514 billion in revenue last year, a 1.6 percent shrink rate would translate into more than $8 billion in losses. Walmart does not publicly disclose its losses due to shrink.”

The National Retailers Association recently reported, “A global study of retail theft found that employees who steal from retailers average $1,890 in theft, while the average shoplifter will only take about $438.”

Hardly a week goes by when there is not a police report of someone being arrested for shoplifting at Walmart, despite the ceiling being filled with security camera portals.

Some thieves boldly load wide-screen TVs onto a grocery cart and head out the front door. Police are called. When caught, they are prosecuted and trespassed from the store.

Most employee theft methods are more subtle than raking in wads of cash from registers. They steal products, often by hiding items in the trash and picking them up later. They engage in a variety of scams involving gift cards, including issuing fake refunds to cards they keep, not ringing up items for friends, or engaging in identity theft.

In 2021, a West Virginia Walmart employee pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud charges after stealing $124,000 in gift cards over a five-month period, according to the Associated Press.

Last year, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office arrested a 37-year-old clerk at the Walmart on Highway 200 in Ocala and charged her with fraud.

She allegedly scanned lower priced UPC codes for items or did not scan them at all. This went on for almost a year. The total loss to the store was $343, according to the arrest affidavit.

“Asked why she took the items from her employer, she advised that she needed them for her daughter and did not have the money to pay for the items,” the report said.

With so much thievery, why doesn’t Walmart have armed security guards at the stores?

Niall MacDonagh, a former Walmart department head for 18 years, summed it up on Quara.com.

“…it would cause more problems than it would solve,” he wrote. “Today, if a thief runs, they let it go. The philosophy is that it is not worth the risk to restrain someone who is resisting. You give the security guard a gun and now things can escalate very fast with needless loss of life.”

Instead, police are called. The Walmart that borders Leesburg and Fruitland Park has a reserved spot for a police car, and law enforcement is often present.

But arrests are not without risk.  

In 1999, a rookie cop on the Fruitland Park force received a 2:30 a.m. call from an off-duty officer doing security work at the Walmart store. He said a video camera picked up an adult and a juvenile stealing cigars. The officer arrived in time to see the suspect’s car take off, hitting a grocery cart on the way out of the parking lot.

The teen driver bailed. The officer said he told the adult to take his hands out of his pockets “four or five times.” When he finally did, the officer thought he was pulling out a weapon, so he shot him.

There were no cigars and no weapons. The man survived and sued the city. The cop left the force and the city’s insurance company paid the man $70,000.

The retailers’ association had a recommendation in its bulletin on “Internal Theft.”

“Unless your employee’s reasoning for stealing is along the lines of Jean Val Jean’s reason for stealing bread in 'Les Miserables,' you will need to fire the employee. (And if the reason is as noble as Jean Val Jean’s, you should look into what you can do to help the employee get to a better place in life). You do not necessarily need to prosecute your employee legally, especially if the theft is marginal, but you cannot have anyone working for you whom you do not trust.”

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