A Best Buy worker told a strange tale of a customer loading up his cart with items just minutes before the store closed for the night, creating enough suspicion for the store manager to call the police. And while the customer did pay for the items, he did so in a way where the employee assessed, “Something just didn’t sit right with me about that.”
The story comes from TikTok creator Dallas (@dallas_ponzo), whose Instagram account touts him as “Best Buy story time guy.” The video is just getting started, with more than 158,000 views as of Saturday morning, for a video released Friday, though he does have multiple recent videos that have cracked the million mark.
He starts, “My manager called the police on this customer tonight, who came into the building 23 minutes before close, and filled his shopping cart up with a couple thousand dollars worth of smart home items and health and wearable tech.”
Specifically, “He had four electric toothbrushes, one of the new Phillips cameras, three Blink cameras, two Amazon Echoes, two Google Nest video doorbells, and a bunch of other items. He had so much stuff in his cart that it was falling off the top.”
The manager checked to see if the customer needed help. When the customer asserted he didn’t, the manager went to the front and “preemptively called the police” in preparation for the customer to try to leave the store with the items. Dallas says that the police, in response, sent three cop cars to the store.
The customer paid, but …
The customer did actually end up paying for the items, but in a way that aroused further suspicion. He said, “I’m gonna use a few different cards, but I don’t know their limits.”
Dallas explained, “And so my co-worker’s like, ‘OK, just go ahead and try whichever payment you want to.’ And so he tries the first card, and it declines flat out.” The customer used several other cards and eventually paid for what worked out to be about $3,700 worth of items.
“It printed out the longest receipt I’ve ever seen,” Dallas relayed. “It was longer than me. And the customer left the building, and the cops drove away because he paid for it.”
Yet, he observed, “But something just didn’t, like, sit right with me about that. He paid for it, but how do you not know the limit of your credit card?”
Best Buy cracking down on theft
Best Buy’s been more aware of crime in its stores of late. A November 2023 story from CNN noted, “The electronics retailer with nearly 1,000 stores says it is preventing shoplifting through higher staffing levels in stores, full-service cashier lanes, security staff at entrances and other strategies.”
The article added, “Retailers report that shrink increased 19% in 2022 to $112 billion and has nearly doubled from pre-pandemic levels. They blame shoplifting and organized groups stealing merchandise from stores to resell online for the rise in shrink. (Shrink also includes employee theft, damaged products, administrative errors, online fraud and other factors.)”
John Eck, a criminologist at the University of Cincinatti, said that stores cutting back on employee numbers increase their odds of falling prey to shoplifting. “The more retailers go toward reducing their labor costs and putting more of the energy on shoppers, the higher the shoplifting.”
Should they have checked his ID?
Commenters had some suggestions about how the employees might have handled the situation.
“Stolen credit cards,” one commenter surmised, before adding, “This is where checking his ID makes a difference but you can’t because they swipe their own card. I think swiping an ID should be required with card transactions.”
“Were all the names on the credit cards the same, or did your coworker bother looking at all?” another asked. “Did they check id? If there’s ever a time to id check a credit card it’s then.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to the creator via Instagram direct message and TikTok comment and to Best Buy via email.
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