In some industries, dealing with criminals and thieves is just another part of the job. However, just because someone is a criminal, it doesn't mean they're very good at it. When workers encounter desperate people who would commit robbery tensions can run high, yet sometimes amusing stories can arise as a result. These are stories of workers who encountered some incredibly dumb thieves, and who came out with hilarious stories as a result. Content has been edited for clarity.
We Didn’t Have Any Money There!
“This one actually happens a lot, but it happened to me one night several years ago during a graveyard shift.
I was working alone on a Sunday night at a gas station. Now, this wasn’t a ‘bad’ area, but it wasn’t great either, so the GM figured that they didn’t need two people watching the store. I disagreed with him, but I digress.
I was in the back of the store mopping, doing my best to keep an eye out for people approaching the store so I could run back to the registers before they got inside. Anyway, I’m mopping when a van suddenly pulls up in reverse to the store. Just as I started to put the mop aside, literally no more than two seconds after this, the doors to the back open up and two dudes with sweaters tied around their heads jump out the back. They rush inside the store yelling. They run up to the counter and grab both of the teller machines. They rip out the power cords, run out of the store with their loot and jump into the back of the van. It speeds off and they hit the road. All of this happened in about twenty seconds and I just stood there and watched it.
What these idiots didn’t realize is that the effing machines are separate from the cash drawer for this very reason. They effectively made off with zero dollars, but did me a favor because I didn’t have to work for the next two days since the store couldn’t operate until they got the new machines in.”
Got This One In The Bag
“Not my own story, but an acquaintance from years ago.
He was working nights at a gas station/convenience store and had a group of usual customers who he got to know the comings and goings of. One man in particular was known to pretty much always wear the same clothes and stood out because he only had one eye and, being poor, wore a patch over the non-functioning eye. He came there every night to buy cigs. He also rented movies there a couple of times per week. So, the store had his name and address.
One night, old acquaintance was working at the station when eye patch man came in, but was wearing a large paper bag on his head.
Employee: ‘Hey man. Here for your usual smokes?’
Patch: ‘No, this is an effing robbery!’
Employee: ‘Haha! Good one.’
He proceeds to put this guy’s cigs on the counter.
Patch: ‘I’m serious! Give me all the money in the drawer!’
Eventually, the guy figured out the robbery attempt was real, handed over the money, and then called the police when eye patch man left.
Now, it’s pretty stupid to rob a place where you regularly shop and where they have your name on computer as a video renter, but even dumber than that, he only cut one eye hole in the paper bag.”
I’ll Cut You
“I worked at a video store for quite a while in my late teens early twenties. One day, a guy who looked to be about eighteen or nineteen walked up to the register, sheepishly pulled out a folding pocket knife, and told me to give him all my money. The counter I worked behind was elevated by about two feet and only had one entrance, which this guy was nowhere near, so there was zero chance of him even being able to touch me.
For some reason, this guy just really enraged me. I said ‘no.’
He said, ‘what?’
‘No,’ I said again.
He then said, ‘I don’t want to do it, but I will cut you man.’
I then began to yell, ‘If you cut me, you better cut me down to the ground because if I get one hand on you, I will end you. I will rip your empty head off!’
As I am screaming this at him, I am climbing over the counter towards him and he is starting to retreat towards the exit quickly. He made it out before I reached him, so I opened the door after he left and yelled something like, ‘You better keep running! If I ever see you again you’re dead meat!’
I have never been afraid of a fight, but if this guy had a ranged a weapon or serious blade, this would have never happened. I was just so outraged at the idea of him trying to rob me with a three-inch folding pocket knife that probably couldn’t cut butter. God, that story still enrages me!”
Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes
“In college, I worked as a Loss Prevention guy for one of the Big Boxes. You know, sit in a little room and watch cameras to catch shoplifters.
We were having a problem with customer’s wallets being stolen out of the men’s fitting rooms. The victim would go in, try on a new pair of pants, come out to show his wife and when he went back into the fitting room his wallet would be gone.
So one afternoon I get a call from the sales staff about a fight in the men’s fitting room. I run down there to find a 6’2″ man with a 5’2″ man in a headlock. The tall man caught the shorter man coming out of his room with his wallet.
Turns out the tall man’s ‘wallet’ was his Secret Service badge and credentials.”
Why Sign Your Name To That?
“I was working as a cashier for a grocery store. A customer came and placed a random assortment of things up at my register – candy, soda, a couple kids toys, and a precooked chicken from the deli. She mentioned to me that she was from Oregon and would like the tax removed (we can do that in Washington for customers from specific states). To do this, she had to give me her ID, so I could record the info on it before removing the tax from the transaction.
After giving her the total, she said she would like to pay with a check. She as filling it out as I noticed it was pre-signed. I asked her whose they were and if they were available to come sign the check in front of me. She said they belonged to her mom who was in the car. When she left, I saw her get in the passenger seat of a van and leave, so I took down the license plate as they drove off. After this all happened, I called my floor manager over and told him what happened. We both shrugged and basically said ‘Weird’ leaving it at that.
Later that day, the loss prevention guy called me up stairs, which is never normally a good thing. He tells me that I had made a good catch, because two women had been going around town with a stolen book of checks and I was the reason the cops had an ID and a license plate to go after.
The funny thing is that these checks had been stolen from a dumpster of a business that had long since been closed. They were most likely not pre-signed. However, the criminals were smart enough to wait a whole year to try to use them.”
Goodnight, Sleep Tight
“I worked at a bowling alley in high school. We had a guy climb up into the ceiling in the restroom and wait until we closed, so he could climb down and rob it.
Not only did he not get any money (everything was locked up in a gigantic safe from the 1930s that probably weighed over a thousand pounds), but he couldn’t even get out of the building. All the steel fire doors were padlocked on the outside, and I guess he didn’t want to risk being seen smashing the glass on the front doors, since it was right by a busy road.
He did the only logical thing, which was go back to the bar and drink all night. The manager found him passed out on the floor when he opened up in the morning.”
Nothing Of Value Was Lost
“Back when I worked at Walmart, one of the best laughs I ever got while working there was watching two middle-aged women run into the store, grab about fifty of those visa gift cards from the rack, then run out of the store. They were laughing while they did it.
You have to activate them. They are completely worthless without being activated. I bet they were pretty upset when they realized they had just stolen a whole lot of nothing.”
Too Stupid To Rob
“My Denny’s is too inept to be robbed. A man walked in and went to the podium/cash stand. He said he had a weapon and wanted the money in the drawer.
The first waitress sighed in disgust and said, ‘I’m not even in the register’ and walked away.
A second waitress stood nearby and looked at her husband, who was sitting in the nearest table, and mouthed ‘Call the Cops.’ The husband says at regular volume ‘I don’t even have my cell phone on me!’
At this point, the robber decides that maybe this isn’t the best route and begins to flee. They caught him about a tenth of a mile away. On foot.”
Giant Glowing Package In His Pants
“I used to work at a PETCO in Alabama. We had a guy who would compulsively steal things. It was never anything expensive, just toys for his dog, or something like that.
One night, about 30 minutes before closing, he comes in with a friend. We know his routine by now: get his friend to distract us while he steals.
Anyway, his friend comes up to me to ask something about dog food, when I noticed that the thief went to the bird aisle. So I agree to help him, but I make a discreet page to our manager to let him know what’s going on. Manager goes to find him and sees him stuffing a bird perch down his pants. I don’t just mean a little one either; this thing was almost 2 feet long and NEON pink. So naturally, my manager calls the cops and he eventually has to pull this ridiculous thing out of his pants.
The jokes about his junk were numerous.”
Tomato Tomahto
“I work part-time in a grocery store that is robbed all the bloody time. Like seriously, once or twice every month. It’s gotten to the point where I now just laugh every time I arrive at work to see the store has been broken into again.
One particular night just before we were beginning to close, a brazen robber runs into the store who appears to be no older than twenty with a cricket bat, nervously demanded the money from the register. The clerk obeys and gives the man roughly $200 (the reward hardly seems proportional to the potential ramifications).
At this point, the customers at the front end are backing away and the man attempts to make an escape. As he breaks for the door, while I’m standing in an adjacent isle where the soup pleasantly happen to be shelved, I grab a big ol’ can of tomato soup and give it a friendly toss in the vicinity of his face.
KO. Slam dunk. Hole in one.
He takes a comical fall into the flower display in a glorious explosion of flowers and water. Then every male customer jumps on the moron and pins him down until the police arrive.”
Mr. Krabs?
“I’m a hair stylist and thinking of this incident always makes me smile.
I was shopping for some work supplies at a local professional beauty supply business when a man came in waving a glock at the owner of the place, who at that moment, was standing at the register.
A bit of background for you all: the owner of this particular beauty supply was notorious for being a miserly penny-pincher and would completely freak out if any of his employees rung items up wrong in a way that would lose even a dime in profits. I’d personally seen him tear an employee a new rectum for ringing up a 3 cent of profit loss before. All the hairdressers that used to shop there called this guy, ‘Mr. Krabs’, but not to his face.
Back to the story…
So the robber is waving his glock around and demands money. The owner of the place starts growling and turning purple in the face, literally, and then he screams, ‘MY MONEY! YOU WANT MY MONEY!?’
Mr. Krabs then reaches over the counter, grabs the glock by its barrel and half of the robbers hand, even with the glock pointed directly at his face. Then with the other hand he swings a hard punch right in the robber’s face.
Mr. Krabs ends up climbing, in a rage, over the counter and beating the robber without mercy with his one free hand while he tries to wrestle the glock away with the other.
Mr. Krabs was a man in his late 60s and the robber was easily in his early 20s.
In the end, what happened was that the robber clearly gave up on trying to get anything and he was just trying to escape Mr. Krabs, while the older man grabbed a hold of him, got the glock away, and started beating him with his own device.
I’ve never seen anything like it since in my life. Unfortunately, the robber did manage to get away, but I found out that he was later caught pulling another crime somewhere else.
Nicely for Mr. Krabs, he got a surge in extra business for a bit from all the stylists that were impressed with his fighting skills once word got around.”
He Didn’t Know What Was Going On
“We have a pharmacy technician from Vietnam that does not speak English perfectly and has a very thick accent.
One night, a guy came in and tried to rob the pharmacy. The man did not have a weapon, but he had his hand in his jacket as if he might. He told the technician he wanted ‘All the Oxycontin!’ The technician said he had to have a prescription. The robber got irritated and cussed and yelled he wanted the Oxycontin pills right now and that this was no joke, he was robbing the store.
The tech, somehow not aware, continued to explain that Oxycontin is a scheduled II painkiller and the tech said he could fax the robber’s doctor for a refill request if had a script for it on file.
The would-be robber got so annoyed he walked away.”
Debit Card Snafu
“I work at my family’s store selling spirits and other adult beverages. We have a debit/credit machine where we take the card, punch in our store id/cashier id, then amount, stick the card in, and hand it back.
This one fellow comes in and grabs a six-pack from the cooler and comes up to the counter. He was the only other person in the store besides a random guy in a corner going through chardonnay, so I rang the six-pack in when I saw him grab it. He came up to the front desk and I asked him how he was doing and he said fine and I told him his total as he was just pulling up to the till. He mumbled something and reached into his coat and pulled out a weapon and placed it on the counter with the barrel (or whatever you call the part that it shoots from) facing me and slid it a few inches forward.
I was used to people doing that with credit/debit cards, so I just stretched out my palm and grabbed the weapon’s body with one hand and the debit machine in the other, he wasn’t holding onto it very firmly so I just pulled it away and I realized as soon as I grabbed it that it was a weapon not a credit card so I froze with his snubbie in my hand and the debit machine in the other. We quickly looked at each other and then he bolted leaving the bloody thing behind.
I called my uncle and then the cops who came and took a statement. After, they told me that the weapon wasn’t loaded, so I wasn’t really in any real danger. It’s still one of the funniest things to ever happen to me.”
Just Take The Light Stuff
“I live in the epitome of suburbia in Tennessee, which means our police are massively overfunded and consistently bored out of their skulls. We have one major intersection in town in particular where our cops love to hang. It’s an easy access point to pretty much any area in town, so naturally they often wait there when not on active patrol. At this particular intersection, there is a very nice, high profile 24-hour Walgreens.
About two months ago, four armed men come into the place at about 10:30 at night. They hold all 15 people inside (my coworker being one of them) hostage and demand all the money in the registers. Unfortunately for them, a great deal of the money is in coins. The robbers, for whatever reason, do not see this as a deterrent and become dead-set to haul out a measly couple grand that is predominantly made of coins. Physics obviously impede their performance.
MEANWHILE, IN THE PHARMACY FULL OF HIGH-VALUE PRESCRIPTIONS: nothing is happening and nothing is taken, because of course it’s not.
So, the four impossibly stupid hoods try to haul off this heavy as heck bag of cash, only to find the majority of the town’s ex-military police force waiting on them with their weapons drawn. 3/4 of them surrender at this point, while the fourth tries to dash out the back. He made it half-way to the Taco Bell before the dog brought him down.
AFTERMATH: The case is still ongoing, but the judge threw the book at them all. At last tally, each is alleged of a count of armed robbery, 15 counts of kidnapping, and a few more fun ones. Each had his bail set well over $50,000. The town is flabbergasted by the sheer stupidity.
Choose your own moral: Do not try to rob the central Walgreens in a suburban town with bored cops. You will not succeed. If you do, steal the prescriptions. They’re light and don’t require a safe to open.”
Seriously, Guy?
“I work at a Costco. For some reason, one of our managers decided that an Xbox Kinect Bundle (about $400 there) should be placed on the pallet right inside the front door. I’m out on carts, just minding my own business. I see this guy driving around, looking for a spot. I only noticed him because his car look like scrap on wheels; his license plate was duct taped to the rear view window. He ends up parking in the handicap spot closest to the door. I notice he hasn’t put up a tag, nor does his license plate have a symbol on it and he looks capable at least. He walks in, quick pace, empty hands, grabs an Xbox, and turns around.
This is the fun part. He noticed me watching him all the way in. As he starts going out the entrance, he asks our door lady where the returns are. He goes around to the exit door, and stands in the fifteen person line, waiting patiently to either make a break for it or to try and return it. I walk up to him, say it’s not his. He insists it is. I say, ‘Well, let me take it (I take it, he stands there confused), and we’ll just bring you to the front of the line. We’ll get you out of the cold and on your way home.’
His response? ‘No way man, it’s not even worth it,’ walks a few steps away, then runs to his car and takes off.
Seriously, guy?”
Too Stupid For Daytime Television
“My sister used to work at a bank in a Walmart and her coworker had this somewhat older pickup truck (about fifteen years old at the time of this story). The truck was pretty unremarkable in every way: stock parts, stock stereo, average looking. Some idiot punched out the driver-side window and stole the CD player, which didn’t play past track 7 on any given CD (mind you, it was stock and ALSO 15 years old). Instead of disconnecting the plugs like a normal thief, he cut all the wires, making it a stolen CD player that now required repair. The idiot bled all over the inside of the truck because he punched the window in and proceeded to wrap his hand up in one of the girl’s spare work shirt.
After taking the CD player, he then walks into Walmart and tries to steal a TV. Not one of the newer TVs that only weights like 25 pounds, the big tube TVs that weighs like 80. When he walked out, the alarm went off. He told the person at the door that it was a return, and he was simply taking his old one back to his car. Keep in mind that he still had a bloody bank teller’s polo wrapped around his hand…that had an employee’s name on it. An employee who was working at that store at that moment.
Of course the friend and the store pressed charges. The friend was also offered an appearance on one of those judge TV shows, but declined because the case was too stupid for a daytime judge show.”