When Store Policy and Morals Clash

A little over a week ago, I got a post in my Facebook newsfeed that caught my interest.  The posting dealt with a customer at Walmart who was short of funds and the cashier used her own personal charge card to pay the roughly $8 remaining balance for the customer.

What was so interesting about this post is that many people said “God Bless” this employee or “Kudos to the employee”.  However, there were people like me who were realists that stated that the employee would get fired immediately for her actions.  Ironically, it was only a small handful of people, including myself, who threw the gasoline on this good deed.

But as they say, “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”.  This must have been stated by a head of a retail company because many times moral values clash with store policy.  Most stores have the policy that employees cannot carry any money or charge cards on the sales floor.  If they did they would be reprimanded accordingly including up to termination.

However, over my 20+ years in retail, I saw this sort of thing happen 3 times.  There were some major similarities in all 3 instances:

• All 3 were done by females.
• All 3 were in some sort of management position.
• All 3 regretted their decision after performing the action even going as far as saying “Don’t ever do what I just did”.

Ironically, 2 of these were done at Staples and those women were more nervous than the one who performed the action at Woolworth.  Maybe its because Staples has no morals and doesn’t care about the customer.

What this brings me to is that over the nearly 13 years I worked at Staples, I performed several things that I felt were morally justified even though they went against Staples store policy.  I always believe that if something is in the best interest of oneself or a customer then it should be done.  Simply put, store policies should be a guideline, but common sense and good judgment (and good morals) should triumph in every case no exceptions ever.