Now, if they just had one of those receipt-checkers just like WalMart...

A good way around this policy would be to have employees go through a 10 min seminar and sign a waiver stating that although the company doesn't want you to chase down thieves you do so at your own risk with no liability to the company.

I guess its good for purse snatchers to know that they can now go to this store and not worry about anyone bothering them.

@GyroMight: The problem is the company still stands to be sued by the person being chased if they are harmed, or if the employee is mistaken about them having stolen something.

@SonicMan: Kind of like "gun-free zones" around schools?

That way the sociopathic murderers know exactly where to go to minimize the risk of dealing with armed people.

@SonicMan: they still have to worry about other customers who may have the guts to stand up to them, but not employees.

@K-Bo: Good Point. Okay let's make the thief sit through a 10 min seminar and sign a waiver saying that they rob at their own risk.

A couple of years ago my wife had the same thing happen in a Whole Foods. The guy picked up her purse and started walking away, she saw it, caught up with him, spun him around, grabbed her purse and started yelling for help. A couple of employees chased the guy out of the store and managed to get his license plate number because he was already in the car backing the wrong way down a divided road to prevent exactly that (Mass. car, no front license plate). The cops found the guy through his plate and apparently he had a record of some sort but we never heard anything more about it. Store manager gave her a $5 gift card. I hope nothing happened to the employees that chased the guy!

@SonicMan: These policies aren't exactly news so this doesn't necessarily mean they'll get more crooks in the store as a result of this. After all, it's not like this purse snatcher waited for news of an employee getting fired.

Furthermore, Schafer knew about the policy but gave chase anyway. So there's still always the off chance of getting chased by a store employee.

@SonicMan: They can also rob 7-11's, as corporate policy is not to confront/try to stop shoplifters. Of course, the police don't have that restriction, and those pesky cameras, rewards, and other things tend to make them show up at your door.

Yes, I'd love to pay more for groceries because the store gets sued after their employee trips and falls while chasing a criminal into the lot.

If you want to give stores immunity from lawsuit when their employees get hurt on the job, then fine -- otherwise the employee has every right to restrict them from dangerous activities.

Hey Troy, you did the right thing man. All American's should feel a duty to protect and serve, not cower in the corner like your policy following manager. The job is not worth it.

@thomas_callahan: I always wondered about how much tougher it is for the police in those states where there's only one license plate on their cars. Who decides (and by what logic) to go with only one plate?

As an Ex-worker at many stores dealing with the public, I must say I completely agree with the store.

This gentleman's statement of: "You protect people that need help." is exactly what he DIDN'T do. Once the woman's purse was stolen, she was out of danger. He came in after that fact. His intervening could have resulted in even MORE people being hurt. Nothing is more dangerous than a criminal cornered, in fear of getting caught. Their adrenaline is already pumping, and once flight is no longer a factor, it comes down to fight. This is a time when your BEST course of action is to get all the info you can and give it ALL to the police.

In NJ, we had the "Hat Bandit" who robbed multiple banks. How was he caught? Someone didn't confront him, they observed the license plate number of the car he got into and relayed that to police. He was captured soon thereafter and before he robbed another bank.

@Albion01: It's not? How on Earth is that woman's purse worth more than his job?

@thomas_callahan: Probably nothing, since they just shooed him out of the store rather than give chase and apprehend him, it sounds like.

@nybiker:

I'm glad i only need one plate, i don't ever have a holder on the front, it would goofy as heck with on on there tho, unless its a Delaware style plate. i like those.

You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

If he hadn't run after her people would be condemning the slack jawed employees that just watched as an innocent woman's purse was stolen.

I think as far as personal safety goes, what he did wasn't smart, but good for him for doing the right thing on a human level.

@Rectilinear Propagation: Or the life of an innocent bystander the crook/Troy shoves out of the way during the chase and hits their head. Or someone who slams on their brakes because Troy chased the guy into the street, which he wouldn't have done if not being chased, who then gets rear ended and has back pain for the next 10-15 years.

Perhaps it was a Louie bag.

@thomas_callahan: Probably not, pretty much all the cases where the employees are fired is when they make actual physical contact with the thieves. It seems this store in particular has a more stringent policy that makes it easier for thieves to get away initially, or for good depending on how good their surveillance setup is.

Where is my John Wayne
Where is my prairie son
Where is my happy ending
Where have all the cowboys gone

Well Paula, it seems they work at Kroegers, or at least they used to.

When I hear stories like this, I wonder if the employee was actually given a copy of corporate policy or training on the matter. I know I didn't when I worked in retail.

@FrankieAvalonin'_GitEmSteveDave:

The policy exists for the safety of our employees, customers and others who may be seriously injured in a chase, which has happened in prior incidents at our stores and other retailers.

So it's not like it's always ended well in the past (or at least not ended without people getting hurt). People like to act like these policies are in place based on theory and fear of things that might happen as opposed to being created because of something that actually happened.

No good deed goes unpunished. I personally wouldn't have chased the guy...at least not on company time.

@FrankieAvalonin'_GitEmSteveDave:

I remember the Hat Bandit. He was active in my area, and I considered it an abysmal failure on the part of local, state, and Federal law enforcement that he was able to knock over 19 banks in a small area before getting caught on a citizen's tip.

In fact, most of the state's biggest cases, from the Lindbergh kidnapping to the Atlantic City serial murderer to John List to Robert Zarinsky, have either been bungled or unsolved.

I'm torn about this. On one hand, he saved a woman's money and identity, and the thief perhaps would have gotten away without his intervention. But clearly, the police were already on the scene (but he didn't know that, apparently).

On the other hand, his actions could have affected other people in the store. It's all a "what if" game, of course, since what if he had pushed someone out of the way to get to the door, or he tackled the thief and injured himself? I'm not sure there would be so much bravado and humbleness if he had twisted his back on the way down and couldn't work for four months.

There's helping people, and then there's vigilantism. If my purse was stolen at a grocery store, I'd definitely like someone to help. But I'm not sure how much help I would want outside of someone calling the police, jotting down license plate numbers, etc. When someone wants to sprint out of the store and chase a thief, that person's actions seem to be somehow on me and if the employee had been injured, I'm pretty sure I'd feel really bad about it even though I didn't make anyone run after a thief.

@FrankieAvalonin'_GitEmSteveDave: Or the people the crook hurts during future crimes because he wasn't caught during this one because people are afraid of what-ifs.

A couple of years go near me in Rockford IL, a meat department guy followed a steak shoplifter to the front door and confronted him(meat departments hate steak stealers, it happens a LOT)

Meat guy now dead from stabbing.

@ekthesy: Watch yourself. I hail from NJ. And I lived in Union.

@FrankieAvalonin'_GitEmSteveDave: I hail from here as well. Remember the Stanley Diner on Morris Avenue (Springfield-Union border)? Man, that place was good eatin'.

@JohnQPublic: He knew. In the video he says he asked the cops if they had a job for him because he would probably lose his.

@GyroMight: If health insurance companies can deny claims related to injuries sustained while committing crimes, why can't civil lawsuits go by the same principle?

@AndyfromIL: ...and criminal in jail for much longer than would have been the case for simple shoplifting, no?

If so, his actions resulted in getting a criminal who was willing to commit murder off the streets -- at a much-too-high price, but that doesn't make him anything less than heroic even so.

@Zclyh3: I bet Dexter would've caught up with him sooner or later.

If three kittens stole my purse, I'd just let them have it. Can't...resist...the cute...

Everyone will most likely disagree with on me on this one, but good for Randall's for sticking to company policy. Yes, I know it sucks, but I'm sorry if you get robbed in my store, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to call the police, and let them deal with it.

These rules are in place for a reason, companies pay out big bucks for workers comp, what if he got hurt while on the clock? What if he got shot? Stabbed? A bystander got shot or stabbed? An innocent child taken hostage?

All of this COULD have happened. Go ahead boycott the store, these people are just immature and most likely have never worked in a retail environment.

And having been robbed before, I did what I was supposed to do, went to the window and recorded the make, model, and most of the license plate number that I could. Now, I realize that this is a food store, and that the kid was 15 and most likely was going to walk, but you just call the police and let them do THEIR job, while you do yours.

And now after this story, he won't be hired anywhere, I wouldn't hire him. Next time he plays hero/cop you may have a dead employee.

I think that the guy did the right thing and I would love to be able to hire him at my company.

And I think that most commentators here, while maybe legally correct, are a bunch of overlawyered ninnies.

Ladies: If you leave your purse in your cart when you are shopping, run the child safety straps through your purse straps and secure it to the cart. It'll be a lot harder for a thief to run off with a whole cart.

Do you think the policy is meant for actual merchandise from the store, not a patron's personal property? Does that matter since it happened on the company's property?

@ekthesy: I was a Mark Twain/Peter Pan diner fan.

@David in Brasil: Ok, we're all in agreement here that he did the right thing.

Next time he does the right thing he gets himself, or others killed.

You sure you want someone like that on your team?

@Charles Duffy: Agreed, the world needs heroes, but I can tell you I had pretty wide eyes reading about this guy and having two kids and a wife at home(I worked in a small town grocery at the time)

I can't afford to be a dead hero to my kids for a petty theft. You have to draw boundaries at times in life that are not so black and white. The store is trying to protect employee safety in this story, I don't blame them a bit.

This man did absolutely the right thing -- he saw someone commit a crime, followed him and kept him in his sights until the police could arrive and handle the situation. That hardly makes him a vigilante!

I understand "corporate policy" put in place to protect stores from liability. Although a lawsuit by the employee should he have injured himself would be remote -- if you read the statistics on employee lawsuits, the VAST majority of them come from TERMINATION and unfair hiring/advancement complaints, not on-the-job injuries! I also understand "PR nightmare" and "corporate asshatery" and "loss of my business" and "bad bad bad publicity" that will absolutely follow this company's decision to fire the employee.

If you weigh the remote risk of an on-the-job injury and lawsuit against the certainty of negative press following his firing, the decision should have been easy to make -- particularly if the employee was an otherwise excellent employee. If his employment record with this company is good, then I wouldn't be surprised if he sues for wrongful termination. More bad publicity.

IF this employee was a poor employee and this incident was one of many where he had flaunted company policy, a smart thing to do would have been to use the situation as a training opportunity and require a mandatory meeting to go over the corporate policies. Then, they could have spoken to the employee about his actions, sorrowfully written him up for violating company policy and warned him about the potential for termination should he be written up again. Then, when he's eventually fired, it isn't directly connected to the purse snatching. As it is, even if he HAS been a bad employee -- deserving of termination for this and other violations -- he comes across as a victim. Not smart.

@David in Brasil: Nope, we're realists. If someone had robbed my 7-11 while I was on shift, I would have hit the alarm as soon as it was safe, and short of getting into the car with the robber, would do ANYTHING he asked, even unhooking the register and carrying it to his car. My till held at MOST $100-$200. Hell, the register was worth more than the money I kept in there. My boss's thinking was that he put too much money into training me, and I was worth more than the money.

As for shoplifters, I was trained to make eye contact with every customer as they walked in the door, to let them know someone knew they were there. If someone did try to shoplift, I would never pursue, but get all the info I could. Besides the safety aspect, how did I know he didn't have an accomplice waiting for me to leave the store to rob my till?

@squinko: Yesterday I was in the express line to check out. The lady in front of me was standing in front of her cart staring at the read out, I guess to make sure she didn't get ripped off. BUT, besides not starting to bag, she also wasn't looking at her purse in the seat, which even I observed to not have the strap through the purse straps. I watched three of four people pass right by to go thru the exit ten feet away and laughed that anyone of them could have just casually grabbed her purse while she was giving the unblinking hawk-eye to the monitor above the cashier, as if doing so ensured she got a deal vs. looking at it at the end, while moving her cart forward to let me move up.

CONSUMERIST - The headline for this article is WRONG - The person was FIRED for not following company policy.

Simple as that.

So is The Consumerist saying that employees should not be fired when they don't follow company policy. So if the company policy is to not spit in foot while working at McDonald's, then The Consumerist would then be upset if the employee was fired?

Company policy is there for a reason. Yes, in THIS CASE the result ended up being good, but there is SO much that can go wrong if they allow employee's to chase someone out into the parking lot.

If they had chased the guy out into the parking lot, and that gun turned around and shot him, would there then be a story on The Consumerist about how a company KILLED their own employee.

PLEASE CONSUMERIST - STOP with the misleading headlines. Stick to the truth.

Sad thing is the guy was the STORE MANAGER - He should know the company policy.

Just because the results ended up good this time DOES NOT mean it should be allowed.

@coan_net: I know that there is an unwritten rule that your comments are not suppose to be negative towards The Consumerist (the last time I posted something like this, The Consumerist comment police banned me.)

But I was later told that I should not have been banned just because I voiced my opinion and was let back in. Hopefully I don't end up banned again because of a misleading (lie) of a headline of the story that was placed.

@Charles Duffy: Who said he was willing to commit murder? He was probably cornered, and his flight or fight instinct kicked in. Many people/animals, when cornered, will act against their nature. So in the end, rather than the store being out $150(the average a shoplifter steals), they lost an employee, he+his family lost his life, and a criminal who may have never had a violent offense on his record is now in jail for a crime he may have never committed otherwise, and costing the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. No steak, which would have been thrown out in the end, is worth all that cost/agony/loss/pain.

@AndyfromIL: This reply is way more polite than the one I would have written.