Thursday night some lowlifes broke into one of my shops. They stole 3 of my computers and clipped all of the wires. Unfortunately they stole my main server computer that has my pos program on it. They also stole my cash drawer. It was empty but I’m a little upset that my manager shut the drawer at the end of the night. I prefer to have the cash drawer left open at night so that anyone thinking of robbing it can see that it has no money in it. The thieves also decided to trash the place as well which was really nice of them! What really sucks is that I have security cameras but they haven’t been working lately. If I hadn’t procrastinated on fixing them, I would have had these punks on camera.
The police told me that the jewelry store and pawn shop on my block also got broken into last week. Thieves went through an upstairs apartment and cut a hole through the floor to get into the pawn shop below. This kind of stuff doesn’t usually happen in the small city I’m in. It has a pretty low crime rate but lately it’s starting to get worse.
This whole situation couldn’t have happened at a worse time for me. I’m in the final stages of opening another shop so I’m pretty much low on cash at the moment so boy is it really frustrating! Sometimes it seems like you have to take 10 steps back to go 2 forward.
We didn’t find out that the place had been broken into until 4:00 Friday when my manager showed up to open. To make matters worse the cops kicked everyone out of the shop and wouldn’t let us open or even answer the phones. They treated it as a crime scene and took pictures and fingerprints. I understand this had to be done and I don’t have a problem with that. What upset me is that it took over 2 hours for the officers who took the fingerprints and pictures to even show up. So as a result not only did I get burglarized, I also lost all of my dinner sales on a Friday night! I feel like I got it stuck to me twice. The phone was ringing off the hook and they wouldn’t even let my employees in to answer it.
At least they didn’t get any money.
Boy are the thieves going to be pissed when they work their butt off to get the drawer open and find that it’s empty. At least they didn’t try to steal my safe. I guess these kinds of things are bound to happen sooner or later. It just pisses me off that some people can be such lowlife scumbags.
Sorry for writing so much, I just needed to vent a little.
Not to state the obvious, but get an alarm installed tommorow! They might still break in, but they wont spend any time to grab your computers, pry your cash drawer out, and especially trash your place. As soon as that alarm siren starts wailing, they want to get out ASAP! Don’t count on your security cameras too much. Last break in I had, the scumbag was seen on 4 different cameras. Still couldn’t tell the color of skin, hair, nothing! He covered up his face and kept his head down. Got busted eventually after hitting 27 other businesses, and was only sentenced to 47 days. The Florida penal system sucks!
I know how you feel, this had happened to us about 6 times in the past year.
However, your shop was actually burglarized - you were not robbed - which would mean you had employees there at the time.
We have been both robbed and burglarized more than a few times in the past year. One indicdent involved a gun pointed at our manager and money being handed over without incident. Another was a totally different story that ended up lasting for 5 hours and involving a 20 member SWAT team, snipers, machine guns and an armoured vehicle.
Add to that 4 or 5 times windows have been busted out in the middle of the night in order for the scumbags to find and steal abosultely nothing. At $400 a pop, those windows get expensive.
The only time a person was caught was when the SWAT team was involved. I’m waiting on the outcome of that case before I tell the story here.
You’re right. My mistake in using the wrong word. I could not imagine actually being robbed and having a gun pointed at one of my employees. What a horrible thing to experience and to think you’ve been through it twice in the last year! I’m really sorry to hear about what you’ve been through.
Don’t beat yourself up about not having the security cameras set up yet, I’m sure you’re taking care of that right away. a grocery store my wife worked at had an alarm system that was installed but not activated yet, burgular got away with a coupel grand, but they didn’t learn their lesson, and a month later, they got hit again, with the same perfectly good alarm system that wasn’t activated yet! The only good thing was that there was an arrest eventually cause it was the same punk both times and he was hitting a lot of businesses in a quiet town, sounds like that may be the case with your situation. I haven’t been burgularized, but I remember going to open at my mom’s shop years ago, and found a rock thrown through a window and a trail of blood straight to the freezer where we kept the cash box. That one was a pretty easy case to solve. It was the employee we suspected the least, the 65 year old we hired to help supplement his retirement! Go figure.
I am really sorry to hear this. It’s amazing that stealing your stuff isn’t enough but they have to destroy things too. You have to wonder what sort of people these are. I wonder where in NY you are located, if you prefer not to disclose that is of course fine. I am just curious because I feel like this is a semi common topic of discussion. Recently, in a town near by at a pizzeria that I have been to, “Thieves rob W. Caldwell pizzeria owner, then set shop on fire”. This is a very very nice town so it’s not limited to less than desirable areas.
I can’t help but wonder if they took the computers out of fear that the video feed was on them. Not that you shouldn’t have cameras, but perhaps one of those little stickers on the door that says something to the effect of “All video stored offsite” … okay, bad wording, but you get the idea… similar to “manager can’t open safe”.
The scumbags in my area are not interested in computers or such - just cash, from what it seems.
Of all the time we have been broken into in the middle of the night never once did they try to take our computers or touch screen monitors. Once they did pry our cash drawers open and ruin them, but there was nothing in them. Now we just leave them open.
They last few break-ins results in a busted window, a little trashing under the front counter - and a ton a dirty footprints on our safe where they tried to kick it up from the floor. No dice, since there are 4-6" concrete anchors holding it down.
So in the end they never take anything - but we have to put in a new $400 window. I’d rather hang a sign that says “Please don’t break window - call me at XXXXXXX and I’ll bring you $200 in cash…”.