Many years ago, I worked as a Loss Prevention Detective at Bloomingdales. Of course, as is often with events in life, I remember the good times. I worked with a team of people, however, there was one guy that I clicked with.
Dave was great. We had a-lot of fun and when I made a call out, he listened to me and took me seriously.
Probably because my first day on the job, he was reading the morning paper, drinking coffee, set for a relaxing day, and I was watching the monitors that were watching the shoppers on the floor and said, "Uh, Dave, I think that guy just stole some jeans."
Dave sighed, temporarily looking up from the paper to watch the customer I had pointed out.
"Holy Shit," Dave said, then radioed the Abington Police that he was about to make a stop.
Dave chased the guy through the parking lot (we weren't supposed to step off the curb but many years ago, that rule was overlooked). One of the cops somehow got into an accident responding (nothing major, just blew out a tire on the median).
But we got the guy (rather, Dave did), and from that day, Dave and I worked really well together. Communicated. And laughed a-lot.
It was a short lived job...everyone left to become cops, join the military, or, in my case, start a sales job that brought in double what working in LP brought in.
Many years have since passed, many jobs, and yet, other than being a paramedic, loss prevention remained my most fun job I'd ever had.
In 2018 I went back to the loss prevention field, this time for Target. Well. Much had changed in the field. And Target...well, unfortunately, the store I was at went through many mangers and the whole store was going through a "makeover." I was also shocked at the amount of creepy things and creepy people (men) that preyed on customers (excuse me, "guests") at the Montgomeryville Store. And the Operations manager did NOT want the public to know about these incidents.
A new Asset Protection Manager came to our store and he was...odd. He told me I cared too much about the job and was too enthusiastic. The AP District Manager told me to do things one way, but my store manager told me the complete opposite. I had loved working at Target my first few months. I was basically solo for 6 weeks after the manager that hired me was moved to a different store and my new manager was in training for 6 weeks. I made it work. But when the new manager, Tom, came in, he was cold, had the personality of brick, spoke about hiring more diverse people, but told me I should me more like Craig and Sam (men). Hmmm. The definition of diversity means variety.
Anyway, I asked to be relocated to a different store, Tom refused, and I resigned.
Off to Macy's I went. The great thing about Macy's is that I am in plain clothes. When I arrived at Macy's - they too, were in a state of flux. Getting new cameras, new systems that identified people on TrueVue (as you walk out the door, the towers scan what you bought and match it to a receipt. No receipt, it's a good bet that it's stolen and reviewing tape can prove or disprove it.)
My manager, unfortunately, as is too common across most retail organizations, is also the Operations Manager. He is spread way too thin. It's obvious his heart is in Asset Protection. Unfortunately, training is basically bare bones. And I started during the busiest time of the season - Oct, Nov, Dec. The team I work with comes together when working a case, and of course, that's when the job is awesome. However, the team when NOT working a case, is frustrated. There's such little communication and no clear guidelines on how to handle situations. The history of that department is crazy! I keep telling the old timers they need to write a book! From a local cop who was forcing shoplifters from Macy's to have sex with him after he picked them up to take them to the station (he was fired) to a detective who was stealing his co-workers food, and also stealing merchandise and would walk out one door with it, and in another door to get a refund for it!
I used to say if I won the lottery, it's a job I'd do for free, however, there's just such a lack of caring and training from corporate. It's not just Macy's - it's all over. And the criminals have more rights than the people assigned to protect the assets of the companies.
If you're thinking of getting into Loss Prevention, do it. Despite all the problems, it's a fascinating job. You might be good at spotting shoplifters, you might be good at investigations, you might be good at internals, you might be good at auditing, you might be good making sure high risk merchandise has appropriate security measures, hopefully you'll be good at most of them.
It's a thankless job. But it can be an exciting job. And if you are lucky enough to land on a good team, you'll love your job despite the frustrations.
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Taco Johns Potato Ole Recipe Update
Taco Johns - Potato Ole Recipe
It's been years since I've been to a Taco Johns. They just don't have them on the East Coast. Yes, I know we have pierogies and cheesesteaks and hoagies, but my GOD, sometimes, I just want some damn nachos and potato oles from Taco Johns.
I tweeted about how much I miss those potato oles - they are little crispy crown potatoes that have this fantastic spicy yet a hint of sweet seasoning.
Someone was kind enough to send on a recipe for homemade potato ole seasoning. I tried it out today, and it is fabulous! Granted, it's been awhile since I've had them, but they satisfied my craving! Ole!
I used Ore Ida Crispy Crowns - but I suppose they'd work on tater tots too!
Cook Crispy Crowns as directed.
While cooking, mix:
 |
| Taco John's Homemade Potato Ole's! So Good! |
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp cayenne pepper (basically subbing the cayenne for the cinnamon)
Mix all ingredients together in a small bowl
Sprinkle of tator tots or crispy crowns
Bake tots or crowns following instructions on package.
Sunday, February 4, 2018
The Chicago Way (Obama's Power Play)
Key to understanding the unraveling of Obama's Power at Any Cost, American Be Damned, is an article by Michael Gecan - who worked as a community activists in Chicago and understands first hand the manipulation of the Obama administration:
http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR35.2/gecan.php
The first quarter of the Obama administration is finally over. The key issue was not health care, not terrorism, not jobs. Nor was it the promise of “transformational change” that permeated the presidential campaign. The key issue was power—how the power of Washington’s political culture would respond to the power of the Chicago political culture imported by the Obama team.
When the media mentioned the administration’s “Chicago tactics” or when opponents complained that the White House staff behaved like “Chicago pols,” they were saying that the Obama team could be aggressive, tough, even mean.
That mild and broad critique missed the more important features of the Chicago way of doing politics: an approach that translated brilliantly in the presidential campaign and miserably after the inauguration. Here are those features—as I’ve observed them for 50 years, first as a young person growing up in a blue-collar Chicago neighborhood, then as an organizer in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere—and a look at how Washington has responded to their presence.
1) The Man on Five. The mayor’s office in Chicago is on the fifth floor of City Hall. The Man on Five is the hub, center, source of all good, generator of all punishment. This has nothing to do with charisma. The two mayors named Daley and most other machine mayors have had little personal pizzazz, no speaking skills, and a more transactional than transformational approach. Decade after decade, they have methodically consolidated and centralized power and influence. There is no counterweight—no House of Representatives, no Senate, no independent committee chairs. The City Council is a vaudeville show directed by the mayor. His power is unilateral, one-way, top-down. The key White House staff—Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, and Valerie Jarrett—inhaled this culture and carried it with them to Washington.
2) Control is God. The organizing principle in the Chicago political culture is control—control of who gets to the Man on Five and who doesn’t, control of how a bill or event burnishes the mayor’s myth or doesn’t, control of who runs for other offices and who doesn’t. The mortal sin of this culture is independence based in any value higher than loyalty to the Mayor.
3) Elections Mean Everything. The one thing that the political machine excels at is managing the electoral process from start to finish. Selecting and grooming candidates. Buying or scaring off reformers. Marshaling election lawyers to knock out other candidates’ petitions. Using only paid public employees to work (illegally, but with almost no chance of being caught and prosecuted because of the care taken to avoid detection) in campaigns and on election day. Filling vacancies produced by indictments and convictions of insiders with even tighter insiders. Nobody does it better. This is why the presidential campaign did so well in caucus states and less well in those with open elections: the machine thrives on narrow or limited voting situations.
4) Other People’s Money. The Chicago political culture is run by families or tribes—Daleys, Strogers, Madigans, Mells, Jacksons, and others—that have been on the public payroll for as long as 85 years. Most members of these tribes have never earned a dollar in the private or nonprofit sectors. They have grown accustomed to drawing their salaries from public agencies, sequestering and spending tax dollars, and using their public positions to grow even richer as lawyers and consultants to private interests who need public favors, ultimately drawing pay for their private efforts from the public coffers. Back in Illinois, leaders of both parties—Democrats in the northern part of the state, Republicans in the suburbs and central parts of the state—have grown up in this culture, reinforced it, and prospered because of it. They take other people’s money for granted the way most people take oxygen for granted. Suddenly, the Chicago cohort finds itself surrounded by an opposition party and moderates within their own party who come from states and regions where there is no such sense of entitlement.
Does all this add up to the end of this administration, as some have suggested? Not at all. I’d argue this could mean that the administration, having squandered the first quarter, is finally ready to play.
But first it would have to draft some new players, remove most of the Chicago crowd and shed many of the political habits developed in a machine political environment.
Then it would have to stop playing by the rules set by the permanent elite in Washington and approach the nation’s core concerns in a very different way.
The administration’s proposal to create a new federal agency to hold financial institutions accountable is an excellent example of not doing things differently. It plays right into the hands of the Washington political and bureaucratic establishment. Until the late 1970s, the United States capped interest rates at 9 percent in most circumstances, and banks were still profitable. Since then, the economy has operated without fiscal speed limits. Reestablishing those limits on credit cards, payday loans, and other predatory credit vehicles would do more for the majority of Americans than another new agency or several thousand pages of regulations. The appeal for this basic restraint has been heard even by titans of finance: the CEO of Citigroup surprised the financial industry by recently agreeing that a cap on interest rates, with certain conditions, would be possible.
As presently constituted, the White House cannot undertake these sorts of necessary and far-reaching initiatives. The president packed his staff with those who grew up in the unique political culture of Chicago and Cook County, one of the last remaining islands of machine domination in the nation. When the machine went to Washington, it did what it has always done and what worked back home: try to crush or co-opt opponents, project and promote the image of a mythic leader, tightly control the media, and rely on those who helped win the election. The disarray that the administration finds itself in after its first year is a direct result of the failure of this culture to function under new circumstances.
Different players, with a different approach, can tackle the lingering and deepening problems that plague huge numbers of Americans. These Americans have a mind to work and are waiting to support and lead effective action.
After all, power, properly understood, is still just that: the ability to act.
Related: Obama stacks Department of Justice with cronies from elite law office; not with Justice as goal, but with blackmail. https://web.archive.org/web/20131101212940/http://mag.newsweek.com/2012/05/06/why-can-t-obama-bring-wall-street-to-justice.html
http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR35.2/gecan.php
The first quarter of the Obama administration is finally over. The key issue was not health care, not terrorism, not jobs. Nor was it the promise of “transformational change” that permeated the presidential campaign. The key issue was power—how the power of Washington’s political culture would respond to the power of the Chicago political culture imported by the Obama team.
When the media mentioned the administration’s “Chicago tactics” or when opponents complained that the White House staff behaved like “Chicago pols,” they were saying that the Obama team could be aggressive, tough, even mean.
That mild and broad critique missed the more important features of the Chicago way of doing politics: an approach that translated brilliantly in the presidential campaign and miserably after the inauguration. Here are those features—as I’ve observed them for 50 years, first as a young person growing up in a blue-collar Chicago neighborhood, then as an organizer in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere—and a look at how Washington has responded to their presence.
1) The Man on Five. The mayor’s office in Chicago is on the fifth floor of City Hall. The Man on Five is the hub, center, source of all good, generator of all punishment. This has nothing to do with charisma. The two mayors named Daley and most other machine mayors have had little personal pizzazz, no speaking skills, and a more transactional than transformational approach. Decade after decade, they have methodically consolidated and centralized power and influence. There is no counterweight—no House of Representatives, no Senate, no independent committee chairs. The City Council is a vaudeville show directed by the mayor. His power is unilateral, one-way, top-down. The key White House staff—Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, and Valerie Jarrett—inhaled this culture and carried it with them to Washington.
2) Control is God. The organizing principle in the Chicago political culture is control—control of who gets to the Man on Five and who doesn’t, control of how a bill or event burnishes the mayor’s myth or doesn’t, control of who runs for other offices and who doesn’t. The mortal sin of this culture is independence based in any value higher than loyalty to the Mayor.
3) Elections Mean Everything. The one thing that the political machine excels at is managing the electoral process from start to finish. Selecting and grooming candidates. Buying or scaring off reformers. Marshaling election lawyers to knock out other candidates’ petitions. Using only paid public employees to work (illegally, but with almost no chance of being caught and prosecuted because of the care taken to avoid detection) in campaigns and on election day. Filling vacancies produced by indictments and convictions of insiders with even tighter insiders. Nobody does it better. This is why the presidential campaign did so well in caucus states and less well in those with open elections: the machine thrives on narrow or limited voting situations.
4) Other People’s Money. The Chicago political culture is run by families or tribes—Daleys, Strogers, Madigans, Mells, Jacksons, and others—that have been on the public payroll for as long as 85 years. Most members of these tribes have never earned a dollar in the private or nonprofit sectors. They have grown accustomed to drawing their salaries from public agencies, sequestering and spending tax dollars, and using their public positions to grow even richer as lawyers and consultants to private interests who need public favors, ultimately drawing pay for their private efforts from the public coffers. Back in Illinois, leaders of both parties—Democrats in the northern part of the state, Republicans in the suburbs and central parts of the state—have grown up in this culture, reinforced it, and prospered because of it. They take other people’s money for granted the way most people take oxygen for granted. Suddenly, the Chicago cohort finds itself surrounded by an opposition party and moderates within their own party who come from states and regions where there is no such sense of entitlement.
Does all this add up to the end of this administration, as some have suggested? Not at all. I’d argue this could mean that the administration, having squandered the first quarter, is finally ready to play.
But first it would have to draft some new players, remove most of the Chicago crowd and shed many of the political habits developed in a machine political environment.
Then it would have to stop playing by the rules set by the permanent elite in Washington and approach the nation’s core concerns in a very different way.
The administration’s proposal to create a new federal agency to hold financial institutions accountable is an excellent example of not doing things differently. It plays right into the hands of the Washington political and bureaucratic establishment. Until the late 1970s, the United States capped interest rates at 9 percent in most circumstances, and banks were still profitable. Since then, the economy has operated without fiscal speed limits. Reestablishing those limits on credit cards, payday loans, and other predatory credit vehicles would do more for the majority of Americans than another new agency or several thousand pages of regulations. The appeal for this basic restraint has been heard even by titans of finance: the CEO of Citigroup surprised the financial industry by recently agreeing that a cap on interest rates, with certain conditions, would be possible.
As presently constituted, the White House cannot undertake these sorts of necessary and far-reaching initiatives. The president packed his staff with those who grew up in the unique political culture of Chicago and Cook County, one of the last remaining islands of machine domination in the nation. When the machine went to Washington, it did what it has always done and what worked back home: try to crush or co-opt opponents, project and promote the image of a mythic leader, tightly control the media, and rely on those who helped win the election. The disarray that the administration finds itself in after its first year is a direct result of the failure of this culture to function under new circumstances.
Different players, with a different approach, can tackle the lingering and deepening problems that plague huge numbers of Americans. These Americans have a mind to work and are waiting to support and lead effective action.
After all, power, properly understood, is still just that: the ability to act.
Related: Obama stacks Department of Justice with cronies from elite law office; not with Justice as goal, but with blackmail. https://web.archive.org/web/20131101212940/http://mag.newsweek.com/2012/05/06/why-can-t-obama-bring-wall-street-to-justice.html
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)