After senior management became aware of the incident and spoke to Donna Hansbrough today, we are reinstating her job, and we are pleased that she has accepted the offer to return to Lowe’s.
First and foremost, there’s nothing more important than the safety of our customers and associates. Products can be replaced; people cannot.
We continue to work closely with law enforcement to investigate and prosecute those who are responsible for this theft and violent attack.
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Gonna give what the kids call a "hot take" and say the woman was in the wrong here. She risked her life in the name of corporate profitability. Ostensibly she's a wife and mother and she could have died preventing Lowes from experiencing 1% more shrinkage. Really dumb move. Protect your shit, not corporate shit.
Problem is corporate policy is often contradictory. It will be don't engage with shoplifters but the employees will get in trouble for too much being shoplifted on their shifts.
I've seen that. I had a friend that worked a customer service line. They were required to take every call and run the issue to resolution, but at the same time were punished if they didn't clear so many calls per hour.
The employee's solution? If a call seemed too complicated or that it would take too long, they would hang up and pretend that they just got disconnected. See also those Wells Fargo branches that were creating fake accounts to meet corporate new account targets.
When a business asks for irrational or contradictory performance by employees, they will find the path of least resistance where they don't get into trouble.
Yep. My friend had a similar situation working for a cell phone company. They told them not to open up any accounts that seemed like they were fraud but at the same time the monthly quota they had was so high that it required you open up fraud accounts.
On top of that you were punished more for not meeting quota than you were if you opened fraud accounts and had them cancelled. So everyone just opened up the fraud accounts because usually by the time they got detected and deactivated it was past the time for their review.
Back when I worked a corpo job, we mostly solved the contradiction by simply preventing them from being able to shoplift to begin with.
Mostly through a lot of spooking and increasing their paranoia, because rarely are shoplifters cool hardened criminals. Even just a random "security to section orange" over the loud speaker (we had no security or sections) saw a noticeable dip in shoplifting as they would drop their shit and power walk out.
It won't solve it completely, but that's the issue with both people and corporations. They want a full solution to the problem and can never accept that some things can only be helped instead of finished.