PLA Issue #8: Anarchy In Your Local 7-Eleven

Causing Problems At Your Local 7-Eleven

I’ve worked in a lot of different convenience stores and gas stations and during that time I’ve really learned what kind of things can piss off an employee or a customer. Most of this list was written by me while working at a 7-Eleven in Portland, Oregon many years ago. A lot of the more destructive ideas were tried by me and friends while working the graveyard shifts. Most of this was written in the mid 1990’s but much of the ideas and tips still apply today. Obviously these ideas will work at convenience stores other than 7-Eleven.

Keep in mind that a conveinence store gets pretty busy sometimes and the cashier(s) can’t watch every section of the store all at once so don’t worry about him/her seeing you do most of this stuff. Even if you’re caught, the worst that happens is you get kicked out for the day. (You can go back the next day because they’ve usually hired someone new by then.) Included in this article are tips for pissing off employees, pissing off customers, stealing money, getting yourself shot and surviving 8 hour shifts alone. Please remember that this was all written in good fun – we don’t expect anyone to actually go out and do any of the horrible things listed on this page!

• If the condoms are accessible to you, use a needle and poke holes in all
  of them. Then look at the newspaper 9 months later and see if there are a lot more births than usual. Causing unplanned pregnancies is funny!

• Take Ex-Lax and put it in the donuts, cookies, ice cream, coffee machine,
  cashier’s soda, etc.

• Take one bite out of each of the cookies and donuts.

• Mix all of the items in the condiments bar together to form a big, yucky
  salad. Be sure to spill items all over each other and on the floor.

• Use a razor blade to make a slit in each one of the cartons of milk. This
  will start a very small drip-leak but when a customer picks up the milk it
  should spill pretty good. This makes a good mess inside AND outside of the
  cooler. Really a bitch to clean up.

• Paint the front sidewalk in pychedelic colors.

• Bring a ton of items up to the counter. After the cashier rings everything
  up and asks for your $34.75, tell him you changed your mind and walk out,
  leaving everything on the counter.

• Most of the more popular stores have a toll-free customer hotline for
  customers to call in and complain or make suggestions. Find this number
  (usually written on the outside window) and call it once a day to complain

  about an employee you don’t like.

• Put a full pot of coffee under the coffee spout. Then press the button
  that starts the coffee maker. This will overflow the pot and create a
  tremendous mess.

• Jam the handle on the Slurpee/Slushie/Whatever machine so that the mush
  keeps on flowing after you leave. Watch the cashier cry when he finds it.

• Ask for $600 in money orders and twenty lotto tickets. After the cashier
  prints up the money orders and lotto tickets, leave. It’s a real bitch to
  void out money orders and lotto.

• Sit your fountain drink on top of a video game. There’s usually some vents
  on top of the game so whoops! Accidentally knock your drink over so the
  entire 44 ounces of Pepsi spill into these vents. This makes for some
  pretty neat-o smoking effects as well as sparks and fire. Make sure that
  it’s not a cool game that you play often because you won’t be playing it
  anymore.

• Fill up a Super Tanker Gigantic drink cup with Pepsi. Take it all around
  the store with you spilling it’s contents all over the items on the shelves
  as you go along. You can imagine what it’d be like to clean this up.

• On a really hot day, get on the roof and turn off the air conditioning. If
  possible, make sure that the air conditioners will never work again. Be
  extremely quiet when walking around up there so mister cashier doesn’t hear
  you.

• Telephone the cashier and start asking him questions about robberies like:

• “Do you have one of those silent alarm buttons you could press if I were
  to rob you?”

• “Do the police in your neighborhood respond quickly when something bad
  happens in your store?”

• “How many times has your store been robbed? Was the robber caught?”

• “Theoreticly speaking, if a professional robber such as myself were to
  come in and rob you, what are the chances of me getting caught?”

• “Do you carry a loaded gun behind the counter?”

• “How much money is in your cash drawer right now? That’s all? Uhhh, could
  you please not drop anymore in the safe until I get there? I, uh, need
  to cash a check, yeah, that’s it.”

• “Are you afraid of death?”

• Order a telephone calling card for the store and obtain the pin number.
  Using the card, make tons of harrassing calls to the store until the card
  goes dead. When they get their bill, they realize that they’ve been paying
  for their own harrassment.

• Find out the store manager’s name or the store owner’s name. From a pay
  phone call your friends in Austraila and third number bill it to the store,
  saying that you’re the manager. The cashier will accept the charges when he
  thinks it’s the manager.

• Order call forwarding for the store. Ask the cashier if you can use the
  phone and dial 72#-911 or *72-911. When 911 answers, tell them you got the
  wrong number and hang up. Now go out to a pay phone and call the store and
  you’ll get 911. Make up some big story about how you’re getting robbed and
  they’ve thrown you in the cooler and taken customers hostage, etc. If 911
  calls back to verify this, they’ll get their own office, 911.

• Start picking up items around the store and dropping them in the trash can.

It’s hard for a 7-Eleven to make money, especially with people like us in this
world, therefore they are usually understaffed. If there’s only one person
working the evening shift then you’re in for some extra
fun. Make SURE there’s only one guy there by calling him and asking. If he’s
the only one there and it’s busy, he usually has to stay at the register so you’re
free to go anywhere else in the store, including the back room and walk-in
freezer.

• Go in the walk-in freezer with a friend. Veg out on the beer cases and get
  drunk off your asses. You can usually keep a good eye on the cashier
  through the window but after a few beers you stop caring about him.

• Find the back room and look for a few five foot tall cylinder things. These
  are called CO2 tanks which is what gives the fountain sodas their fizz.
  Locate the one hooked up to a hose and turn it off. Everyone’s soda will
  taste pretty damn gross now.

• Take it one step further by disconnecting all of the soda tanks. It’ll take
  the poor cashier an hour to figure out why there’s no soda, and another
  hour to hook ’em all back up and figure out which hose goes to which tank.

• If there’s not a public restroom then there’s definately an employee rest-
  room in the back someplace. Go in there and the employees will sometimes
  keep their personal belongings lying around. Steal it all and then phone
  the cashier, demanding a ransom for his stuff.

• Look for the employee schedule and time sheet hanging somewhere on the
  wall. Steal the shedule so you’ll know who’s working for the rest of the
  week. Flush the time sheet down the toilet so the manager won’t know who
  worked when all week and nobody’ll get paid.

• Instead of flushing the time sheet, find an employee on it that you’re not
  too fond of and add a few hours here and there on his time card. The
  manager will most likely notice this and either think the employee is
  trying to cheat for more hours or think that another employee is trying to
  get him in trouble. If the manager DOESN’T notice, that guy’s going to
  have a nice, hefty paycheck next week.

• Find the manager’s office. It’s probably locked but most can be opened with
  the credit card method. Once in the manager’s office, loot. Have your
  friend watch the security monitor so you’ll know if the cashier’s comming,
  while you look for things you want to take. The computer is a nice start.
  If that’s too big, how about the modem. You can steal the employee files
  and then freak them out by calling them and reciting information to them.
  Also, security video tapes would be kind of neat to have. In the more
  modern stores, the cash register is linked with the computer in the office.
  Sometimes the register won’t work without the computer being turned on so
  unplug the computer and take the cord home with you. Pretty soon the
  cashier will be using a pocket calculator and a shoebox to ring up the
  merchandise.

• The main phone wires are usually somewhere in the back room. You can slow
  the cashier down quite a bit by disconnecting them all. Don’t just unhook
  them, though. Cut all of them down that you can find and take them with you
  so there’s little chance of them being fixed anytime soon. What does this
  accomplish? Well, the Lotto machine will stop working soon after losing it’s
  phone line. No more checks, credit cards, ATM cards, gas cards because the
  credit validation machines can’t call in to get approval. Believe me, I
  know that this is frustrating. Worse thing is, when he starts having all of
  these problems, he can’t call anyone for help because his phone doesn’t
  work anymore. To make it even more pathetic, put the outside pay phones out
  of commission so he doesn’t have a chance.

• The back rooms are filled with stock that won’t fit out on the sales floor.
  Since there usually aren’t any cameras in the back room, this is your
  chance for fearless shoplifting! Bring a large bag…

• The gas pump controls should be lurking about somewhere. Take a look at all
  the buttons and figure out for yourself which ones would be most disaterous
  to shut off. There’s usually serveral shut off switches so shut them ALL
  off. The cashier will spend a great deal of his life staring at the banks
  of switches trying to figure out how to turn them back on.

• Find the circuit breaker boxes. They’ll always be unlocked. Find the main
  switches on all of them and shut them all off at once, cutting the power to
  the whole store. Since it’s dark, you’ll be able to slip back out onto the
  sales floor without being spotted. The cashier will probably assume it’s a
  normal power outage. This is a perfect time for shoplifting.

• If it’s a self-service station, the cashier hears an annoying BEEP BEEP
  BEEP BEEP… when you lift the gas nozzle and push the lever up. The
  cashier is supposed to look outside, take note of the car and the driver,
  then hit the Validate button so you can get your gas. Walk up to a pump,
  out of the cashier’s view, hide behind the pump and push the lever up. The
  cashier will go nuts trying to figure out why the console’s beeping if
  there’s no car out there. Go from pump to pump doing this until the cashier
  comes out to say, “Hey…cut that out.”

• Okay, this is a good one I’ve always wanted to try. Go to one of those
  personalized license plate booths in the mall. You know, the one’s where
  you make a plate ILUVYOU for your girlfriend to hang in her room. Find out
  what the cashier’s license plate number is or, failing that, find out what
  his mother’s license plate number is. Attach this plate to the front of
  your car and pull in to get some gas. Make sure the cashier can see your
  license plate very clearly. Fill up your tank with Super Unleaded. Make
  sure the cashier is watching, get in your car and slowly back out of the
  parking lot, giving the cashier’s reflexes time to kick in so he can find a
  pen and write down your license plate number. Have a friend hang around the
  store to watch the fun next. See, if the cashier doesn’t get a plate number,
  then he’s in a lot of trouble. When someone gets gas and doesn’t pay for
  it, the cashier has to call the police and fill out a report and everything
  so he doesn’t get a disciplinary write up. The cop will want to know the
  make of car, the plate number and a description of who was driving. (A good
  idea is to wear a cap and glasses, not that a cop is any real threat.) When
  the cop runs the plate number through he’s going to come up with the
  cashier’s name (or his mom’s) and we’re all in for a lot of confusion and
  fun. I have no idea what the outcome would be.

• At full service station, pull up to the pump and make sure your gas tank is
  on the opposite side as the gas pump so the gas attendant has to manage to
  get the hose on the other side. If he says you have to turn your car around
  say, “Aw, it’ll reach, I promise.”

• Also at full service, if you’re needing unleaded gasoline, pull up so your
  gas tank is about four feet past the unleaded pump. Tell the gas attendant
  you want five bucks unleaded and go inside. This is a pain in the hiney for
  the gas attendant because he’s so far away from the pump that he can’t see
  when he’s up to five bucks. Usually they end up pumping a little, running
  over to the pump to see how much left to go, running back and pumping a
  little more, running back to check again, etc, etc…Piss him off more by
  saying, “Hurry it up a little, willya?”

• Most every gas pump I’ve seen can be locked with a normal padlock. Go in
  the store and shoplift as many Master padlocks as you need. Bring them out-
  side and lock up each one of the pumps. Since the average gas station
  doesn’t have a pair of bolt cutters on the premises, nobody will be getting
  gas for the rest of the night.

• Gas stations have to take daily gas readings by sticking a really long pole
  into the the ground where the big underground tanks are located. You can
  find these poles somewhere around the outside of the building or by the
  dumpster and there’s usually several of them. Take them all and the station
  won’t be able to take the daily readings anymore.

• Get in your car and drive a few blocks from the store. Floor it towards the
  store and try to get up to 90 M.P.H. by the time you hit the parking lot.
  Smash directly into a gas pump, blowing up the pump, the car and killing
  yourself. Try to enter the parking lot at the right angle so after you
  smash through the pump you’ll crash through the store’s front window and
  into the cashier, killing him too.

• Pick up the gas pump nozzle, squeeze it and hold a match in front of it to
  create a flame thrower. Burn all of the nearby customers to a crisp and try
  to set the store on fire before the cashier hits the Emergency ShutOff
  switch. (Can you tell I’m running out of ideas?)

This section is for the 7-Eleven employees. As anyone who’s worked it
knows, graveyards are the most boring eight hours of your day. At about a
customer an hour, there’s not a whole hell of a lot to do. Your manager has
probably provided you with a checklist of work to do but it’s usually not
very much fun to do work.

• First order of business. Try to think of the most creative way to destroy
  your manager’s checklist. Make it a point not to do ANYthing on the list.
  If you do, you’ll get no praise for it. If you don’t, you’ll be doing just
  exactly what’s expected of you. Nothing. If you lose your job, oh well.
  There’s a million other 7-Elevens out there looking for a slave.

• Bring a radio, even if they’re not permitted. No human being should be
  expected to sit in total silence for eight hours. Sure, that’s what your
  checklist is for but remember, you destroyed that. I’m sure your manager
  will understand.

• Open the Clearly Canadian bottles and drop Alkaselters (sp?) into them. If
  you drop enough in you can make a pretty good mess. If you’re worried about
  the mess, do it outside.

Picture of my co-worker, Kevin, from the AM/PM Mini-Mart trying to break the record of how much gum an employee can shove in his mouth. He won with five packs of Big League Chew…

• Sit on a gas pump and light fireworks, occasionally dropping one on the
  ground by the pump, making everyone nearby nervous and jumpy.

• Be extremely rude to everyone that comes in to shop, especially the cops
  who come in to buy the entire stock of Hostess donuts and think that just
  because they’re cops, they get free coffee. If you really hate doing any
  work at all, this will help. When you’re rude people go out of their way to
  keep from shopping at your store.

• Make prank phone calls to the other store across the street.

• Sweep the parking lot. Do a real good job and when you get to the edge of
  the parking lot, keep going and going until you’ve swept the entire block.
  Then sweep the streets in the area and the parking lot across the street.

• Take all the breakfast and snack food from the shelves and hide them in the
  back room. The cops will cry when there’s no more Hostess donuts.

• Go over to the store across the street and start cleaning up their store
  just to see the other guy’s reaction.

• When being robbed at gunpoint, be a real sarcastic smartass to the guy
  holding a gun in your face. Make fun of obvious things such as his weight,
  facial scars, etc.

• If that doesn’t work, whip out a pen and start taking notes. When the
  robber asks you what in the hell you’re doing, say, “I’m writing down your
  description for the police. I have a short memory, okay?”

• If that doesn’t work, pick up the phone and dial 911. Tell the police
  what’s happening as you take your time putting the robber’s money into a
  paper bag. If he gets mad, tell him, “Shhhhhhh! I’m on the phone!”

• If a black guy comes up to the counter to pay for his 12 pack of beer,
  look him in the eye and say, “This establishment don’t serve no colored
  folks.”

• When the pimps that always hang out in front come in to buy alcohol, card
  them. Insist that the picture on the I.D. isn’t them and refuse the sale,
  smiling the whole time.

• Be really rude to the gang members. Wear the opposite colors that they do
  and tell them you’re Homey G Roy and they’re going down!

• If O.J. Simpson comes in to buy a pair of gloves, start cracking a bunch
  of bad O.J. jokes.

A friend of mine is getting a job at a Hit ‘N Run store and wants me to write
him out a list of different ways to screw the store out of money for himself
so I’m just going to add the list onto the end of this file. I’m sure that
he’s not really considering doing any of these horrible things and just wants
to know so he can watch the other employees to make sure they’re not stealing.

Most of these are obvious but maybe there’ll be a few ideas that you never
thought of. Most stores have a camera pointing at the cash register from
several different directions and the more modern stores have the registers
linked to the cameras so that whatever you type into the register it appears
on the security tape. (Pretty sneaky) This prevents you from charging your
friends’ 50 cents for a case of beer.

• First of all, all your groceries are going to be free now. This itself can
  be a real penny saver. Bring a back pack or something similar to work
  every day and load it up with your favorite foods and candy. If you have a
  car, load up the trunk. Keep in mind, it’s very common for a manager or a
  district manager to sit across the street in their car for hours and watch
  you so make sure they’re not there. In one case, the district manager
  actually rented out the building across the street so he could sit in there
  and watch the employees with his binoculars. (He caught this one guy loading
  up about ten bags of food into his car.)

• Your manager probably didn’t mention this, but all of your friends’ get
  special discounts! Twelve packs of beer are seventy five cents, fountain
  drinks and Slurpees are only ten cents, candy bars are five cents, packs
  of cigarettes are half price, etc.

• The most common form of employee theft is collecting the money for something, not ringing it up and putting the money in your pocket. Once you’ve
  worked there for awhile you pretty much know all the prices without ringing
  any of them up. The trick is to make it look like you’ve rang it up because
  customers will notice that you don’t and inform the manager. (Believe me,
  they really will do this.) Let’s say a customer buys a pack of cigarettes.
  They’re $2.19 ($2.36 with tax). Hit CLEAR 219 CLEAR 236, collect they’re
  money and hit CLEAR NOSALE. That’s a pretty good simulation of ringing up
  something for real. The customer will see the price on the register and
  assume everything’s normal. Instead of pocketing the money all at once,
  keep a little tally sheet next to your register and write down the amount
  of each sale that you haven’t rang up. When you’re done doing this, add
  the numbers all up and collect the full amount. This lessens the chances of
  someone seeing you pocketing the money.

• What if you’ve got about fifty dollars in merchandise that you haven’t rang
  up but there’s three cameras watching you and there’s no way that you could
  possibly take the cash without the cameras seeing you? Well, call a friend
  and tell them to come over. The friend will buy something in the store and
  you ring up the friend for his purchase and then give him his “change”
  which will include the fifty bucks that you’ve stolen. The only bad part is
  that now you’re expected to share your cut with the friend.

• Be careful when selling your underaged friends alcohol. Make sure to card
  them, look at the I.D. very closely (make it look real) and then ring up
  their beer. (Which is 75 cents, remember?) And hopefully your friend doesn’t
  look like he’s ten years old. Put the beer in a (hopefully paper) bag so a
  cop doesn’t stop him walking out of the store with the alcohol. Make sure
  you tell your friend that if he’s caught drinking this beer and the police
  asks where he got it, he doesn’t tell them where he got it. Tell him to
  name another store nearby so you won’t get into any trouble. (Besides,
  they’ll have proof on the security tapes.)
  
  

  7-Eleven Bandits In 1993 me and a girlfriend cleaned out a 7-Eleven safe and ran for the border. Click on the picture to view the police blotter. Click here for the whole story.

• Most stores have some way of keeping inventory on the cigarettes so the
  employees aren’t stealing them all. If you have to count each individual
  pack of cigarettes at the beginning and end of your shift, things are gonna
  be hard on you. For one, you’ll have to ring up every pack of cigarettes
  that you sell. If there’s something else in the store that costs the same
  as a pack of cigs, you can ring this item up under the cigarette key. Lets
  say that a customer buys a gallon of milk which is $2.36, the same as
  cigarettes. Instead of ringing up $2.36 on the grocery key, ring it up on
  the cigarette key. There, now you’ve got one pack of cigarettes!

• Usually the stores will only keep a tight inventory on the cartons of
  cigarettes and not the individual packs. In fact, I’ve never seen a store
  that doesn’t keep tight inventory on the cartons. So don’t steal the
  cartons but load up on the packs. Remember that when your friends come in
  they get that special deal, five packs of cigs for the price of one! And
  since they’re a friend, it only costs about $1.50!

• Credit Card Machines (masturbating…) There’s a button on the credit card
  machine called REPRINT. Every time a customer uses a Mastercard or Visa,
  press this button after they leave. This will give you a reprint of their
  receipt and their credit card number will be on this. A customer comes in
  and buys some gas and fifty dollars worth of condoms and a Hustler
  magazine totaling $65 and pays cash. Ring this up on the register. After
  they leave, hit the MANUAL ENTRY button on the credit card machine and it’ll
  ask you for your card number. Whip out your list of card numbers and punch
  one in. Then the expiration date. Then the amount of the sale which is $65.
  A receipt will come out and you can scribble a “signature” on it and put it
  in with your other receipts. Now that the purchase has been paid for with a
  credit card, you’re free to take the $65 in cash home with you. Just make
  sure you’re not still working there next month when the owner of the card
  you used gets his bill.

• Arrange for some friends to come in and do a “beer run.” Have them steal a
  good amount of twelve packs and run out the door with them. Make sure that
  there’s no “good samaritan” customers out in the lot who will catch your
  friends and drag them back in the store. Pretend to be surprised, maybe run
  after them for a second. Then go to the phone and call the police’s non-
  emergency number and explain what happened. Give them incorrect information
  like they’re on foot (if they’re in a car) or they’re headed down a certain
  street when they’re really going the other way. The police will show up and
  you’ll have to fill out a report and that’s the end. After your shift is
  over, go to your friends’ house and get drunk.

• A customer comes in and buys $10 worth of merchandise and leaves. Take
  their receipt and write it down on your paper work as an over-ring. (Like
  the cusomer didn’t have enough money and you had already rang it up.) Now
  there’s $10 in the register for you.

The managers know that all this stuff happens. They watch security tapes as
much as they can be usually it’s hard to watch the entire thing. (Impossible
if there’s only one manager doing it.) Break into the room with the monitors
so you can look and see exactly what the cameras pick up so you’ll know what
you’re up against. No matter how many cameras they have, though, there’s
always several ways around it all. You could pause the tape from recording,
go out and steal some money and then run back in and turn the tape back on. It
would be very unlikely for anyone to notice this jump on the tape. Even if they did notice the jump, they can confront you about it but what proof do they have?”

Each store I’ve worked at has a daily paper called a “frequency chart.” or
something like that. This takes note of each shift, who was working, how much
money they made, how many refunds there were, how many customers, etc, etc.
Each day of the week has a different amount of business and this chart keeps
track of all that. When the manager looks at the chart they may notice that
when YOU work sales are down alot. This is because you’re stealing. If this
continues every day only on your shift, the manager will start watching the
security tapes of your shift a lot closer and start parking his car across the
street to watch you. So don’t get greedy and you should be okay. If you can,
break into the office and find this frequency chart to see how you’re doing.
When they see oddities, they’ll sometimes highlight them and make notes.

When you’re caught stealing, you’ll be fired, that’s all. I’ve never seen a
store try to take legal action because of employee theft even if they have it
all on video tape. (Well, except for that time I looted the Wood River, IL
7-Eleven of about $4,000 in cash one night but I won’t get into THAT.)
You just won’t be able to shop there anymore and you won’t be able to use them
as a job reference. (Oh, darn.) So you don’t have to really fear getting caught
unless you really need the job.

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