Tales From a 7-11: Mark

Mark was our youngest employee. I knew him first as a customer who came in nearly every day and talked about how badly he wanted to work in the store. Sure enough, he started work on his sixteenth birthday.

The 7-11 was just a stepping stone for Mark, though. His real aspiration was to be a police officer. Even before he was working with us, he got to know all of the officers who frequented our store. Once he was working there, it was even worse. If there was a cop in the store, it was nearly impossible to get Mark to do any work. There could an empty cooler and a line a mile-long, and Mark would be over by the coffee counter hounding the officers.

Mark was generally pretty law-abiding himself, but I did once see him sell cigarettes to two girls who were no older than fourteen. After completing the sale, he stepped outside and returned a minute or two later. “Did you sell them cigarettes?” I asked, more surprised than scolding.

He grinned. “They showed me their boobies.”

Mark was working with me one day when a group of guys in their early twenties came into the store asking about Pokemon cards. This was at the height of the game’s popularity, and even at $5 a pack we couldn’t keep them in stock. We’d just gotten a shipment, though, so when the guys asked if we had any purple packs, I was able to tell them that we did.

It immediately struck me as strange that these young men were asking about the cards. They seemed to old to play but too young to have kids who played. More strangely, they didn’t actually want to buy any of the cards. Instead, they asked for a carton of cigarettes, which required me to step away from the counter and dig around in a cabinet for their requested brand.

When I returned, the guys were gone. I quickly checked the box of Pokemon cards which was sitting out on the counter with the other impulse purchase items. I never would have known for sure that they’d taken anything, since I had no idea how many packs there were to begin with, except that there were now no more purple packs. Had the guys not specifically asked about them and had me verify just a minute ago that there had been some, I would have had no way of proving they’d stolen them.

Amazingly, they were still sitting out in the parking lot in their car. I jotted down the license, and more annoyed at the brazenness and stupidity of their crime than anything else, I called the manager.

“How many packs did they take?”

“I don’t know.”

“Eight.”

“Huh?”

“They took eight packs. If you don’t give the police an exact number, they won’t do anything with the report.”

I called the police, and they said they’d send someone by eventually. There was less than an hour left in Mark’s shift, but he stuck around for another hour waiting for the police to come. Finally he left but begged me to call him when the police did arrive, which I didn’t.