What you're describing sounds awfully familiar, except for the "loot the place", our store was in Madison Heights, MI, which had/has a large Korean population nearby so it wasn't unusual to have days where it felt like we were being "mobbed by non-English speaking Asians[0]", but I'm not aware of that being used as a distraction at the store I worked at in the 90s -- interesting.
Internal fraud was incredible. One day just about the entire warehouse staff and I want to say a third of the floor staff was fired. If memory serves, the warehouse manager discovered that a large number of specialty "Made for Compaq/Dell" RAM by one of the major RAM vendors had its "COST" value set very wrong (to like $5.00 or something like that). The price paid by employees was whatever IMS said "COST" was. So a $350 memory chip could be purchased for $5.00 by an employee. After figuring it out, of course, he shared the knowledge with other members of staff who participated, as well. Dad always said "if it seems too good to be true, it is", so that -- alone -- was enough to keep me from making that mistake.
The other scam I recall them running was taking items home that were supposed to be destroyed per agreement with the manufacturer. It was very strange coming to work one day and finding out about half of the staff I used to work with was let go for fraud...
[0] We had this one local gentleman who was notoriously frustrating to handle. He'd come in with a million questions, spoke very poor English very quickly and became frustrated to the point of yelling, I think, "F** YOU" at me/storming off when I told him I was having a difficult time understanding ... due to an ear ache (didn't even mention said English; I was pretty good at understanding thick accents, normally).
[1] Not as great as it sounds -- I doubt it was "invoice cost", but if it was a PC/laptop/anything terribly expensive, it was frequently higher than the price of the item.
Some of my memory is coming back -- I recall a somewhat true-sounding explanation as to why the RAM was setup with a $5.00 cost value and why it was specific with branded, "Designed For", memory. I remember hearing that the reason they were fired is that the SKU was supposed to be on a receipt with the computer that was being upgraded; they're never supposed to be sold, alone, and this was something the warehouse manager knew of (he also knew they were poorly audited).
Corporate customers were usually paying on pricing terms that were "X% above cost". And enterprise sales had flexibility further to close a deal. These one-off products had something to do with that -- perhaps it allowed them to offer pre-configured systems for some customers that calculated to the agreed-upon price when their % above cost was calculated, or maybe it was just a way to "throw in the RAM on all of these shiny new Packard (Bells)".
Internal fraud was incredible. One day just about the entire warehouse staff and I want to say a third of the floor staff was fired. If memory serves, the warehouse manager discovered that a large number of specialty "Made for Compaq/Dell" RAM by one of the major RAM vendors had its "COST" value set very wrong (to like $5.00 or something like that). The price paid by employees was whatever IMS said "COST" was. So a $350 memory chip could be purchased for $5.00 by an employee. After figuring it out, of course, he shared the knowledge with other members of staff who participated, as well. Dad always said "if it seems too good to be true, it is", so that -- alone -- was enough to keep me from making that mistake.
The other scam I recall them running was taking items home that were supposed to be destroyed per agreement with the manufacturer. It was very strange coming to work one day and finding out about half of the staff I used to work with was let go for fraud...
[0] We had this one local gentleman who was notoriously frustrating to handle. He'd come in with a million questions, spoke very poor English very quickly and became frustrated to the point of yelling, I think, "F** YOU" at me/storming off when I told him I was having a difficult time understanding ... due to an ear ache (didn't even mention said English; I was pretty good at understanding thick accents, normally).
[1] Not as great as it sounds -- I doubt it was "invoice cost", but if it was a PC/laptop/anything terribly expensive, it was frequently higher than the price of the item.