We had gotten out of the store with several PlayStation game consoles, at the time a new item. Each was retailing for $399. We estimated we could easily move them at half retail and make quite a tidy sum of money. We also had several dozen game discs for the PlayStations as well as quite a few assorted music CDs and VHS videos. All told, this would bring each of us nearly $500 when it was all sold.
We should have called it a day right then and there, but greed, as it often does, got the better of us. We decided it would be fun to cross the river into Ohio and go to a WalMart store just off highway 52. As we drove there we joked around about how lax security was at all these stores and how easily we were able to rob them blind. .
WalMart, this one in particular, was a little bit more of a challenge. This store employed a new security system that used small magnetic strips to maintain inventory control. If you had the strip on your person as you passed through a scanner by the door it would sound an alarm. There were only two ways to get through the scanner: have your items demagnetized at the registers or get rid of the strips. .
Of course, today we know you can also carry a sufficiently strong magnet in your pocket to accomplish the same result that the electromagnet at the register gives you. However, in 1995 you simply could not get your hands on magnets that were of a sufficient strength to guarantee you would be able to depolarize the strips inside the inventory. So, that left us one choice: we had to remove the strips by opening the items.
Opening items inside a store is a very risky method of doing things. You never know who is going to be looking at you, either with their own eyes or through an eye in the sky. I had started shoplifting using this method in the early 1990s, so I was very good at it. Given my expertise in opening, I went into the store alone after we had went in as a group and scoped the place and determined what items we wanted to get.
