I stole thousands of dollars in merchandise in the 90s because I was too lazy to work for beer money.

I grew up in a decent sized town with a lot of big box stores. I was around 19 or so at the time and my friends and I were drinking a lot and needed a way to get beer money without having to actually work. At the time, if you worked at a big box store, you only had to work a 4 day 40 hour week because the 4th day was reserved for inventory. I don't know if this is how it works anymore but back then, the stock room was full of boxes of unopened product that was not for resale. It was items that had been returned to the store that were defective. Sometimes it was even stuff people had shop lifted in the store, got caught and it never got returned. We would bring it out, put it on the shelves and then either steal it, or sometimes even sell it to people in the parking lot out of our cars. The return policy was very lenient back then so a lot of times we would just return the items that we had "stolen" from the store for cash or store credit. I know that I stole at least $5,000 over the course of 4 years. I know that my friends stole at least as much as I did. It was a huge store so the owners really didn't even notice because they did so much in volume. I worked in the electronics department so I stole a lot of electronic stuff. I had everything I needed and I used to go to the bar and buy people beers just to be the cool guy. I now own a small business and realize that if I was on the other side, that would have really hurt. I am not proud of this and it is really just on my mind because I recently opened my own business and I am paranoid that my employees are stealing. Honestly I don't care that much about it anymore, it has been 20 years and I am in a different place now. <br><br>EDIT: This was in the late 90s early 2000s. I didn't need the money, it was purely selfish and laziness on my part. I was stealing because it was so easy to do and I could get anything I wanted without having to put out any effort. I am not justifying it, I am explaining why. The main reason I posted this is because I am in a completely different head space now than I was back then and I can't imagine doing something like that now. I am not the same person and I am not condoning this behavior in the slightest.