I think some people are so desperate for money that they think their "plans" of ripping of the lottery will work out. It seems in most cases it doesn't work.

I can't say if it's really true because no charges were filed, but a former neighbor of mine (not a personal friend) was fired from a local 7-11 for stealing lottery tickets. She denied it. She was never reported for the crime, so that's why I sort of believed her. Plus, why would anyone admit to being fired from a convenient store for stealing? However, I think sometimes employees look at the tickets as some kind of perk or benefit.  I'm not saying it's right (of course it isn't!) but there must be millions of people who take pens and paper from their offices all the time or make long distance calls, etc.  One thing she admitted to was eating a hot dog once in a while instead of throwing it into the trash, which I guess they have to do after they've been on sale for a certain time.  The management called it stealing and she said "but it was trash."  What's really stupid on her part is that they have video surveillance cameras all over the store.  Again, I never said she was a personal friend! LOL

We had a girl was stealing tickets at our store.   How the owner found out who it was?  Another store owner called to find out where the winning tickets were registered.  Why?  Because the girl never bought any there, only cashed in the tickets.  So he found out that they were registered at our store, then called our owner and describe the women.   Our owner went down to the store and picked up the cashed in tickets and watched the videos.  It was a shame that these girls did this to a boss who is so nice.

tntea, I never worked in a convenient store, so I'm not sure..but aren't tickets like inventory?  I mean, if I were working at a furniture store and a bedroom set was missing, it would be obvious that someone stole it or didn't turn in the invoice and pocketed the money. However, a small lamp or accessory might be easier to hide, but it still gets counted and would be noticed.  I realize a ticket is small and easy to pocket, but I assume the store pays for them and has to keep track of the quantity, right?  Would this woman have eventually been caught anyway?  I'm just wondering how the thieves in this article got away with stealing "books of tickets" for 3 years.

Maybe she should have waited after the closing of her shifts

and scavenged through the trash cans for winning tickets.  It's a viable option.

The store owner must not have had any controls in place to keep track of his Lottery Tickets. One store I shop in keeps track of the serial numbers of the tickets (logs the next ticket to be sold in each roll: at the start of business and at the end of busness) then checks the days receipts against the number of tickets sold. The book of tickets has to be activated before being put out for sale. The inventory of tickets not yet put out for sale/activated are kept under lock and key which few people have access to.

Yes,  the books are inventory.  However, when this happened lottery was new to TN.  Our store is on the AL/TN stateline so we were processing a lot of tickets.   We were instructed to activate the books and keep them moving.  The owner did not have a balance/check system set up to know if tickets were sold or taken.  She knew through the lottery account something wasn't adding up.

This went on for nearly a year.  I am not sure but she may have called around to different retailers in the area and few beyond and alerting to check for serial numbers of some books. 

The system she uses is better now.  Lots of paper work on her part.

That's how it is set up now.

If they were doing a really good job of tracking inventory they'd know when a piece of Bazooka bubble gum was missing, even if they couldn't determine what happened to it. Plenty of businesses deal with inventory that's much harder to account for.  In addition, plenty of people run reasonably successful businesses without managing them nearly as well as possible, and accounting and inventory control are often weak areas.

A long time ago I worked in a business with old  mechanical cash registers. The registers had two settings for totaling sales at the end of the day. One kept a running total, so that each day's total was the sum of all previous days' totals and the current day's total. The other setting reset the register to start from zero. The owners were largely clueless, and the cashout procedure was to reset the totals at the end of each day, which meant that they had no real record of what was rung up during the day, since it was possible to reset the total at any point. Through a stroke of luck (mostly just a fortunate accident) they discovered that an employee who worked evenings sometimes reset the register after  making a sale, but they never knew how much had been taken. 

That we see a lot of stories about workers stealing huge numbers of tickets over a period of time suggest that a lot of stores don't do a very good job of tracking their ticket inventory. Of course it's also possible that with a few people using the same register a lot of it is buried in cash drawers that come up short on a regular basis. God knows that nowadays most clerks can't count change if the register doesn't tell them how much it is.

KY Floyd writes: " God knows that nowadays most clerks can't count change if the register doesn't tell them how much it is. "

Gee, I wonder what it's like to go through life feeling superior to the rest of the world.  I'm not saying you're totally wrong, but sometimes people are very judgmental when they're being helped in a store.  I'm well educated and I've budgeted millions for a corporation, but I'm sure it's much different when someone works in a noisy environment with lots of chatter and distractions helping one customer after another at a fast pace.