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A Broken
Record
By Michael Alan Hamlin
February 24, 2003
Whenever I’m asked whether
the Philippines is as dangerous a place as international news media
make it out to be — which is often — I respond that I’ve
made the Philippines my home for 21 years, and never been a victim
of even a remotely serious crime. It was a record too good to last,
and regrettably, it was broken last Thursday, when around P20,000
was literally snatched from a Binondo sales clerk by a fast-talking
con artist. My wife had just given the money to the clerk in payment
for electrical fixtures.
While negotiating our purchases,
a respectably dressed man had entered the store and made himself
a part of our conversation. My wife and I assumed he was the store
owner. The clerks later said they assumed he was with us. When the
salesclerk failed to put the cash into the cash drawer, this mystery
man brazenly swept it up and bolted from the store.
That was only the beginning of a
nightmare of a day. The salesclerk of Winlight Marketing on Soler
Street went absolutely ballistic when she realized the money had
been snatched from under her nose. That’s not too surprising.
The policy of most of these small shops is that if something gets
stolen or broken, it’s the clerk that pays for it out of her
salary. In fact, it is illegal to force an employee to cover such
losses unless the employee is also the thief. But what should be
and are in such cases is woefully misaligned.
So her reaction was to refuse to
acknowledge that she had received payment, even though my wife had
been given a receipt for the goods. And to ensure that the goods
not leave the shop, she called on a number of people — including
one burly fellow who blocked the door — who appeared seemingly
out of nowhere to make sure that we didn’t leave with our purchased
goods.
If the saleslady couldn’t catch
the thief, she was determined to catch her valuable customer instead,
and turn me and my wife into the culprits. Stalemated, I leaned
out the door and pleaded with a gathering crowd of onlookers to
call a policeman. Fortunately, some good Samaritan did, and before
long a lieutenant and two uniformed officers arrived to help resolve
the standoff between the saleslady victim and the saleslady’s
victims — us.
I asked the officers — who were
very helpful, I should say — to accompany us to the police
station with the goods so that the situation could be resolved.
We had a receipt, we had paid for the goods, and we had taken possession.
There just wasn’t room for argument, or so I thought. But we
all — saleslady, friends, and stunned customers — trooped
to Precinct 11 to plead our cases.
A professional business person, rather
than inconveniencing his customers in this way, would have had the
good sense to concentrate his resources on trying to catch the thief
and recover the money. Instead, the proprietors of Winlight Marketing,
Webster Ong and his father, decided the hapless customer made an
easier target for the recovery of their loss. And so we invested
the next eight hours of our day, surreally, arguing back and forth
over who was really responsible for the loss of the money.
In a truly bizarre twist, this was
despite the fact that the poor saleslady immediately upon arriving
at the police station went voluntarily on record saying that the
money had been stolen from her. The police blotter, in fact, shows
my wife as a witness. Not to be deterred by blatant logic or facts,
however, the proprietor insisted that the goods we had purchased
were still his. That argument didn’t impress the police officers
present any more than it did us.
Police Inspector Danilo C. Hermosura
and SPO 2 Raffy Melencio noted that we were in possession of the
goods we had purchased, and had a receipt for them, repeatedly.
This observation, of course, sent the poor salesclerk into uncontrolled
crying fits which made everyone feel bad. And it naturally occurred
to me that it would be a lot easier for my wife and I to cough up
P20,000 than this poor girl.
But what about the proprietor? He
insisted, coldly, that we pay half the cost of the goods and the
salesclerk the balance! The proprietor, therefore, would walk away
with no loss whatsoever although his employee had taken payment
from us and provided a receipt and the crime took place in his store.
Meanwhile, we were to pay 50 percent more than the cost of the goods
we had already purchased! This proprietor’s customers and employee,
he insisted, must shoulder the loss, not him.
Well, obviously, I’m recommending
that Ong’s shop is probably the last place on earth that you
want to do business in. Fortunately, there are lots of alternatives
along Soler Street, and I would advise anyone who values his dignity,
hard-earned resources, and time, to take those alternatives. Ironically,
we had come very close to investing elsewhere, and it was only unhappy
chance that took us to Winlight Marketing.
Over the half day that the proprietor
kept us first detained in his store and then arguing at the police
station, the anticrime unit under Senior Inspector Benigno A. Macalindong
was out tracking down the alleged thief, a certain Cesar S. Lim.
Lim has, not surprisingly, been in trouble before and his photo
was on file at the police station. My wife and I and the saleslady
immediately identified him from the photo.
About the time I had given up on
the proprietor and decided to sue him for as long a list of transgressions
as I could come up with, officers Raul Dagang and Michael Arcella
walked in around 6:30 pm with the very surprised suspect. “This
individual, gentlemen,” I remarked to the proprietor and his
lawyer, “is who you should have been concerned with, not me.”
Not even the capture of the suspect,
however, would satisfy the proprietor, since the money hadn’t
been recovered. The only way I could extract ourselves from this
fellow was to make a P4,000 “donation” (ie, blackmail
payment) to the salesclerk to make her repayment of the proprietor’s
loss easier. This guy was determined to come out of this clean.
And so he did, although he promises
to return the P4,000 if the funds are recovered from the suspect.
I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, if you do plan
to shop at Winlight Marketing, hold your money close to your chest
and get your purchases out of the store right away and run as fast
as you can. Otherwise, you’ll be held responsible for whatever
happens there, no matter who is at fault.
(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing
director of consultancy TeamAsia and the author of three books on
Asian economies and companies. His latest book is Marketing Asian
Places, of which he is a co-author (Wiley, 2001), and he is currently
at work on High Visibility: The Making and Marketing of Asian Professionals
into Celebrities. Write him at mahamlin@teamasia.com.).
Copyright © 2003 Michael Alan
Hamlin. All Rights Reserved.
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