I think the title of this post pretty much sums up my opinion on the whole thing, but I felt the need to write about it because people still aren’t letting the situation go and appear to cling on to anything that makes their tiny boring lives that little bit more interesting, so here’s the story…
Friday morning I thought I’d get some shopping in before work, I’m a shopaholic, over half my salary goes on clothing, shoes etc and one of my favourite stores is Topshop, I love it! I regularly tweet about them, blog, pin them and generally sing their praises because I spend a lot of money in there and I like what they sell, simple.
I didn’t expect to go in there this Friday however and experience what I did. I got to the till and the young girl was scanning my items through and the total came to £126. Eeeek, had not expected to pay that much as I wasn’t adding things up in my head as I went around, but I wanted everything I had in my hands.
Next stop was coffee before work, but I had time to kill so decided to have it in store. At this point I thought I’d check my receipt, it wasn’t until this point that I’d realised that the receipt had less items than I actually had in my bags. So I compared each item to the receipt and found out that the sales assistant hadn’t scanned a bag, a £40 bag.
Now I don’t know about you, but when things like this happen, to me it feels like a miracle. It’s not like I stood in that store, watched that girl not scan the bag and give it to me for free, that did NOT happen. She had taken all the security tags off and even the stuffing out of the bag and put it inside a Topshop bag. I didn’t purposely say to her ‘Don’t scan that bag!’, I didn’t steal the bag and I didn’t think ‘Oh because I’ve spent over £100, I should get a bag for free!’ Who thinks like that these days, who actually has that kind of mentality? Someone tweeted me ‘so you spent over 100 quid and want to get a free bag as a rewards? don’t you think that’s a bit cheeky ?’ Nothing in life is free, if you get lucky, you get lucky.
So, I was pretty excited, I’d got a free bag and hadn’t even realised! Now the big question was, do I take it back? I had thought about it, I felt guilty. But what would you have done? Would you have walked back into that store with a bag without any security tags on and said ‘Excuse me, but you didn’t scan this and I owe you £40!’ Would you REALLY have done that? The answer is no you wouldn’t unless you were Jesus, or God, or Allah, or any other God before I get accused of discrimination as well as theft.
Now when I get excited about things, I tweet about them. I’m constantly sharing photos of new shoes and handbags I’ve bought, so I tweeted about it. I was happy for goodness sake. But now I see my mistake, tweeting about somebody’s error was wrong and I do regret it, but I wasn’t prepared for the backlash I was about to receive..
I get the point of twitter, I know companies can see your tweets if you write about them, I’m not stupid, I didn’t get upset because Topshop found out about this, I contacted Topshop and the problem was being discussed, but for some twitter users this wasn’t enough.
One man tweeted me saying ‘Perhaps @metpoliceuk might be interest in your tweets about how you stole from @topshop? You savvy social media PR you 
’’ Are you serious? Am I suddenly a criminal? That’s right, lets get the police involved for such a serious crime that wasn’t committed in the first place, I didn’t steal the bag!
This person then went on to publicly slander me and tweeted ‘@PippaBlake‘s profile says she’s a “Social Media PR”. That’s got to be a joke given that tweet. Would you hire this person!?!?? Firstly, double standards or what? It’s ok to accuse me of being bad at Social media, but publicly slandering people isn’t?!
Another then followed suit and tweeted from his own account ‘The big question now is will @topshop pursue @PippaBlake for theft? They have signs up saying they prosecute… Are they just idle threats?’ Again, theft!? The shop assistant made a mistake, I didn’t steal the bag, she put it in the Topshop bag without scanning it, that’s her human error.
Another… ‘@PippaBlake I wonder how it will go down with her employer that she is not honest at all’ - because dishonesty is tweeting about the bag isn’t it? Dishonesty would be not contacting the store and not tweeting about it, idiot.
These were just a few of the comments I had, all from people who have never followed me before, do not know who I am or what type of person I am, but think it’s ok to judge me on 140 characters and accuse me of being morally wrong. Morally wrong is bullying people on twitter, morally wrong is accusing people of theft, I’ve never ever had any sort of involvement with the police, I’m about as good as they come! However it wasn’t all negativity, 99% of MY followers, people who KNOW me, were on my side as it were and a lot of people, if in my situation, would have done the some thing.
As the situation lies now, I’ve spoken directly to the store and Topshop themselves, I can understand the company don’t want it to happen again and that’s fair enough. I didn’t name the sales assistant because I’m not the kind of person who wants someone to lose their job over human error.
I think the point I’m making here is, what counts as morally wrong these days for one person is clearly different to others. In my opinion, morally wrong is committing murder, morally wrong is rape or child abuse, not getting excited because a sales assistant forgot to scan your new handbag. I’d had my purse stolen a week before, getting a free handbag felt like I was finally on the right side of the God’s again. I’m not a bad person, I’ve never committed a crime and I’ve never been anything but friendly on twitter, how can you have bad words to say about someone you’ve never met? I don’t think I deserved the negative tweets I got, I do admit that tweeting about it was a faux pas, but where’s the line? Soon we wont be able to tweet anything without offending someone.
But I did what I thought was right, I told people I wasn’t prepapred to comment any further on the matter, I promoted my blog instead offered the haters cupcakes, haters gonna hate and I’m going to enjoy my new bag!
x
