SEMA Warehouse

[TheFugitive]

Back when I was working for Ames most of our freight came from a company distribution
center in New Jersey that was known as SEMA.

SEMA is AMES spelled backwards.
This facility experienced very high levels of internal theft.  Jersey continued to live
up to its shady reputation apparently.

More often than not when we unloaded trucks we'd find cartons that had been broken into
and individual items removed.  All we could do was report them as short.

It was a unionized facility and supposedly it was almost impossible to fire anybody
there for any reason.

The only other theft I have seen which was worse than this was at Service Merchandise.
We were having MAJOR problems with someone breaking into FedEx jewelry shipments and
stealing gold.  FedEx employees would see packages addressed to the jewelry manager and just
punch a hole in them.   The company countered by not addressing packages that way, but
instead using the code word "Attn: Mr. Green".   They quickly figured that out too.

The company continued to use FedEx because the legal costs of trying to get out of our
contract with them would have been far higher than the cost of the gold that had been stolen.