A. Excellent saleswomanship B. Grand larceny
Alfred Stieglitz, Winter on Fifth Avenue, 1892
Saks Fifth Avenue’s jewelry department is lined with items like $3,000 David Yurman bracelets and $1,600 Anthony Nak earrings, and Cecille Villacorta was good at getting customers to buy them.
From 2000 to 2006, she brought in more than $27 million in sales, more than any of the other sales associates at the luxury department chain’s flagship store in Manhattan. In fact, she was the highest-grossing saleswoman in the store’s history, according to her lawyer, and was paid nearly $400,000 in her last year there.
But exactly how Ms. Villacorta, 52, of Manhattan, managed to rack up such sales figures is up for debate — and at the heart of her trial on charges of grand larceny and falsifying business records, which began Thursday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan…
On Trial, A Sales Wizard, A Thief, Or Both, at Saks in the New York Times.
If a store offered such a great rebate system, I would be a regular customer.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
March 1st, 2009 at 03:32
C. Office Intriga Magnet
March 1st, 2009 at 13:12
D. A case of “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.”
March 1st, 2009 at 21:28
US or Canadian media, when writing about a crime perpetuated by an immigrant never fails to mention the ethnicity of the accused (e.g “the priest who had a liaison with blah, blah was born in the Phils, or the embezzler came to New York some twenty years ago from the Phils, or the thief is a Jamaican-Canadian, etc).
You will never get to read ” the accused who migrated from Ireland five years ago, or the rapist who is Scottish by descent, etc”
March 2nd, 2009 at 00:36
If the financial bailout doesn’t work will the media refer to “President Obama, who is Kenyan on his father’s side”?
March 2nd, 2009 at 00:57
The’ve already done it many times over; why else do we know that he’s got a half-brother (?) who lives in a shanty in Kenya, who he never bailed out of poverty?
March 3rd, 2009 at 02:17
Regarding comment #2, that thing also happens here in the Philippines. At least in the local media back in my hometown in Mindanao. They’d say for example, “Two Muslim robbers…” You’d never hear or read, “Two Christian robbers…”