Theft from purse at work - advice

[FunkyPorchini]

I work in retail as a shop assistant for a well known high street shop. We are instructed to keep our belongings in a locker in the staff room, the issue being that the lockers require £1 to be inserted in order to lock and have not been updated since the introduction of the new £1 coins. They will not accept these. Therefore we do not have a secure location to store our belongings. There is also no CCTV in this area.
Today as I was leaving a colleague pulled me aside as I was the person in charge this evening (no management available to work) and told me she had £10 go missing from her purse this afternoon and that she had £55 go missing last week which she had informed the store manager of.
I made a mental note to have a conversation with the manager regarding this tomorrow.
When I got home, I took out my purse to find that my purse had also been emptied of all cash. I have been in contact with the store manager who has said she will be in contact with the loss prevention team to see what measures can be taken to catch the thief. There has been no mention of reimbursement.
Where do I stand with this?
Is it unreasonable of me to expect the company to reimburse both of us for the money stolen due to the fact that suitable secure storage for our belongings was not provided?

Is there a written policy/ contract and what does it say about valuables? My workplace takes the stance of ‘valuables are left at your own risk’ and would probably say it was foolish to bring cash to work knowing that it can’t be locked away.

Yes this, and also how would you or anyone prove how much was stolen?

Are you certain that the colleague who had money stolen isn't the thief? She may be playing a victim to lay a false trail if you see what I mean.

Do you think the thief was/is a colleague or a customer? Is there any CCTV showing who was in the store?

It’s unreasonable to expect staff to come to work and bring absolutely nothing with them. It would 100% foolish of me to bring valuables with me and choose to not use a locker. I would take full responsibility if this were the case. My issue is that the lockers provided are not fit for purpose and cannot be secured.

CAn management not provide tokens to mimic the old £1?

There is CCTV on the shopfloor and cash office, no where else. The thief must be an employee as all doors to back of house lock automatically after closing - a code is required to open them.

Can any valuables be left in the store cash office while they come to a solution. I know my store I work in we can do this if we need too. This I imagine will be locked due to the cash that's kept in there and only management will have keys.

do you have a lot of colleagues? Or can rotas be checked to match incidences of theft?

I don’t think the employer will replace the money. For a start there is no proof of how much was taken, or even that anything was taken. I know that sounds shitty.

seems like the best thing they could do is to extend the CCTV into the locker room. Presuming that it’s not somewhere where people take a lot of clothing off

For the future, I'd try to negotiate with store that you wear a bumbag , or similar thing for carrying valuables, while working, and leave nothing in lockers. They'd be unreasonable to refuse when there have been thefts.

This happened many years ago at a shop I worked at, we did have lockers but they were broken and ancient.

Money kept being stolen and we were not permitted to have money on us on the shop floor so we all got very angry. I was only 17 and didn't have much cash to bring but one afternoon they went as far as to steal my £1.50 bus money. That bad.

In the end all staff leaving the shop floor during working hours had to go with someone else. All of us had to sign in with a time when we used the staff room. On every we had to tell our boss what money we had with us and would be searched on the way out.

Turned out it was our section manager who was vile to us all and had constantly tried to point the finger at us teen Saturday girls. She was caught by our boss red handed. She was sacked on the spot and police arrested her. She was the one doing the bag searches would you believe.

Yes I can believe that @WillimNot - same for us at M&S. the guy searching us as we left (loads of stock was going missing) was the one nicking it. Manager had no idea until the police arrived one morning and arrested him. He's been shipping it all abroad and had made a fortune. He got a prison sentence though.

Usually the one who points fingers is the one stealing. It's usually someone you would never believe would do it . In this case I would say it's someone who has free access to roam round the store any time they like .