If you’re into digital gadgetry and live in the Bay Area, you probably spend a fair amount of time and money at Fry’s Electronics, the chain of ginormous electronics superstores that also has outposts in Southern California, Texas, Arizona, and a few other areas. And every time you buy something, you go through a moment of anti-theft kabuki at the exit in which you have to show your receipt to a guard who examines (or pretends to examine) the items in your shopping bag to see if you’re trying to steal anything. It’s a little example of ritual humiliation that irks me every time I go through it (though not enough, so far, to keep me out of Fry’s).

I couldn’t help but think of this when I heard the news this week that Ausaf Umar Siddiqui, Fry’s vice president of merchandising and operations, has been arrested in an alleged $65 million kickback scam involving charging electronics suppliers a commission in return for buying products at inflated prices. Prosecutors charge that it had been going on for almost four years, and that the money went to pay off Siddiqui’s mammoth Vegas gambling debts. Nobody at Fry’s noticed until recently, apparently, when an anonymous coworker dropped a dime on him.

If Fry’s has indeed been cheated out of a vast sum of money by one of its top executives, I’m not happy…but I might be just a tad more sympathetic if it weren’t long-standing company policy to obsessively treat every single paying customer as a potential thief. One wonders if the crime Siddiqui is accused of committing could have possibly happened if Fry’s put as much energy into auditing its supplier relationships as it does into hassling its shoppers…

 
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