8 insider facts about shopping at Target that only employees know

Apparently “CSI: Target” is a thing.

The retail chain runs two forensic labs, one in Minneapolis and the other in Las Vegas. On its website, Target said its investigators solve cases through “video and image analysis, latent fingerprint and computer forensics.”

In a 2008 article profiling the Target Forensic Services team, Forbes reported that 70% of the lab’s time is spent looking into fraud, theft, and personal cases.

But Target investigators have also assisted law-enforcement agencies on a number of armed robbery, kidnapping, and homicide cases, according to Minnesota Public Radio.

People who said they’ve worked at Target before took to Reddit to say that the stores tend to have state-of-the-art camera surveillance.

“The resolution on those things was insane,” one Reddit poster wrote.

“I worked at Target in the early nineties and it was insane then,” another Reddit user added. “Twenty years later and I wouldn’t be surprised if they weigh me as I enter and as I leave to determine if I’m shoplifting.”

One Target employee told Business Insider that the surveillance system doesn’t ensure that all shoplifters get busted immediately, however.

“Stores will often let shoplifters go until they steal an amount that will be counted as a felony — sending them straight to jail,” the Target employee told Business Insider.