Venus Beauty employee loses job for allegedly selling face masks to customers in private

An employee of a beauty store in Singapore has recently been dismissed from her job after allegedly being found selling face masks to customers in private. However, the masks she was selling were not from the Venus Beauty store’s shelves.

It appears as though the rise of the Covid-19 outbreak has also brought about a face mask-selling frenzy in Singapore and the rest of the world. With public awareness of hygiene raised to unprecedented levels, consumer demand for the goods has skyrocketed.

There have been reports of long queues of people outside different stores to purchase face masks. There have also been numerous instances of sellers trying to profit from the high demand. One online seller even listed a box of masks for S$288. Such actions, however, have been criticised by both ordinary citizens and government officials.

According to a report by The New Paper, the employee of Venus Beauty Shop in Nex was allegedly selling boxes of 20 masks for S$25.50 per box. The masks she was selling were not part of Venus Beauty’s inventory.

The woman, who was a part-time employee working at Venus Beauty for almost three months, had reportedly been personally communicating with the store’s customers via the messaging app, WhatsApp.

After firing the employee, Venus Beauty posted a statement at its cashier counter which explained that the woman had been selling masks “from her own account”, and that the store was neither made aware of this nor asked for its permission. A screengrab of a WhatsApp conversation between the terminated employee and a customer was also put up at the counter.

The screengrab showed that the woman allegedly told customers that Venus Beauty had run out of masks and that as an alternative, she was selling masks from her brother’s business, and that the 100 boxes she had were from Britain.

Venus Beauty has filed a police report regarding the incident. -/TISG