Undercover CEO caught an employee faking orders on his own credit card. When she learned why, she skipped the firing and gave him a $20,000 raise
'It’s completely against company policy. It’s just unacceptable,' Leite exclaimed.
The best realities are discovered when one looks at everything from the point of view of an outsider. Sharon Leite, chief executive officer of The Vitamin Shoppe, went undercover in several of the company’s stores and expected to uncover ordinary operational problems. Instead, she found an employee using his own credit card to create fake buy-online-pick-up-in-store orders as a workaround for persistent inventory shortages. The practice violated company policy, but when Leite learned why Tracy had resorted to it — and about the financial pressure he was facing at home — she chose not to fire him. Instead, she offered him a full-time role and a $20,000 raise. The Undercover Boss episode, which originally aired in 2022, was republished by Undercover Boss (@Undercoverbossglobal) on YouTube on October 24, 2026, and has since garnered over 413,000 views.
Going undercover
The episode was shot in early 2021 and aired on Jan. 21, 2022. Disguised as Marie, a former gift shop manager from Ohio, Leite initially entered a store in Connecticut to meet an employee named Glo, who had seven years of experience working in the company’s stores. Her first task, Glo instructed, was to learn about supplements. During the training, she realized she couldn’t deal with customers without having proper product knowledge. She also discovered that Glo is always on call, always working, sometimes seven days a week, which seemed exhausting, all the while juggling classes in a nutrition school. Leite learned that training for new employees “isn’t that great," and therefore, Glo had to take the additional training to run the store while nobody was around.
Shocking discoveries
The next person she met was an employee named Suzanne in a Virginia store. Here, she learned about a faulty delivery system in which the products were delivered in disarray, much like Christmas surprise parcels. She also found that the payment system crashes every two weeks. Her next investigative stop was the company’s Richmond, Virginia, store, where she met Tracy. Her first task was to clean windows. The first thing Tracy showed her after entering the store was empty shelves.
He then told her about something that left her shocked. “Bogus BOPUS,” he called it and said it happened frequently. “Something will become out of stock, and then we don’t get replenishment in for quite a while. We improvise,” he explained, “Buy online. Pick up in a store. When it comes in, it’s actually not going to a customer; we’re just going to cancel that order, and then it’s going out of our stock, and then we’ll have it for our customer.”
"Really?" was all that Leite could exclaim as she witnessed Tracy use his own credit card to place fake customer orders to replenish the diminishing stock. “It’s completely against company policy. It’s just unacceptable,” she said later in the footage. She would have never found out this detail if she visited as the CEO. “While I was undercover, we had to deal with things like system outages that made serving customers a challenge in stores and issues with our robots in our distribution centers,” Leite said later, per WWD. “I also connected with associates on a human level and gained some real insights into some of the difficult life challenges that our people have to juggle every day, such as personal loss.
Tightening loose ends
Although Leite told Tracy that the fake BOPIS orders had broken company rules, she also called the discovery her biggest “aha moment” of the week because he had been trying to keep products available for customers. She told him the company planned to invest $1.5 million in its inventory management system, then gave him $5,000 to help improve that process. After learning that he was working about 70 hours a week and struggling with debt, she gave him another $15,000 to help his family. Finally, she offered to move him from part-time to full-time with a $20,000 salary increase.
At the end of the episode, Leite said that she plans to triple the company’s revenue over the next five years. Also, Tracy’s tweak of the system prompted several investments, per Retail Touch Points. For instance, $500,000 on product education for store associates, known as Health Enthusiasts; $1.2 million in a new mobile checkout system; and the launch of The Vitamin Shoppe Cares Foundation, a peer-supported employee assistance fund to provide financial support to employees experiencing hardship.
It wasn't his fault
Meanwhile, viewers responded to the episode with mixed reactions, many of them disapproving that the employees were to blame for any of the systems. @jamescbrowniii commented, “I believe that as management, all the way up to the CEO, should be able to walk in and know how to do what their team members’ jobs do. They should be able to do the jobs!” Defending Tracy, @noone-seven said, “Tracy is an innovative problem solver to serve the customer and make things happen. The stores need a feedback system that is responsive and appreciative.”
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