If you’ve been in retail for 2 days, you know that a thief will take just about anything that’s not tied down… sometimes, they try to steal those items too! As retailers, that puts us in a very unique, and sometimes difficult position. How do we secure our merchandise in our stores, while trying to get honest, hardworking folks to buy them without feeling like a criminal themselves? We’ve all been in those stores where they take protective merchandising a little too far. Just recently, I was in a retailer and they had peg locks on just about every item in their store. That’s a bit overkill. It’s hard to blame the retailer when they are simply trying to keep their product available to purchase.
Recently, I was helping my father conduct some minor renovations at his restaurant. Halfway through cutting out a hole for a new window, his power tool stopped working. It was an old corded drill and I think the little motor had just given out. We needed a new one, so we drove down to the hardware store up the road. My dad owns a small business, so sometimes he will go out of his way, and spend a little more money to shop local instead of at the bigger, mass merchants. We get to the store and start looking for a new skill saw. After finding the displays, it was pretty clear that we would need assistance. Not only were the saws locked with a heavy cable to the display, they were secured with an in-effective hard tag in addition to a handwritten sign that warned of the use of CCTV.
The store owner was a friend of the family, so I asked if he’d been having a bit of a theft problem with the power tools. He told me that over the past month or so, he had lost thousands to theft and didn’t know what else to do. He also acknowledged that his sales were less when I inquired about the draconian display method. I told him what I did in my day job and he asked if I had any solutions. We talked for a few minutes and I told him I’d come back during the week with something for him to look at.
I went back to work on Monday and grabbed an O-Tag from the stock room. I used these on a plethora of product in my store and I’d seen bigger stores use these on electric tools, so I thought I’d show him how switching to one tag might be more effective. I went over on my lunch break and showed him how easily the tag could attach to the power cord. I’ve never seen anyone get more excited for an EAS device… and here I thought I was the only one. I suggested that he look into it since it would definitely help with his shrink and make his displays a little more appeasing to his customers.
I went and checked on him a few weeks later and found that he had started using the O-Tags just as I showed him how. Not surprising, he told me he hadn’t lost a single one since deploying the tags and customers had been commenting on the cleaner looking security solution.
For more information contact us at losspreventionsystems.com or call 1.770.426.0547
For more information contact us at losspreventionsystems.com or call 1.770.426.0547