I was headed to the grocery store one Friday evening and decided that I wanted some red wine to go with the fish dinner I planned on preparing later. Once in the store, I shopped around a bit and then headed over the liquor section. Of course, I was met with more choices than I wanted. I’m not a wine drinker, so trying to pick out one bottle of red wine from a selection of 200 was a bit overwhelming. As I was shuffling up and down the aisle, I happened on the manager of the store, whom I had met at a recent retail meeting. I noticed he was placing bottle locks on some of his product. I went over and introduced myself and we struck up a conversation that ultimately led to why he had to secure his liquor.
The way he put it, was he was tired of coming in to work every morning and seeing how much alcohol was lost. He had worked in several retail settings most of his career and he told me alcohol had to be one of the highest shrinking categories he had ever had to manage. He went off on a tangent about how he didn’t think anyone in the city paid for alcohol. Knowing exactly what he was feeling and I asked about the different ways he was securing his product. The locks seemed to work really well for him, but he stopped mid-sentence and said, “I have to tell you about this one shoplifter last month.” I’m never in too much of a hurry to ignore a good shoplifting story.
It was about a month before our talk and he came into his store and noticed he was missing about 10 bottles of a more expensive bottle of whiskey. Angry at the fact that he knew they were stolen, he went to his camera system to see if he could find the thief. Over the course of the evening, he saw not only one, but three different shoplifters take his whiskey, even though they were secured with a bottle lock. He was frustrated, rightly so. Not only with the shoplifters, but with his employees. They were not visible in the area and were not providing service in that area, leaving it wide open for theft. After cooling down a bit, he went out onto the floor and spoke with some of his supervisors and stressed how important it was the teams to be aware of their surroundings. That’s when he was called to the front of the store.
He figured there was customer upset about something, so he prepared himself and walked towards the doors to rectify whatever complaint was most likely coming his way. As he neared the service desk, he noticed a man holding two bottles of whiskey that still had bottle locks secured to them. Then he realized that this was one of the shoplifters he had seen on tape steal the whiskey! Not knowing what he was about to walk into, he asks the individual what he needed. To his complete dismay, the guy says that he bought the whiskey a few nights ago and the cashier had failed to take this locks off. The manager, took back the bottles, apologized and asked if he could wait while he took the security device off. He quickly contacted the police and his whiskey thief spent a night in the drunk tank.
For more information, contact us at Bottle Locks, or call 1.770.426.0547