I got my inventory results for this past year, and they were a lot worse than I had expected. I just took over this location a few months ago, and I knew the controls were lacking before my arrival, but we missed our shrink budget by over $2,000. I figured out a couple of the worst categories, books and soda, were caused by vendor paperwork errors and those have since been corrected. I can at least look forward to a swell next year. However, we have had some significant thefts in the cosmetics section and of course, that was our worst category for shrink. We had figured out who was in the group that was hitting us and we had to create an action plan to stop shoplifting in that quadrant of the store.
We went through and adhered Checkpoint Labels to our entire stock of foundations and lipsticks over a period of two weeks. I saw the ring leader of the group enter the store about three weeks ago. At the time I didn’t know it was her, but something about her made me suspicious. I even had a feeling right then that she was our makeup thief. I watched her for a bit, and then I got called to the front checkout to assist with a customer. I hated to leave her unattended, but I have to put my paying customers first. I was able to watch her from the front and I could see she was picking up lipsticks and quickly replacing them. I knew right then those Checkpoint Labels were working and I knew that woman was our culprit. She was able to get to a spot where I couldn’t see her, and she stole some eyeliners and mascaras. She did not activate the alarm on the Checkpoint Systems because we had not tagged those items. I was able to verify the theft later via camera footage.
Then last week, exactly two weeks from the day I figured out who the thief was, I was working the evening shift. I was just about to leave to take the deposit to the bank, when someone down one of the aisles caught my eye. You guessed it! It was her. I smiled at her, went back to the front, and told my cashier to call the police. Then I went outside quickly to figure out where the getaway car was. I walked over behind the car and jotted down the license plate number. (There was a dude in the driver’s seat, glaring at me in the mirror! I seriously did not care at that point though. Enough was enough.) Then I went back inside and verified her position in the store. I walked past her and the only thing in her cart was her giant purse. I asked her if she needed help and she said she was fine. Then her phone rang. I walked back toward the front to see if the police had arrived and not long after that she came to the front. She approached me and loudly asked me why I went out and got information from the car. I calmly told her I did it in case she left before the police came; I wanted them to be able to find her. She was not pleased with my answer. In the cart she was pushing were several packages of name brand facial care items. (All that added up to over $400 retail) She left it all and stormed out the door. They pulled out of the parking lot, but were pulled over right afterward.
I would like to point out that all the stuff she had chosen to steal this time were all lacking Checkpoint Labels. Our “stop shoplifting” plan was working in cosmetics so she moved over to a different category. She knew she couldn’t defeat our Checkpoint Systems, so she was carefully choosing items that were not protected.
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Retail, big or small, is an increasingly competitive, cost sensitive environment, and while not every retailer can afford to have a full time loss prevention team, no retailer can afford to do nothing to stop shoplifting. Retailers need solutions but they don’t need a bigger payroll expense. Labor is time and time is money so solutions need to cover both of those issue and that is what investing in Electronic Article Surveillance provides.
When I teach LP associates and operations staff about theft and it’s shrink impact I address two points. The first: the people who cause loss. The second: that time is critical to success.
People, in my opinion, fall into three classes regarding theft. The first class is the Professionals, those who steal for a living and whom we will discuss later. On the opposite end of the spectrum comes the Honest Angels, folks who would stop at a roadside stand and pay for everything they take even though no one is around for miles. The Fence Sitters are the third, the largest, and the most diverse group and the one that Electronic Article Surveillance impacts the most. The motivations that drive their decisions to steal vary, like financial issues, family needs, an entitlement mind-set or simply the existence of opportunity. These people don’t chose theft as a profession, they choose it in a moment when need or opportunity outweigh morality. But in that moment when they choose to step off the fence the risk and fear of being caught is in the forefront of their minds. The presence of items like EAS Tags has a major impact on their choices.
Unprotected merchandise creates an opportunity for theft, and unseen protections like LP don’t always deter shoplifters. EAS Tags create a visual reminder of the risk, representing time, time needed to complete the theft. Time creates too much risk and the Fence Sitter won’t take that risk. In the end they leave your store. Your merchandise remains safe and available for your paying customers.
With the fence sitting population covered let’s look back at the professional thieves, the boosters who make their living stealing your livelihood, from you. Electronic Article Surveillance impacts their actions as well but in a different manner than the Fence sitters. For boosters It boils down to a single factor, time! Successful boosters have an average time in a store of under 5 minutes. Even a full LP team has a hard time spotting and apprehending boosters with that small of a window. It is here that EAS Tags do serious work to stop shoplifting by the boosters.
Boosters removing tags takes time and time increases their chance of being caught. Professional thieves look to maximize their profit while minimizing their risk and effort. Merchandise protections removes these two elements, reducing the draw for the boosters. Even without LP in your store the presence of Electronic Article Surveillance works to stop shoplifting by increasing the risk to the booster, creating a deterrent.
In the end it is all about time. Extra time and effort spent by determined boosters increases LP’s success rate against them, saving your profit and increasing the return on investment for having LP. The visual deterrent of Electronic Article Surveillance increases the time the fence sitters think about their choice, causing them to give up, saving your profit. Most important is the time you save stressing about profits. Time is priceless and isn’t it about time you got to ease your mind?
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What is it that I most love about the Loss Prevention career field and retail theft prevention? I can’t say that it was ever one thing in particular. I enjoyed investigating internal and external theft. I enjoyed working with new anti-shoplifting technology as it rolled out to our stores, from new Checkpoint tags to Checkpoint Security System hardware such as antennas and deactivation pads. I really loved to stop shoplifting, and in fact I think my most interesting stories are from the shoplifters I caught (and in a few instances didn’t catch). Some stories are funny; some were scary as I reflect on them now, and some you just have to shake your head at in wonder.
One shoplifter story that was interesting involved a gentleman who came into our store and went to the sports card collections located near our checkout lanes. There was nothing that stood out about this shopper except that he was near one of our high theft areas. The individual packs of ball cards were source tagged with Checkpoint Tags so they would activate the Checkpoint Security System antennas at our front doors if someone were to try to walk out with unpaid merchandise. The boxes of collector cards were sometimes source tagged with Checkpoint Tags and other times weren’t and our Loss Prevention Team would have to place the tags on ourselves. As I mentioned, the ball cards tended to be a popular area for shoplifters. The packs were small enough they could be placed in a pants pocket easily. Usually individual packs were stolen by the kids who would be looking for a favorite player or one of the latest game based card series that was out at the time. The boxes were another matter, and these were being stolen by professional boosters and would find their way to flea markets, or sold to “buyers” who in turn sold them somewhere else.
My suspect in the case spent a lot of time hanging around the cards before he started to select several boxes and placed them in a shopping cart. After he had loaded up three or four boxes, he took them into the store where he concealed the boxes under his coat and walked towards the exit. As he approached the Checkpoint Security System antennas, he set off the alarm and continued out the door where we stopped him. We took him back to the office and I recovered the merchandise and processed him, taking his information and picture and entering his information in our case management reporting system. I questioned the subject about what he was going to do with the boxes of cards and he told me he was going to sell them at a flea market in another state. I asked if he had ever done this before and he admitted he had done so in Minnesota. I questioned him for about fifteen minutes and satisfied I had gotten all the information I could from the suspect, I contacted the local police, and explained what the subject had admitted to me. Police were not always interested in Organized Theft Rings and treated this as another shoplifter. The last step I had to do was email an alert to my District Manager and our designated Area Investigator since the case involved “booster” activity.
The next day I received a phone call from one of our Area Investigators located in Minnesota. He had been alerted to the report I submitted in our reporting system and by the information I sent to our Area Investigator. He recognized the name and description of the subject we had caught and it turned out he had a large case he was investigating in his area involving a theft ring stealing boxes of ball cards. The investigator asked for any additional information I could give him and the number to the local police department to see if he could speak to a detective. I provided the information and we said our goodbyes. I never heard from him again, but I did find it interesting that my team and I were able to stop shoplifting by this person who was being sought halfway across the country.
While I did not have the satisfaction of knowing whether the case played a part in closing a bigger investigation, I did have the pleasure of knowing that I had asked the right questions. Checkpoint Security Systems can help to stop shoplifting, identify suspects and recover merchandise, but by conducting a careful interview, it is possible to find out things aren’t always as they seem. That always gave me a sense of accomplishment in Retail Loss Prevention.
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People never cease to amaze me. From my years as an Air Force Security Policeman through my years in retail, I have seen truly odd things from customers and on occasion I have had to adapt to these behaviors. Hopefully as I stroll through memory lane, you will find some of these things as amusing as I do. These days there are all types of measures taken to stop shoplifting, there are Checkpoint tags to place on merchandise, electronic article surveillance antennas, closed circuit television, but these tools were not always readily available about 30 years ago.
When I was a young Airman 1st Class stationed at my first base, I experienced my first encounter with aggressive shoppers. I had no idea that the release of a new toy could be the cause of a huge uproar. I learned my lesson when I was dispatched to go to the Base Exchange (BX)/toy store. It was somewhere in neighborhood of the Christmas shopping season and the BX had a “Toyland” store set up. I was assigned guard duty this particular day at the BX for a new toy coming out called the Cabbage Patch doll. I felt a little silly having to go to a store to guard a shipment of dolls, but I was not about to argue, orders were orders.
I arrived and stayed near the display where the dolls were being set up. I was more than a little surprised at the growing crowd waiting outside the doors for the store to open! These were just dolls weren’t they?! While I am sure there was some concern by store managers to stop shoplifting, I learned later that the bigger concern was to prevent rioting (admittedly it was not on the scale of a city riot, but it was big enough to me!). Checkpoint tags weren’t used at that time to prevent theft and even if they were, they weren’t going to prevent this mayhem. The doors opened and the crowd of shoppers stormed through those doors for the limited number of dolls on the display. I don’t know what management thought I was going to do, but my instinct for self- preservation prevailed…I moved out of the way. These shoppers were grabbing dolls from each other, yelling, pushing and screaming. What effort I did try to exert was to no avail and I watched, somewhat horrified I might add, as the melee ensued.
Eventually the last of the dolls was grabbed and held with a death-grip by some fierce shopper. I don’t know that my performance was what the management had in mind when they requested a Security Policeman to be present, but I did escape with all limbs attached so in my mind, mission accomplished. I will say that this experience somewhat prepared me for the future when I would find myself in a new career as a Retail Loss Prevention Manager. Black Fridays couldn’t be any worse…could they?!
My later experiences in Retail Loss Prevention did find me preparing merchandise and the store for Black Fridays, as well as chaotic new releases of products. Using Checkpoint tags to protect merchandise we normally kept in lock up cases, we spent many hours tagging merchandise, but the results paid off. While we were aware some theft took place, overall we did not find a lot of empty packages or torn shrink wrap with tags left on them in the days after Black Friday. The combination of protected merchandise, employee awareness, strong police and Loss Prevention presence proved to be a significant factor to stop shoplifting.
I was proud of the fact that during my time as a Loss Prevention Manager, we did not experience anything like my “Toyland” trauma. Thanks to Checkpoint tags and careful planning, I never went through that again.
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Did you know that within food and grocery categories, coffee ranked fifth for most stolen items in North America, according to the 2014-2015 Global Retail Theft Barometer Report? I admit I was somewhat surprised by this. I expected meat and wine to be on the list, but coffee would not have been on my radar. When I saw this statistic I began to question what would be driving this category to be such a hot commodity (yes, pun is intended). Coffee prices swing up and down based on crop production and this is influenced greatly by rainfall or drought in coffee producing regions. Yet, it seems that regardless of the price of coffee it is always in demand and consumers are willing to pay for the bean or the beverage. Consider that just a couple of years ago coffee prices went up significantly due to drought in coffee growing countries like Brazil but the popularity of coffee houses continued to rise despite price increases. While there are those who are willing to pay more, there are also those who still want their beverage but aren’t willing to pay for it. The use of EAS labels is one way to stop shoplifting of specialty bags of coffee.
EAS labels (electronic article surveillance) are small adhesive tags that can be applied to products you want to prevent from being stolen. The labels have a circuit built into them and when brought into the detection field of an EAS antenna, activate the antenna’s alarm and lights. This alarm serves to alert store personnel to respond to and address the cause of the alarm. There is also the potential that the alarm may startle a shoplifter enough to cause them to drop the merchandise they were carrying and run from the store. The tag adhesive is strong enough that trying to remove it usually results in the paper being torn off, but the circuit remains attached.
With the increased popularity of coffee shops such as Starbuck’s and house coffee’s offered by restaurants like Dunkin Donuts, specialty coffee has found a niche in grocery stores. Customers can purchase favorite brands and blends of coffee bagged and ready to go directly off the shelf. A 12 ounce bag of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee at one big box retailer can be purchased for about $7.00 a bag and a 12 ounce bag of Starbucks coffee at the same place is roughly a dollar more. Another Grocery store chain sells Caribou Coffees at $8.99 for a 12 ounce bag. Add to this the rise in popularity of K cup coffee that can be up to $14 a box and the shortage ranking of coffee makes more sense.Thieves will steal because they want something and can’t afford it or it is stolen by organized theft rings and resold in “mom and pop shops” or alternatives such as online sites. It is also stolen because it is easy to steal. This is simply a category of product that is often overlooked in merchandise protection strategies. Applying EAS labels to your bags and boxes of coffee can significantly reduce the theft in your store.
Having worked in retail loss prevention I have seen the effectiveness of EAS labels to stop shoplifting. They are economical, coming in rolls of 2000 tags and they are easy to apply to merchandise by simply peeling them from the roll and sticking them to the merchandise. Dishonest customers generally shy away from merchandise that has anti-theft protection on it. I have made numerous recoveries of merchandise dropped at the doors when an alarm sounds during an attempted theft. I also learned how to give people an excuse for “forgetting” they had unpaid merchandise when an antenna sounded and frequently made recoveries that way.
If your bean counters (another intended pun) notice that coffee shortage is a problem for your store, take action to stop shoplifting. Use EAS labels to make shoplifters wake up and take their activity elsewhere.
Get more information on EAS labels, contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 today.
