I am in complete agreement with Karen Page’s excellent contribution, “Loss Prevention in Retail – What can you do about it?” In addition to Karen’s excellent points, I also would like to add that using the advantage of a liberal dose of paranoia can lessen employee theft even more, if they feel there is someone watching their every move.
Once, I was involved in a spot-audit of items in a convenience store and a cashier broke my train of thought completely when I heard her say out loud, “Mary, I hope you are paying for that candy bar. I don’t want it to come up missing on my shift!”
One slightly paranoid cashier pulled me to one side and asked if “we” could see her while she was in the bathroom. Of course, I laughed, but she was dead serious.
As convenience store employees often work in teams, there is almost always at least one member of the ‘team’ who will rat on the others if the appropriate atmosphere is established beforehand.
Also, you can teach them how to use this technique on customers without tipping your hand, taking advantage of their natural fear of being found out. All you have to do is just make eye contact with a suspicious person and they will generally move out of the store before they have the opportunity to take something without paying for it.
One of the least addressed issues during training (if there is any training), is a minimum of one-hour of loss-prevention training before an employee is giving the keys to the store. Another, is the amount of interest the store manager and owners display regarding how strongly they care about the stock in their stores, and overstock is one of the main contributors to employee and customer theft. Once employees get the idea that you are paying no attention to the quantity of each item on your shelves, they feel safer by assuming that if something goes missing, no one will notice.
Store owners like to claim that theft is one of the reasons that profits are low. While there is some truth to that, if you get down to the real cause of the issue, the root cause for the inventory losses is generally of their own making.
Bill Scott is the author of two retail books, a convenience store retailing consultant, speaker and president at StoreReport LLC.