I come from a long line of retail professionals. I have been in the corporate loss prevention world for years, my dad owns a restaurant and my grandparents ran a grocery store for decades. During every family gathering and holiday the conversation seems to always turn to our jobs and we all trade stories of our funniest… or dumbest shoplifter stories. Last Independence Day, the family was together and grandpa began telling a story we’ve all heard probably 100 times. It involved an employee at his grocery store stealing bottles of vodka. One of my little cousins was hearing this for the first time and sternly asked us, “Isn’t there a bottle lock you could use?” What a little genius.
The year was 1967. My Grandpa had been running his own grocery store for 10 years, with the help of his wife and anyone that wanted to make an honest wage. The hours were long, the margins were slim, but being his own boss was all he ever dreamed about. Inside the store was a small, although very profitable, liquor section. My grandpa liked to brag about how he was the only person to stock high end scotch, whiskey and vodka for miles around. He not only stocked it, he sold the heck out of it. Liquor was a cash cow for him back then, and it still is for stores today. Liquor theft today costs retailers hundreds of thousands of dollars. It may have not been that much in my Grandpa’s store, but it was more than enough to get him to notice.
Over the course of a few weeks that summer, he began to notice that he was always out of stock on a certain brand of vodka, but his sales seemed to not show a profit. He couldn’t figure it out and eventually forgot about it while dealing with a hundred other problems in the store. One day while receiving a shipment of produce in the warehouse, he noticed one of his most tenured employees carrying two gallons of water to the loading dock. He watched as the employee poured the water out of the jugs and left the warehouse. He got pulled away again and forgot about what he saw until a few days later. He went back to that area of the warehouse and noticed a few boxes that were out of place. After moving them aside, he discovered about 20 empty bottles of his most expensive vodka. It all began to make sense to him now. He learned after watching for few days that his employee would empty the water, fill it with vodka and then leave the store after paying the $.20 for the water. If bottle locks had been invented back then, it would have saved him thousands of dollars in lost profit.
In today’s world, a bottle lock is the preferred method of retailers to secure their high end liquors. It’s a simple, cost effective solution that will prevent loss and lead to increased sales. They come in all types of sizes and styles that can fit any application out there. I’ve used them in several applications in my career and they really are a simple way to protect your product. So join me as we raise a glass to higher profits!
For more information, contact us: Bottle Locks, or call 1.770.426.0547
I come from a long line of retail professionals. I have been in the corporate loss prevention world for years, my dad owns a restaurant and my grandparents ran a grocery store for decades. During every family gathering and holiday the conversation seems to always turn to our jobs and we all trade stories of our funniest… or dumbest shoplifter stories. Last Independence Day, the family was together and grandpa began telling a story we’ve all heard probably 100 times. It involved an employee at his grocery store stealing bottles of vodka. One of my little cousins was hearing this for the first time and sternly asked us, “Isn’t there a bottle lock you could use?” What a little genius.
The year was 1967. My Grandpa had been running his own grocery store for 10 years, with the help of his wife and anyone that wanted to make an honest wage. The hours were long, the margins were slim, but being his own boss was all he ever dreamed about. Inside the store was a small, although very profitable, liquor section. My grandpa liked to brag about how he was the only person to stock high end scotch, whiskey and vodka for miles around. He not only stocked it, he sold the heck out of it. Liquor was a cash cow for him back then, and it still is for stores today. Liquor theft today costs retailers hundreds of thousands of dollars. It may have not been that much in my Grandpa’s store, but it was more than enough to get him to notice.
Over the course of a few weeks that summer, he began to notice that he was always out of stock on a certain brand of vodka, but his sales seemed to not show a profit. He couldn’t figure it out and eventually forgot about it while dealing with a hundred other problems in the store. One day while receiving a shipment of produce in the warehouse, he noticed one of his most tenured employees carrying two gallons of water to the loading dock. He watched as the employee poured the water out of the jugs and left the warehouse. He got pulled away again and forgot about what he saw until a few days later. He went back to that area of the warehouse and noticed a few boxes that were out of place. After moving them aside, he discovered about 20 empty bottles of his most expensive vodka. It all began to make sense to him now. He learned after watching for few days that his employee would empty the water, fill it with vodka and then leave the store after paying the $.20 for the water. If bottle locks had been invented back then, it would have saved him thousands of dollars in lost profit.
In today’s world, a bottle lock is the preferred method of retailers to secure their high end liquors. It’s a simple, cost effective solution that will prevent loss and lead to increased sales. They come in all types of sizes and styles that can fit any application out there. I’ve used them in several applications in my career and they really are a simple way to protect your product. So join me as we raise a glass to higher profits!
For more information, contact us at Bottle Locks, or call 1.770.426.0547
Have you ever been in a store on a Monday morning and wondered why the store was so blown up? Recovery had not been completed, stock piled up in the aisles, returns not put away? Maybe you decided to give them the benefit of the doubt by looking at their sales to see if they had an unusually busy weekend. I know that on several occasions, after looking at the sales reports, I still was in the dark as to why the store was in such terrible shape. That’s when I knew I needed to go to my VisiPlus people traffic counter reports.
The VisiPlus is a people traffic counter report. It breaks down day of the week and hour of the day to show how many people are coming into the store. Even though my sales had not been where I would have thought they should be in light of the disaster zone my stores had turned into, the people traffic counter was giving me an alternative view of what had happened.
I was seeing increases in the customer traffic, but the sales were not where they should be. I then learned that my stores had been understaffed. Payroll had been mismanaged through the week, leaving critical hours being cut or the weekend. Not only were there not enough employees to handle the customers to increase sales, but also the lack of payroll negatively affected the store’s presentation standards.
Had I not seen both the sales reports and the VisiPlus reports, I would not have been able to track down a very critical operational breakdown. It wasn’t that my managers and employees were not being productive enough to get the work done. It was that processes had been mismanaged throughout the week causing this secondary breakdown. I now knew exactly where to go to fix my store’s problems.
Have you ever been in a store on a Monday morning and wondered why the store was so blown up? Recovery had not been completed, stock piled up in the aisles, returns not put away? Maybe you decided to give them the benefit of the doubt by looking at their sales to see if they had an unusually busy weekend. I know that on several occasions, after looking at the sales reports, I still was in the dark as to why the store was in such terrible shape. That’s when I knew I needed to go to my VisiPlus people traffic counter reports.
The VisiPlus is a people traffic counter report. It breaks down day of the week and hour of the day to show how many people are coming into the store. Even though my sales had not been where I would have thought they should be in light of the disaster zone my stores had turned into, the people traffic counter was giving me an alternative view of what had happened.
I was seeing increases in the customer traffic, but the sales were not where they should be. I then learned that my stores had been understaffed. Payroll had been mismanaged through the week, leaving critical hours being cut on the weekend. Not only were there not enough employees to handle the customers to increase sales, but also the lack of payroll negatively affected the store’s presentation standards.
Had I not seen both the sales reports and the VisiPlus reports, I would not have been able to track down a very critical operational breakdown. It wasn’t that my managers and employees were not being productive enough to get the work done. It was that processes had been mismanaged throughout the week causing this secondary breakdown. I now knew exactly where to go to fix my store’s problems.
Do you normally make impulse decisions that could cost your business thousands of dollars, or do you look at all of the available data to ensure you make an informed decision? If you don’t like taking risks with the future of your business, why would you take a chance on hiring someone without first running background checks to review their past. Not many people would expect the well dressed and well-spoken interviewee to be a thief, but sometimes that’s just how things turn out.
In a perfect world, job candidates would walk in and give you an honest and full disclosure of their past. This is not even close to reality. There are not many people out there that are going to tell you something that could potentially hinder their chances of getting the job. They are secretly hoping that you don’t have a pre-employment screening process in place.
No matter what size your company is, you don’t want to judge a book by its cover when hiring your employees. It’s sometimes easy to be fooled by appearances. In some cases, it is the person who you would least suspect that will wind up robbing you blind. Whether you have five employees or 5,000 working for you, it’s never a good idea to trust only in your instincts when hiring your staff. A good background check is the best way to assure that you don’t hire criminals to represent your business.
You may not realize it, but some people seek jobs specifically to steal from their future employer. They will not only have the chance to lighten your wallet by stealing from you, but you will be paying them to do it. Some of them work by themselves, and others are a part of a much larger network. I have worked cases in the past in which the employee was just a small piece of the puzzle in regard to the role they played in their group. For example, I worked on an employee theft investigation that involved a single cashier that was not only taking cash from the register, but was having their friends come in and fill out fraudulent credit applications using false identities as well. It was later shown that she was also accepting counterfeit cash.
Some small business owners may think that this kind of activity would only happen at a massive store, which is not the case. Once these groups have a single person on the inside, the possibilities of what damage they can cause to a business are endless. We were lucky in this situation, because were able to work with multiple branches of law enforcement to identify others involved and close the case. Not every case has a good outcome though, sometimes they are gone before you even realize anything is happening.
While not all cases are that large in scope, for a small business a large loss could be crippling. I’m not trying to give you nightmares. I am trying to arm you with information that could help save you a lot of time and money by doing it right in the first place.
You can’t just assume that everyone you want to hire will be a good decision. Take the guesswork out of the process and run thorough background checks by using a reputable company that is known for pre-employment screening. These steps are necessary to avoid all of the headaches you could face if you don’t get them done for everyone you hire. Skipping the process is gambling with the success of your business, and the small costs involved are a tiny fraction of what you may wind up losing in the long run.
For more information contact us: (Background Checks) or call 1.770.426.0547
Do you normally make impulse decisions that could cost your business thousands of dollars, or do you look at all of the available data to ensure you make an informed decision? If you don’t like taking risks with the future of your business, why would you take a chance on hiring someone without first running background checks to review their past. Not many people would expect the well dressed and well-spoken interviewee to be a thief, but sometimes that’s just how things turn out.
In a perfect world, job candidates would walk in and give you an honest and full disclosure of their past. This is not even close to reality. There are not many people out there that are going to tell you something that could potentially hinder their chances of getting the job. They are secretly hoping that you don’t have a pre-employment screening process in place.
No matter what size your company is, you don’t want to judge a book by its cover when hiring your employees. It’s sometimes easy to be fooled by appearances. In some cases, it is the person who you would least suspect that will wind up robbing you blind. Whether you have five employees or 5,000 working for you, it’s never a good idea to trust only in your instincts when hiring your staff. A good background check is the best way to assure that you don’t hire criminals to represent your business.
You may not realize it, but some people seek jobs specifically to steal from their future employer. They will not only have the chance to lighten your wallet by stealing from you, but you will be paying them to do it. Some of them work by themselves, and others are a part of a much larger network. I have worked cases in the past in which the employee was just a small piece of the puzzle in regard to the role they played in their group. For example, I worked on an employee theft investigation that involved a single cashier that was not only taking cash from the register, but was having their friends come in and fill out fraudulent credit applications using false identities as well. It was later shown that she was also accepting counterfeit cash.
Some small business owners may think that this kind of activity would only happen at a massive store, which is not the case. Once these groups have a single person on the inside, the possibilities of what damage they can cause to a business are endless. We were lucky in this situation, because were able to work with multiple branches of law enforcement to identify others involved and close the case. Not every case has a good outcome though, sometimes they are gone before you even realize anything is happening.
While not all cases are that large in scope, for a small business a large loss could be crippling. I’m not trying to give you nightmares. I am trying to arm you with information that could help save you a lot of time and money by doing it right in the first place.
You can’t just assume that everyone you want to hire will be a good decision. Take the guesswork out of the process and run thorough background checks by using a reputable company that is known for pre-employment screening. These steps are necessary to avoid all of the headaches you could face if you don’t get them done for everyone you hire. Skipping the process is gambling with the success of your business, and the small costs involved are a tiny fraction of what you may wind up losing in the long run.
For more information contact us: Background Checks or call 1.770.426.0547
