Having one store in a major metropolitan area is great. Having two or more really helps you capture more market share and increases the awareness to your particular company. Do you know what else multiple stores in the same market does? Attract thieves. Not just your bored stay at home mom, or school skipping teenager. I’m talking about individuals who make a living, a good living, off of ripping people like you and me off. You can deploy as many Checkpoint Tags and EAS Alarm Systems as you want, and it will only keep the honest people honest. A professional booster will get that product no matter how secured it is. In my experience, the only thing that stops them is a tax-payer funded ride downtown.
Just recently the company I work for introduced a new line of athletic bottoms. That stretchy material that everyone is crazy about right now. I’m no expert in apparel, so I couldn’t tell you why this particular style retailed for $159, but it does. Before this product ever hit the stores, I made sure our buyers and warehouse were on the same page with securing this product. There was no way on Earth that I was going to put these pants on the shelf without some type of clothing security device. We opted for a Checkpoint Ink Tag which had a bit more of a deterrence factor when you looked at it.
Due to the price point, they only hit select stores. In one particular market, one of my stores received them, while the other store across town did not. As in retail, the next big investigation came along and more new and exciting product dropped and I soon forgot about those $159 pairs of pants I was so excited about seeing a few months back. Until I was conducting a store audit one day. I happened to find myself in that store across town that did not stock these pants. As I was auditing their sales floor, I noticed several pairs of these pants on racks, simply mixed in with other styles of lesser priced clothing. This wasn’t right… we had a special section built for these units to showcase them. Why did this store have a small selection when they shouldn’t have at all? I grabbed the store manager and asked if he could explain. He couldn’t.
I began researching the product shipments and I came up empty handed. It wasn’t until I looked at the return history of the product that I saw that multiple pairs of these pants were being returned to this store. Upon closer inspection of the pants, I found holes where the Checkpoint Tag had been. I verified the sister store’s sales and while we were definitely selling the units, there were far more returns than sales. I had a theft problem. On top of that, the thieves were returning the stolen goods back to me in order to get store credit, then buying more product. I was out of that money 3 separate times. It took a few weeks of investigating to uncover the ring, but we eventually did. Local police assisted in making several arrests and we were able to stop that particular loss. Watching the theft on camera, I noticed that the thieves had struggled defeating the Ink Tags on each visit. Had it not been for the ink tags, I do believe they would’ve gotten even more product.
For more information, contact us: Clothing Security, or call 1.770.426.0547
