When adults involve children in theft, they know they are less likely to be caught. I’m in the retail pharmacy business, and I’ve had to deal with this problem before. Once I had a man come in with a little boy that looked to be about three to four years old. He held the child’s hand while walking through the store, and no one, including me, paid him any attention. Then he went and wiped out a whole section of cough/cold items. I found it on video later when I discovered the empty shelves. Now I use tools from Alpha Security to protect those items.
That’s what I hope happens at a liquor store I read about recently. They showed a picture of the place. The point was to get out a picture of a woman that used a five year old girl to steal, but it also showed their lack of any type of liquor bottle security. It was the typical layout, with high shelves of bottles as far as you can see. So this woman comes into the store with the child and walks around with her in tow. Then when they are in an aisle alone, she looks around and points at a specific bottle. She then walks away and leaves the child there by herself. The little girl picked up the bottle and put it behind her back. Then she sneaks out the front door, and not a single staff member sees her. They never looked up, and they never suspected a thing. The staff saw the theft on video later, after they found the empty spot where the missing $40 bottle should have been. The police watched the video, and the little girl acted like she had done it all before. It was like she was completely comfortable stealing for the woman, presumably her mother.
The worst part is that the little girl has no idea what she’s doing is wrong; children simply aim to please adults. If the store had bottle locks on their inventory, this problem would have likely never happened. If the woman did instruct the child to still try and steal the liquor, the gadget would have caused an alarm to sound when she got too close to the door. I’m sure this horrible woman will simply explain it away, and pretend to scold the child if she does get caught in the act. The good thing is that if she tries it at enough places, someone is bound to catch on.
Either way though, the crime has already happened and now the store that was victimized needs to address their shortcomings. If they are losing inventory to five year old children, they are probably losing even more to adults. This store needs to take a look into the products offered by Alpha Security like bottle locks. At least if they have these on all the bottles, the store staff can monitor the inventory a little easier. The locks have different levels of alarm capabilities, so the store can decide on which ones to invest in. Liquor bottle security is nothing to take lightly. That store has to get that corrected so they are not involved in any incidents with any other minors getting alcohol. Whether they steal it or manage to buy it, the store they got it from can still be held responsible if anything bad happens to them because of it. Bottle locks can be the deterrence they need to stop it from ever happening.
For more information on bottle locks, contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 or Bottlelock.net