Looks Can Be Deceiving And Criminals May Be Stealing Without Your Knowledge; Training To Prevent Employee Theft And Stop Shoplifting Is Available

Quiz time! You are watching your checkout lanes and you see a customer checking out with one of your cashiers. They seem to know each other from their friendly banter. The customer pays with cash, receives change and takes several bags and leaves. A few days later you see the same customer going through the same cashier’s line again. There are several available registers but he waits for this cashier. After everything is rung up the customer pays cash, gets change and leaves with his bags. Do you see anything wrong with this picture? Let’s try another one, a couple of young women come in the store with a baby stroller and a baby is in the stroller. They walk around for a bit and begin picking out clothing in the young women’s department. One young lady picks up the baby and carries him in her arms. They don’t have a shopping cart and they have a lot of clothes they have picked up. They place the clothes in the baby stroller rather than bothering with a shopping cart. Do you see anything that bothers you about this? Last one, a customer is looking at merchandise in a display case. He asks an associate to show him a piece of merchandise. He is allowed to hold the item and asks to look at another item. The employee selects a second item. All the while he is chatting with the associate.  The customer asked to look at a third item from the showcase and the employee reaches for it to show the customer. Is this okay or not? The answer for each of these is they were real types of theft that I dealt with as a Loss Prevention Manager. Store managers and owners running small businesses rarely have the experience or training to deal with employee theft or stop shoplifting. Those small retail store owners also don’t have budgets for trained Loss Prevention Associates. In order to address this problem Loss prevention Systems, Inc. (LPSI) offers training to reduce employee theft and training to stop shoplifting.

With training designed to teach managers how to protect merchandise, identify vulnerabilities and develop programs to reduce shrinkage smaller stores can keep up profits in a world of ever-increasing criminal activity. Additionally, employers often don’t consider all of the ways employees may be stealing from them or from their customers. They also don’t know that there are signals that they can look for that may be warnings that an employee intends to or is stealing. LPSI’s programs will instruct owners and managers on various methods employees use to steal, from giving merchandise to friends, under charging family members for merchandise to keeping receipts from customers for fraudulent returns. Armed with the right tools and knowledge, managers can stop shoplifting and employee theft.

So what happened in each of the scenarios I presented earlier? In the first one, the cashier was having a friend come to the checkout line and would ring up the merchandise presented. Some of the merchandise was voided from the transaction and still bagged for the friend. Other items were rung up but then the price was changed to a lower amount. Because there was a balance to pay and it looked like the customer was charged and paid properly. Looks were deceiving. Live surveillances then showed the same friend coming back over the course of several days, establishing for my case that it was not a fluke or an accident. In the second scenario two young women were in the department store where I worked, pushing a baby stroller. One girl was holding the baby and they were filling the carriage with blue jeans and covering them up with a blanket inside the stroller. As a Loss Prevention Officer I was trained on identifying suspicious signs or signals shoplifters give off so I had a reason to watch them, otherwise I would not have caught them. In the final scenario the suspect was a known iPod thief and was clever at distracting employees and getting them to take too many items out of a showcase. The employee lost track of how many iPods he had removed from the case and the suspect was able to conceal one in his waistline while the employee was reaching for a third iPod. We lost that one. Unfortunately I was not working so I could not stop shoplifting in that instance. It was found on video review after an audit of the i-Pods found a discrepancy.     

Can’t afford a trained Loss Prevention staff? Need more training for you and your managers to prevent shortage? Get LPSI training to reduce employee theft and stop shoplifting.

Need information on employee theft? Give us a call at 1.770.426.0547 now.