Prevent Cart Staging And Theft With Checkpoint Hard Tags

Cart staging also known as staging a cart is a common yet crafty way for a thief to steal from you. If you provide your customers shopping carts then this is for you. Cart staging (just one common phrase) is when a thief creates a barrier in the shopping cart in order to make it easier to steal items from you without detection. This can now be prevented and leave shoplifters very discouraged with Checkpoint Hard Tags.

Working in a big box store for many years I would come across these carts frequently. But this is not just a problem for big box stores. If you provide shopping carts to your customers, shoplifters will use these carts to assist them in taking your merchandise. This is done by the shoplifter blocking out all sides of the cart usually with clothes draped over the sides to prevent anyone from seeing through all sides of the cart. This creates a very large area for the thief to place items inside the cart, now concealed from all sides. While it may look like they are just placing merchandise inside the cart they are actually ripping tags or trying to disable security tags. With the Checkpoint Hard Tags, this stops thieves in their tracks.

While working in a big box store shoplifters would create these carts while walking around the store. The problem was the store used inferior security tags on their merchandise. With social media now it’s like a tutorial for shoplifters on how to disable these tags. This made my job much harder as the only way to stop these thieves was to catch them in the act. This created a problem as there was always more customers than there was of me or any of my colleagues. Plus I don’t work 7 days a week and many times the store had no loss prevention. This is when the store really needs to depend on the security systems we had in place. With inferior security tags used on the merchandise, unless I caught them in the act we were losing many items with only a shopping cart left with several broken tags inside.

Staging carts or any other type of shoplifting is a crime of opportunity. Thieves don’t want to attract a bunch of attention or spend much time trying to defeat your security tags. Many of these devices used in retailers are frankly inferior. The Checkpoint Hard Tags have undergone extensive testing. They’ve taken hammers to them and even taken tools to try and pry them open to no avail. The fact is, the time and the amount of tools it would take to defeat the Checkpoint Hard Tags is not worth their time. Remember, shoplifting is a crime of opportunity. If a shoplifter has to bring multiple tools and then spend a lot of time and effort to defeat the security device they will simply move on. 

While staging carts and other types of deception used by shoplifters will still occur, we can now prevent and discourage shoplifters in your store. Pay attention to a shopper that has concealed their cart. Become a customer service expert! Give them all the attention they could have ever hoped for. But in the end by using Checkpoint Tags on your merchandise, you can at least rest easy knowing that those tags will still be in place with your merchandise still in the store. You may have to put all that merchandise in the cart back on the racks at the end of the day, but at least it will remain in your store!

For more information on Checkpoint Hard Tags contact us at 1-770-426-0547