I have a friend who works for Nordstorm doing this kind of work. She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in large scale to be sold on eBay.
This is a longstanding problem. I worked at the receiving dock of a retailer long ago, and the amount of procedure and double-verification involved was a bit of a drag, all of it obviously aimed at making sure that neither I nor the guy driving the truck could make things "fall off the truck" without it being obvious.
But even then, it was common knowledge that most "shrinkage" (generic term for stolen/damaged/expired/destroyed merchandise) was from employee theft (except in grocery stores... there it is second to expired goods).
I remember a guy in high school basically taking orders for things to steal off the Walmart truck; expensive electronics (for back in the day) like XBoxes, Playstations, etc.
And of course, while working at Kohl's, you had people occasionally put items away in the back, tucked behind shelves, so that when they went on ultra-clearance they could pull them out and buy them.
That definitely brings an experience from college into focus for me. We were cleaning out the back room and came across a luggage set that had slipped behind some shelves and was missed for like 3 years. It was originally priced at $400 but was so old or was clearanced at $40. I bought it, thanking my lucky stars that we had luggage for our upcoming honeymoon.
About a week later, loss prevention called me in and asked me a ton of questions about the luggage and how it came to be behind the shelves. It was before I worked there so I had no idea. The whole thing seemed weird to me at the time. Now it makes sense. Wild.
Yep, anywhere clearance is handled by "computer" and not someone physically noting and putting a sticker on it you have this happening.
If you find something wedged behind a shelf it's sometimes a customer just putting something back where it doesn't belong, other times it's the long-con.
Some stores won't clearance below a certain point because of this; they'd rather ship pallets off at 20% "loss" to an outlet broker than enable clearance shrinkage.
In a sort of reverse of that story, back when my teenage son was working at Target, my wife asked me to get a vacuum cleaner. So I went to the Target webpage and found a mid-range model, and texted my son to buy it and bring it home after his shift. He came home and said the only one left was the display model but that he got it for me.
The next day, security called him in to the office, which freaked him out a little, of course. They asked him why he had bought that vacuum cleaner. He said I'd asked for it. They then all laughed, and told him that it was a commonly stolen model and they were using it as a honey pot. When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood. It was always the dad causing problems. And they sent him back to work.
> When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood.
What could possibly be confusing about a person doing what most normal people do in a store?
I have a friend that does this for Home Depot. He describes his job as being a detective. Watching video to collect enough evidence so he can question employees shorting the company. Non-employees has their evidence given to the local police department once there is enough.
Often employees with talk about the other crimes they committed while being interrogated. He just plays along, ".. yes we had that too ... and that too". Give them enough evidence and they will hang themselves.
The hardest to catch are the slight of hand employees that can take money from the safe while it looking like they put all the money in. This is even with cameras watching the safe.
>The hardest to catch are the slight of hand employees that can take money from the safe while it looking like they put all the money in. This is even with cameras watching the safe.
I've read about this in Vegas, where there are people who can palm the the chips so quickly that they weren't able to discern it on 30fps cameras (they had upgraded to 120fps, I think). Didn't know if it was the sort of bullshit people like that like to tell stories about without any evidence or not.
> “Take a seat, the door is unlocked and you can leave at any time.”
Why wouldn't everyone just leave at that point? That's what I'd do, since if I'm being investigated, then my job there is over anyway regardless of my guilt or innocence. I'd have nothing to gain by volunteering to be interrogated.
People think that if they refuse to talk, they'll look guilty. An innocent person would want to clear their name so they'll sit for the interview. If the person really is guilty, they'll probably get tripped up somehow during the questioning and get cornered. Of course they can still leave at any time but they think that as long as they keep talking, eventually they'll convince the investigators that they are innocent.
Loss prevention isn't like the cops, they actually want to catch the thief because if they don't, the thief continues to operate. Cops just need someone to pin it on. Crime continues regardless of whether or not someone was wrongly convicted so what does it matter that one guy got away as long as the public thinks you're doing a good job? LP looks bad if theft continues, no one is applauding them for doing their job.
> An innocent person would want to clear their name so they'll sit for the interview.
I can see that. I think they're misguided, but I can understand the impulse.
> Loss prevention isn't like the cops, they actually want to catch the thief because if they don't, the thief continues to operate.
I'm deeply skeptical. Probably because of my own experience with this. When I was a teen, I was wrongly accused of stealing in the workplace, was subjected to interrogation, declared guilty and fired. I wanted to clear my name so badly that I went to the trouble of taking a lie detector test and sending them the result.
I learned to never cooperate if I'm ever in that situation again. There's no point. Just quit and move on with your life.
Tom Segura has a standup bit in one of his specials about cop reality shows, and how people think talking to the cops is going to work out great for them. "Lawyer up. You can't handle that s**. Everybody's like, 'I'm gonna talk to the cops, and straighten this whole thing out.' You're gonna do 25 to life. Have fun with that, man."
you do a couple of things to distract them on the way, like lead them around to a harder to reach room, ask them unrelated questions e.g. "did you see that goofy guy at the counter this morning", and give the impression that you want to hear their side of the story.
most people will comply esp. if slightly distracted or thrown off a little; the serious hoodrats would be picking a fight or pushing back and the pros would already be walking out the back door ASAP
I think part of the fixation on "shoplifting" is that a Reddit video showing someone walking in and filling up a bag of merchandise viscerally gets people going in a way that "statistics about wage theft," "invisible employee-caused shrinkage," and "process/control failures" doesn't get people hot-and-bothered.
People will get mad because they visually saw someone steal a tube of toothpaste, but not care about other forms of mass-theft because it's not on YouTube.
Beyond even the cops and DA absolutely refusing to do their jobs in any way, it also severely degrades the shopping experience.
You can either go to costco which is always mobbed, or if you make the mistake of going to Target, you will have to repeatedly get someone to unlock cabinets which hold laundry detergent, deodorant, toothpaste, etc.
That's Target degrading the shopping experience. It's understandable how they make a cost-benefit analysis and decide to, but let's not absolve them of responsibility for that choice.
Given the shoplifting levels, comprehensive lack of enforcement, etc they don't practically have a choice. See also SF whining a couple years ago because a Target actually reported all the thefts and it made Breed look incompetent. And the open retail-theft marketplace operated at 16th st bart.
They have many choices. Off the top of my head: accept the higher loss, raise prices on in-store purchases of those items to account for the higher shrink, authorize their security guards to forcibly stop and detain people, put vending machines that unlock with a payment card (deposit) rather than employee-operated locks.
I don't know why you're continuing to absolve the well-capitalized corporation of responsibility for their choice of dumping externalities on legitimate customers, except as part of some gish gallop of reactionary talking points that lash out with blame for everyone but those directly responsible for the frustrating conditions.
Yes, indeed. I don't understand why you're not blaming the criminals and the incompetent government enabling them, rather than merchants with thin margins. Or us, for not being enthused about paying for the thieves.
We can condemn each individual criminal for their personal choice to steal, but this does not have much bearing on the overall situation. There is no "government enabling them", rather there is a government that is necessarily choosing how to optimize its limited resources.
Meanwhile, a large store full of goods manned by a skeleton crew, which doesn't even hire a single person to chase down thieves, seems like quite the attractive nuisance. Why is it governments job to subsidize the security of this store's stuff through the threat of expensive post-facto enforcement against a bunch of judgement-proof perpetrators? Why do you keep absolving the well-capitalized corporation of responsibility and even agency ?
We're now at the point where Geico doesn't even ask you to cosplay working government by filing a police report. Because everyone knows that nothing will happen.
It's one of the purposes, sure. But I don't think the set of people who want to raise taxes, and the set of people complaining about rampant shop lifting have very many people in common.
Would you personally support cities levying higher sales taxes on in-store purchases at large stores that forgo traditional security guards (let's imagine matching the state rate, so effectively a doubling) to pay for the resulting costs of those stores not preemptively securing their merchandise?
Ha, I watched this happen at a Target here in SoCal. A group of people filled up their carts (3) with clothes and shoes, rushed out the door to a waiting van. Security didn't even try to stop them at all.
I would not expect an hourly employee barely making minimum wage with no benefits to even lift a finger to stop a potentially violent shoplifter. If it were me, I'd hold the door for them to get them out of there.
> She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in large scale to be sold on eBay.
One of Kanye's early songs he mentions stealing kakis from his job before he quit to become an artist. Not surprised, if you're an employee you have access to all sorts of things a customer does not. I imagine you also have access to areas where there are no cameras.
When I was younger, teen and early 20s, and working in retail. I noticed and thought it was kind of funny how in the job application process, these 100+ question interviews were all about trying to filter out criminals. They really treated employees as potential criminals first. Its ironically more paranoid than working in the financial industry.
> Its ironically more paranoid than working in the financial industry.
Having owned a liquor store for a while, it's not paranoia. The majority of the people you can get to work low end retail jobs will try to rip you off in any way they can.
Back in the stone age, I worked at 7-Eleven while in university. Nothing was really computerized at the store level then, even cameras were rare.
What was done all the time was a simple, templated, paper-based process that managers went through each month. I believe the gist of it was that it recorded sales for each shift in the month (7am-3pm, 3-11, 11-7), and who worked them. Some simple stats highlighted low sales correlated with employees, to point out who was likely entering smaller prices in the till and pocketing the difference. Now it's all bar-code scans of course, but it was a common problem at the time.
back when bookstores were a thing most places I used to work in one, and had a manager watch us, the entire time, as we took romance novels we couldn't sell out back and ripped off the covers before tossing them in a ship-back bin. Ditto for a few others like best sellers and some mags
she took two us out back to do it, leaving only one person on the floor to run the checkout -- field day for any serious thief. but they were more worried about us...
i'm surprised by this because it's so hard to sell used goods. i have an old suit from graduation that's in perfect condition and looks quite nice. the thing will NOT sell, not even for 10$, at all even though it's practically brand new.
I can actually comment on this a bit as I ran an eBay business during college selling second-hand clothes. A lot of it is about volume and brand. For example, women made up a majority of our sales even if it was men's clothing. Certain brands like Nike, Polo sold better & having hundreds of items up vs. just one and having 5 stars. All of that combined allowed us to sell items daily.
