Retail Chains WILL Get You If You Steal, Manager Reveals Their Secret
Retail chains can always catch shoplifters when they involve their loss prevention teams.
Shoplifting is a multi-billion-dollar issue, and there isn’t a retail company in the world that doesn’t have procedures and policies in place to curb the potential losses they might suffer because of retail theft. A loss prevention department is as common as a coffee station is to a company’s office. And it’s the loss prevention team that will nail serial shoplifters every time, according to Kenzie Ray, a former retail sales manager for Victoria’s Secret.
The whole job of the loss prevention team is to mitigate potential asset losses and plug the gaps they discover within an organization that opens the door for opportunistic criminals to exploit a perceived weakness in the company’s security protocols for their own personal gain. For many, the need for a loss prevention team may be hard to rationalize, because the general populace is guided by an honorable moral and ethical code. However, people that are career criminals do not live by that same moral code, thus the need for a team of experts dedicated to preventing retail theft.
Yahoo life spoke with former Victoria’s Secret sales manager Kenzie Ray, and highlighted that “she estimates that someone would steal from the store at least once a day, which resulted in high losses for the struggling lingerie company.” Retail theft is an accepted risk by any company in this industry, and those companies usually set an acceptable loss goal for each of their locations. This is a company telling store employees that it is inevitable that someone will steal from their location and as long as the amount of the loss is less than X figure then the company can stay profitable in spite of having that amount of inventory assets walk out the door.
Almost all retail companies have a policy that states if an employee becomes aware of a customer that has committed a retail theft they should not stop or confront that individual. This is for the employee’s safety because of the unpredictable reaction that confrontation may elicit from the thief. Instead, the employee will follow the company’s loss prevention protocols and inform management, human resources, or directly contact the loss prevention department.
Once a criminal establishes an easy mark or score, which is a phrase that describes a target where they feel they will have a low probability of being caught, it’s likely they will start committing retail theft more frequently at that location. If a location’s employee observes or becomes aware that this is occurring and follows the proper protocols, then the company’s loss prevention team takes over.
Once loss prevention starts looking into the recurring retail theft, they will comb through locations’ security footage watching every time that individual has entered the store and what they had stolen on each visit. For example, they discover that the customer carries an item into a blind spot from the cameras, and every time they walk out of that blind spot, the item is no longer with them. They start making retail theft procedural or security adjustments based on the weakness that is being exposed.
They establish a pattern that the individual is exhibiting, a specific day of the week or time of the day because a specific clerk is easily distracted and they target their shifts. Since the loss prevention team is not on site, they also look at all the locations in a range surrounding that location because maybe this individual is targeting multiple stores with this type of retail theft. At some point, they will have acquired enough evidence and a loss prevention agent will be embedded at a location when the criminal strikes again and has left the store they will confront them and get law enforcement involved.
It’s easy to think well I only took a $25 item so how much trouble could I be in, right? Wrong. Loss prevention will use all the evidence they acquired, and you might learn that they are aware that you stole that $25 item 400 times for a total theft of $10,000 which is now a major felony with long-lasting consequences if convicted. The moral of the story is don’t commit retail theft, because you will ultimately get caught.
