Target online sales drop

[Romr123]

Another interesting critical article about shrink and Target and how it's articulated in the press

https://popular.info/p/off-target

[veteran+]

Another interesting critical article about shrink and Target and how it's articulated in the press

https://popular.info/p/off-target

Thank you and finally a breath of fresh air on this over debated topic.

Critical and root cause analysis is your friend! (not videos playing the same thing over and over again along with carefully curated and edited photography)

[mjhale]

Another interesting critical article about shrink and Target and how it's articulated in the press

https://popular.info/p/off-target

Thank you and finally a breath of fresh air on this over debated topic.

Critical and root cause analysis is your friend! (not videos playing the same thing over and over again along with carefully curated and edited photography)

The article also notes that Walgreens "cried too much about shoplifting" and things have "stabilized". The party line with retail theft for the past years seems to have been it is everyone else's fault except for the retailer. I'd sure like to know what the internal versus external theft numbers are for the retailers who cried the loudest and subsequently locked up their entire stores in cases. This is not to say that external theft is not a problem and has likely increased in recent years. However, these retailers have to be willing to look at themselves too. Maybe instead of doing huge stock buybacks you could invest those millions into increasing store based salaries, or increasing staffing so employees aren't completely stretched thin to the point of not caring. Employees that don't feel valued aren't going to care if their store gets ripped off and might even be doing it themselves because of the if they don't care I don't care mentality. You can get quality employees if you show them you care with a good work environment and a fair salary. And that goes for the customers too. What does it say when a upstanding citizen who lives in a marginal neighborhood is greeted by everything locked down like they are the criminal. The customer starts to stop caring too. I recall reading long ago commentary from Izzy Cohen who was the CEO of Giant-MD when it was still independent. He readily said that the high volume suburban stores subsidized some of the urban stores but that was sometimes the cost of business to provide a service to the community. Some neighborhoods have been bad for long periods of time but we didn't hear about mass shoplifting to this degree until recently. Something changed. It isn't just the populous and it isn't just the retailer. The press wants an easy clickable link when it isn't always that.

[jamcool]

Define “fair salary”…

[storewanderer]

Many retailers have completely turned their loss prevention focus to internal theft. These sub retailers like supermarkets, drug stores, for decades now, they have no loss prevention in most of their stores and the district loss prevention people who may roam around in a store here and there for a day are often explicitly told not to do any captures for external theft unless you have a serious repeat offender situation going on. The entire time spent of these loss prevention individuals is on internal theft, safety checklists, money laundering training if they do money wire/money order sales, safety checks, cash shortage investigations, and many many more tasks that do not explicitly have anything to do with actual theft of merchandise but are still under loss prevention.

And over the years as employees have complained about the external theft as the employer is demanding purse/bag checks are done to employees as employees get off shift, the corporations keep up with the line of some huge chunk of theft is internal. The employees know this isn't the case (probably never was the case) but maybe now these companies are finally accurately seeing just how much external theft there actually is. And that their loss prevention programs have been a failure to address external theft because they downplayed it for too many years.

Again talking the things like supermarkets and drugstores specifically here. Also these things like pet chains, dollar stores, etc.- same loss prevention model that focuses on treating employees like thieves and pretending hardly any external theft exists. Failure.

[veteran+]

I have never worked for a company that did purse - bag checks on their employees nor have I ever instituted such a policy.

I also never experienced directives that concentrated on employee theft more than customer theft.

All kinds of shrink were exigent.

[buckguy]

Bag checks used to be common with full-line departments stores. I did several Christmases and a summer at one that did this at somewhat random intervals. The value of many small items at stores like that probably justified them in a way that they don't in most places now. There would be occasional organized groups as well as quick change artists, but the stories of big shrink were always employees and, at that time, it was the end of the era where you had delivery and big back room operations, so the scams often involved ghost sales that were sent out or somehow went out through friends in the stockroom. There often was a chain of people in and out of the store.

Another seasonal job of mine was it a now defunct regional discounter---a hard goods-oriented chain that frankly seems like Blomingdale's compared with the way Walmarts are run. They caught two large inside thieves one summers---I grew-up with one and worked a lot with the other. There must have been some obvious inventory gaps and they questioned a lot of people who seemed to know these guys well (myself included). The loss prevention person left their list of recent shoplifters carelessly in front of me and I recognized half the names. Even then, the sterotype was people from outside our rather forgettable suburb, but the reality was a bit different.

[storewanderer]

I have never worked for a company that did purse - bag checks on their employees nor have I ever instituted such a policy.

I also never experienced directives that concentrated on employee theft more than customer theft.

All kinds of shrink were exigent.

I wonder if the union got that policy eliminated decades ago in the grocery business for various reasons.

I find it to be a terrible, demeaning policy. There is also an issue with the punch out of the employee- the employee is already punched out (time clock at back or side of store, dozens of steps from the door) but policy of bag check must be done at door. In my opinion if this was the policy the time clock should have been right next to the door and after completion of said bag check then the employee can punch out. Very demeaning- you are checking the bag as customers walk in/out. I was never comfortable with doing this.

However one of the things "loss prevention" used to watch was to make sure these purse/bag checks were actually being done. They would go back on the cameras near the exit and randomly verify the checks were being done. Some locations just never did the bag checks and nobody ever got in trouble for not doing the bag checks, until they wanted to fire someone, then suddenly it became a problem, despite silence for years when it wasn't happening.

I am also aware many mall stores do these bag checks on their employees as well as electronics store chains.

[veteran+]

The non union companies I worked with did not do that either.

[storewanderer]

The non union companies I worked with did not do that either.

I don't know of any non-union grocers who do that either.

Standard policy at various mall stores, multiple drug store chains. Funny when the $11/hr shift supervisor who has worked at the store for a month is checking the purse of the pharmacy manager who has worked at the store for 20 years and makes $150k/year. Total joke. Also a joke in mall stores where the 3 teenage employees check each other's purse/backpack at the end of the night and joke if they need to get into each other's pockets too.