After the holidays, you probably have a whole array of chores you must do to decide whether you had a good or bad year. The holidays are behind us, and if you seem eager to have new strategies to put in place, it is not uncommon, and you are not alone. New year resolutions are abundant during this time of year, and even though many of them are related to exercise, eating and health issues, yours can be directed completely to the business side of your life.
For a retail business owner, employee training is always an important issue they should not neglect. There are many aspects of every business that owners must take care of to ensure a well-run business and employee training is one of those important issues they must keep in mind.
Employee training has been shown to help businesses keep more of the profits, and to reduce the shoplifting happening at their stores. Paying for employee training is one way of investing in your business, and seeing the return of investment right away.
One of the many benefits of employee training is the certainty your employees will know what to do in case a shoplifting incident occurs. From the way they approach the suspected shoplifter, to the way they apprehend them, their training can be the difference between a lawsuit for your store or not. The guidelines they are supposed to follow are clear for trained employees when dealing with a difficult situation, and a dangerous situation is clearly assessed and dealt with before lives are endangered.
Employee training can also be a deterrent to shoplifters. Shoplifters will be less eager to enter your place of business if they know they will be approached and even questioned or apprehended if they do something illegal. Making your business a place where shoplifting is hard can get around to other shoplifters. Sharing the names of “easy” places to shoplift is well known among them, make yours the “hard” place shoplifters are unwilling to try.
Trained employees know how shoplifters behave and how they try to get away with stolen merchandise. They know which items may be a target for shoplifters, and which ones if the opportunity presents itself will be stolen without a second thought.
It’s that time of year when all store owners and managers start to make personnel decisions. Remember those people you hired in late August, maybe in September or even as late as October or November? Remember the conversations you may have had with them discussing how this was a “seasonal” position? You may have really dangled the carrot in front of them and told them that if they worked hard and showed initiative they might be retained on your staff after the holidays. Guess what? It’s time now for you to start taking a hard look at your staff and making some decisions and that isn’t always pleasant. Now you have to evaluate those employees and consider whether you want to keep them or you may have to decide if you can afford to keep them.
Big corporations across the globe worry about cybersecurity attacks and the repercussions those attacks have on the corporation’s bottom line. These cybersecurity attacks to their servers and information databases can be costly and can bring with them costly lawsuits as well. But, according to many analysts, employee theft and shoplifting are the more concerning issues affecting the retail industry. They alone account for more than two-thirds of their shrinkage and that figure seems to be rising every year. During the holiday season, those issues become more problematic and costly, and the retail industry looks for ways to prevent the great loses they will certainly suffer during this jolly time.
For many big retailers and the small mom and pop shop, the holidays are something to be excited about.
Could it be that Santa Claus is not always a jolly, giving man? Oh yeah. Take a 
The end of the holiday gift buying season ushers in the inevitable holiday gift return season. Clothes that don’t fit, ugly holiday sweaters no one really wanted, toys that were too old for a young child or too young for the older child all lead to returns, exchanges, and refunds. For those who have been in retail for any length of time, we know that many of these items will be returned without tags or a receipt and not even a gift receipt. It also means people will try to return merchandise to your store that was never even purchased there, despite what the customer in front of you says. This means it is prime time for those who engage in return fraud. There are so many people making returns that trying to separate legitimate refunds and exchanges from the fraudulent ones is difficult. There are steps you can take to minimize the number of fraudulent returns you accept.
December is the month when retailers are focused on driving those end of the year sales. We push as much merchandise as possible out of the stockrooms to fill the floors. Empty salesfloor spaces should be “no-no’s” during this time of the year. We re-merchandise our fixtures to get gift ideas in front of our customers. We also take steps to increase impulse buys by filling check lanes with snacks, batteries, magazines, gift cards, etc. Managers should also be looking at last year sales information to plan schedules around peak times of the day in order to avoid long lines at the registers. While all of this is important it is just as important to start planning for your end of the year wrap up.
A New Year is just around the corner and once again resolutions are going to be made and many of those will fall by the wayside. Why does that happen? Are goals too big to achieve? Sometimes we all start off with good intentions and we just get caught up in our normal routines and we can’t seem to focus on what it was we wanted to get done. There may be a manager out there who resolves that this is the year they will meet quarterly with each employee and discuss performance. They might do well the first quarter but then as the demands of the job take up more and more time something gives and it was the meetings. I recall one of my resolutions was to be more organized at work. I had a filing system, it was called my desktop and I knew where everything was at. I would make my resolution, create a filing system and you guessed it by the end of January I was back to my old habits. My intentions were good I just wouldn’t stay focused on it and made excuses.
As a manager of a retail shop, the layout of the store is probably out of your hands and there is nothing to do about it.