workplace theft

Shoplifting, Employee and Vendor Theft: Is There A Solution?

Employee theft, shoplifting, and vendor theft are problems that the retail industry faces every single day without a clear solution. The billions of dollars lost to these crimes is a constant problem for retailers, and the losses have to be accounted for someplace else, and they need to make them up somehow to minimize their losses. The amount of sales retailers need to cover any losses is significant and not easy to do. Is preventing the loss the first step to stop the crime? Read more about this topic by clicking the links below.

Wage Theft and Shoplifting: Same Cost, Different Deterrents

A massive force is deployed against one, but not the other. (Guess which.)

ach year, shoplifters steal roughly $14.7 billion worth of goods from stores. (So says the Retail Theft Barometer.) Each year, employers steal roughly $15 billion from their workers by paying them less than the minimum wage, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.

The treatment of these two kinds of crime, however, are completely different.

Many more resources go into trying to deter, detect, and punish the guy trying to pinch a video game system off the shelf at the local big-box store than into the grand theft the store itself may be perpetrating against its own employees—even if the retailer is taking millions of dollars from workers’ paychecks. It’s one more way that the economic crimes of the powerful are treated far less seriously than the transgressions of those with less power.

Task force teaches businesses how to thwart fraud, theft

The enormous number of ways criminals can defraud shoppers and business owners requires increasing awareness about how to combat their efforts, Greenwich police detective and state financial crimes task force member Mark Solomon told attendees of a Monday panel on how to combat identity theft and retail fraud.

“It’s a constant cat-and-mouse game — there’s always a vulnerability criminals will learn to exploit,” Solomon said during his presentation. “It’s not if (criminals) do have our information, but how many times over they have it.”

Due to its wealth and slowness to adopt more secure credit card technology, the United States has become a prime target for cybercrime and fraud, according to Solomon and his co-presenter Christopher Riley, resident agent in charge of the U.S. Secret Service’s Connecticut financial crimes task force.

Employee retail theft soars says new report

When it comes to insider theft and employee dishonesty, the news is not good for the nation’s retailers. At least that is what Mark Doyle, president of Jack L. Hayes International, one of the leading loss prevention and inventory shrink control consulting firms in the world, confides as the group announced the results from their 29^th Annual Retail Theft Survey this week.

The 23 large retailers who were surveyed comprise 16,038 stores across the country with over $370 billion in sales in 2016 and they reported 438,000 incidents of shoplifting and employee theft where suspects were apprehended. A staggering $120 million was recovered by retailers from these thieves.

“The five-year trend shows a continued increase in employee theft in both apprehensions and recovery dollars. This past year is the first decline, which was very minimal, in both shoplifting apprehensions and recovery dollars. In four of the past five years both shoplifting and employee theft apprehensions and recovery dollars have increased, and in many cases, this is with a reduced loss prevention/asset protection staff. The losses are real and the theft problem is only getting worst,” says Doyle.

Fighting Shoplifting Locally

Across the United States, local governments are passing legislature to combat and punish shoplifting and employee theft. The harsher sentences are supposed to deter the shoplifter while sending the message of severe persecution if caught shoplifting. Now, small business owners are taking a new initiative. They are uniting to fight retail theft, and being able to provide information about shoplifters and shoplifting among retailers in the area.In some areas, the increase of shoplifting is hitting businesses hard and according to them “We are fed up.”

For more about this and other topics, follow the links below.

East Coast supermarket chain finds talent in former drug dealers

PHILADELPHIA

When Jeffrey Brown looks to promote employees within his 13-store supermarket chain, he looks for people with hustle, ability, commitment, all that.

There’s another unlikely attribute that has turned out to be a predictor of success at Brown’s ShopRite and Fresh Grocer stores.

“What we realized is that a lot of the people we hired were in the drug trade,” said Brown, founder and chief executive of Brown’s Super Stores Inc. “We were surprised that some of the people we hired have fairly good business skills. The drug trade is a business. It’s an illegal business. You are buying. You are selling. You have inventory. You have some of the common problems that any retailer has. A lot of them are accelerating into management.”

That’s the kind of human capital insight that Brown would never have imagined in 2008, when, at the urging of an outspoken customer, he decided to make it his company’s mission to hire people coming out of prison.

Research Findings from Employee Theft Articles

Peer-reviewed employee theft articles can stimulate discussion and reassessment of policies among LP professionals.

As many of you know, I have been researching employee theft, occupational crime, employee dishonesty, and workplace deviance for more than 30 years. I peruse scholarly journals and academic publications regularly for relevant research studies that can help us all better understand this phenomenon. This column features a couple of employee theft articles that may shed some light on this continuing problem. I have included the full citations so you can find these publications online or in your local library to read and share with your staff. If you do not have direct access to a major research library, try using Google Scholar.

“Workplace Theft: An Analysis of Student-Employee Offenders and Job Attributes”

The first of the two employee theft articles is authored by Elizabeth Ehrhardt Mustaine (University of Central Florida) and Richard Tewksbury (University of Louisville) and published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice 27:1 (pages 111 – 127, 2002). This employee theft study surveyed a large population of college students attending a number of major universities. Since existing research suggests that many dishonest employees are younger, part-time, untenured, and dissatisfied, these two researchers concluded that college students would make an ideal sample of employees to survey about their occupational criminal behavior.