In my professional life I take pride in being a detailed investigator, brilliant interviewer and all around excellent LP teacher. I love telling good stories, using real world experiences to instruct others. That is unless the story involves me and my being human. Those stories, where an oversight while applying an Alpha Spider Wrap turned into a hard lesson, I wish I didn’t have to tell.
As those of us in the loss prevention community know we do far more than just prevent shoplifting. Many of us also serve as compliance officers, enforcing policy. We work as safety captains, checking fire doors and clearing hazards and we work as process auditors, making sure company programs for using devices like an Alpha Cable lock are in place and 100% correct. Retail is a tough world and it is much easier to protect the sale you have already made then it is to find a sale to replace it.
Yearly inventory is a gauge of our success in LP. Inventory results can accelerate or derail an LP’s path forward. Preventing inventory shrink is why we prevent shoplifting, why we use Alpha Cable Lock devices to secure display TV’s and laptops. It’s why we use an Alpha Spider Wrap to protect Vacuums, Printers and TVs from theft. Or at least why we are supposed to use them.
Inventory is a crazy time for everyone, LP included and no one is immune to being overwhelmed and losing focus. I was clearing out cancelled layaway merchandise and it was a nightmare. Besides the storage area being heat wise just shy of the surface of the sun and slightly warmer than Death Valley in July, I was running about a million miles an hour.
I hadn’t done anything to prevent shoplifting in about two weeks and I was flat out worn down. Imagine my delight when I found a dozen TV sets just sitting in a stockroom completely forgotten. The fact that I had prevented a miscount was little consolation as I dragged the pallet of TVs across the store to put them out on display. I remember talking with associates who were busy securing electronics to the counter with Alpha Cable lock devices and asking if they had any Alpha Spider Wraps with them. They had some but not enough and I secured what I could before heading to the back.
I never made it. One associate question, led to another which led to issue after issue. With all the fires around I finally understood why the store was so hot. It wasn’t long before I had forgotten that we even sold electronics much less that I was stocking them. Overloaded and with my stomach on empty I decided that lunch was a matter of life or death and with everything else forgotten I left for lunch.
And there sat a trio of lovely TVs that I failed to use the Alpha Spider Wrap on. You can guess where the story ends. I walk back into frantic manager who informs me that we had a pushout of three TVs a few minutes after I left. Just perfect. My mistake didn’t prevent shoplifting it had enabled it!
It was a costly lesson. The subject was in my store under three minutes and the only thing they had taken was the three TVs I left unprotected. Had I maintained focus and applied the last three Alpha Spider wrap to the TVs I’m sure this story would have had a different ending. In the end we have to accept that we cannot see everything, cannot prevent every loss but what we can do is to ensure that what needs to be protected is, even when we aren’t there.
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