It’s not only businesses that are closed or downsized that suffer crime at Christmas. Retailers are also more vulnerable. As a retailer heading towards Christmas, you begin to lift the tempo of your working week. New products must be sourced, new stock purchased and stored, extra staff employed and trained, rosters worked out, displays created, systems for profit maximisation fine-tuned. Because Christmas is retail’s harvest season.
Meanwhile, in another street in another part of town, another type of person who makes a good living out of retail is also preparing for this harvest.
Shop-stealers know the Christmas period as an opportunity to take advantage of increased retail activity. Thieves plan around annual cycles just like a retailer or a farmer. And Christmas is the busiest and most profitable time of year for shop-stealers just as it is for retailers. They know stores become far easier to steal from and to defraud at Christmas time. The whole retail landscape changes. There is greater quantity of stock in your store, which creates barriers and blind spots and allows for confusion. And you have the camouflage of large crowds in which crooks can hide.
As well, at Christmas you have young and inexperienced staff who are virtually defenceless against experienced thieves. Every trick that might be tried unsuccessfully on an old hand throughout the year can be tried successfully on casual staff at Christmas.
For example, a customer gives your new staff member ten dollars for a small item and when he’s being given change insists he gave her a fifty. An eighteen year old school-leaver is not going to stare down a veteran thief and call his bluff. It’s this constant drip, drip, drip of dishonesty that dries up your profit. Statistics rise exponentially for shop-stealing, credit card fraud, cheque fraud and employee dishonesty over the whole Christmas period. What do you know about your new short-term employees? More often than you’d think, one of them might be responsible for stock shrinkage or missing cash.
So what can you do?
It is imperative to have enough Loss Prevention Staff to observe your goods and customers at high-risk periods. Our Loss Prevention Officers are trained in detecting shop-stealers and in procedures for dealing with them.
Having enough, well-trained, staff is the most effective deterrent to being ripped off. Thieves talk to each other, and if you become known as a vulnerable venue they’ll descend on you like wolves.
For a confidential enquiry with one of our specialists, call us today on 1300 136 102 or enquire online.
