Some time ago when watching some old Dragnet re-runs there was one show where clothing retailers were getting ripped off by criminal scum and drug crazed hippies, and Sgt. Joe Friday schooled them all on the latest high security methods. The most interesting method he suggested was for clothing retailers to alternate clothes on floor display hanger by hanger with respect to the direction the hanger hooks were put across the bar so that a thief couldn’t grab a whole rack at once and put them in shopping cart of run out with them.
To make this clear without pics if you had a hanger bar in front of you, you would place dress one with the open portion of the hanger hook away from you, then toward you, then away from you etc. This prevents a mass grabbing by interlocking the clothes on the bar if more than one item is grabbed at a time. While kind of a huge PITA for clerks I can see how this would slow mass grabbing shoplifters down.
Assuming this was a viable security method in the 60’s or 70’s I have never, ever seen this method used by any retailer anywhere in my little of the known universe. Do any clothing retailers actually use the Sgt. Joe Friday Dragnet alternating hanger theft prevention system?
Oddly I knew what you meant just from the title. We can only hope shopkeepers do not keep milk crates outside their stores. Someone could use one to smash a window and run off with stuff.
I wouldn’t think that the mass grab-and-run method is particularly successful these days. I’d bet stores now lose more through the stealthy stuff-things-inside-my-clothes gambit.
I know the late 1980s doesn’t qualify as “these days,” but I was walking into the mall once with my girlfriend in college and saw a guy race out of a department store with what must have been 30 or 40 bathing suits in his arms, jump into a car and peel out. It was obvious he had done exactly what Sgt. Friday’s scheme was designed to prevent.
I listened to a podcast where a female from New York mentioned working in stores that put racks of clothes on the sidewalk to entice customers and she said the hangers were always alternated to prevent someone taking an armful of clothes. That’s the only time I’ve heard of it. I’d be surprised if a clothing store in the mall would do it, but it makes sense to me on the New York sidewalk.
I love this Dragnet. Friday and Gannon spend the episode making multiple speeches about the importance of limiting the ways to be victimized by burglars and shoplifters. Then what happens at the end? They come out of preaching to another local businessman’s meeting and approach their police car. Before they get in, they hear on the police radio that a robbery is taking place a block away. How did they hear the car radio before they got in? They left the windows rolled down. Safety first, right, Joe? More amazingly, Friday then tosses his briefcase into the wide open car as they run off to the scene of the crime. I’m sure it was quickly stolen by a hippy and sold to buy LSD.
Man, do I love Dragnet.
It’s more common than you think. I am a 911 center supervisor, we have a large Mall in our area and they get hit with a grab and run a couple times a week.
It’s everything from a pair or two of shoes to 3 people walking in grabbing a armload off the racks and running out the door.
The only version of the grab-and-run I’ve heard of where I’ve worked involved those plastic bins in carts, they dumped the clothes in and put the lids on and tried to get out. Didn’t make it. Such fun it was putting all that stuff away.
I must say that it’s hard enough to keep up with the messes that the non-thieves make, I’d never in a million years have had time to be fiddling with each and every hangar. You’d need a lot of employees to make something like that happen. Way more than any store would be willing to pay for.
