About fifteen to life. :dubious:
At the semi-deserted K-Mart here (one register guaranteed to be open several times a day!), the dressing rooms (a likely place for a rape or murder) aren’t locked any more. You used to have to press a buzzer and hope someone with a key would eventually arrive to count your try-ons and let you in. Now you can try on every sorry garment in the store, all day long - no one there cares. I can only imagine how much stuff, and not only clothing, gets hidden on a shoplifter and waltzes out the door… I guess they really HAVE given up.
[Not a cite, but] According to a friend who is a lawyer the most profitable tactic for the slip and falls is to simply file the motion, and await the store’s settlement offer. He said simple economics govern the stores choice to pay out. Settle for X amount even if you know the slippee is lying, or go to court to demostrate your innocence at a cost of 10X…
Exactly.
You can take that stance but then you’re encouraging fraud and become a target. I’ve worked with large retail accounts around D.C. that fought every claim, even the few that might be meritorius very hard. I’ve never seen any numbers that show which is the most cost effective course of action but even if they were to come out even fighting makes more sense to me.
Skin color aside, he had nothing to prosecute anyway. After all, it could have been *him *doing the stealing. “Missing stuff” is not evidence that a certain employee is stealing.
When that certain employee is the only one on duty, and is the one to count and deposit the day’s sales, and the amount of sales doesn’t match the missing inventory by a long shot, and it happens multiple times with that person and never with anyone else, we may have to disagree what constitutes evidence.
I’ve been think about this all throughout reading this thread: what happens when the loss-prevention folks are dirty?
You get more loss prevention guys involved, and sometimes covert cams installed that an in-store loss prevention team doesn’t even know about.
I’ve heard tell of sites where the ENTIRE in-house loss prevention team (all shifts included) went dirty…
I’ve been tangentially involved with customers where we had crooked LP working with crooked store management…
Something that has not been brought out so far is that theft does not only occur in the retail stores. Theft also happens at warehouses, distribution centers, crossdocks, and other places where there are no customers, just employees. When I was connected to retail some time ago there was considerable theft going on in the warehouses which required tighter security measures. Employee turnover was high partly due to the ones fired for stealing. I guess it was too tempting to not take one or two units of a product when there were literally thousands lying around the warehouse.
In retail stores if you’ve ever wondered why certain products are so inconveniently placed (like behind locked glass cabinets, behind counters, etc.) it’s because of their high risk of pilferage. That’s the tradeoff that retailers have to make. By displaying products more securely they may lower shrink but that can also deter sales. This is one reason why companies that sell high margin products have a lot of interest in RFID technology. It’s one way of making the product accessible yet traceable anywhere in the store.
Satellite^Gal’s cousin works at the local Wal-Mart here, and, last week or so, one of the other employees saw a guy in the automotive section, staying there a little while. a bit later, one of the managers went over there, and, in an empty microwave box sitting there, she found dozens of empty CD cases. the thief was taking the disks out of the cases. Satellite^Gal just now told me that some thieves are now taking cereal boxes, pulling out the bag of cereal, and stuffing the CD cases in that, just keeping the disks…
Satellite^Guy
This is why WMT keeps their video games behind locked glass cabinets. Thieves were slitting open the boxes and stealing the discs.
You hope they get sloppy and screw up. Which they eventually do.
One guy got caught because a savy employee watched a customer leave his department with a DVD player, pass up the registers, and talk to the security guy on the way out. Threw up a red flag and the employee let management know.
Another guy was a student and took requests from other students to get them stuff for “real cheap” (he stole it and resold it for a discount). An honest student thought it was shifty and made a call to the store management.