The unsung heroes of retail? Theft prevention staff

Thanks for reading The Hustle, a weekly newsletter about frontline workers and the issues that matter most to them. Each week, this series features insights from LinkedIn members about their experiences at work. Quotes may be lightly edited for clarity.

If you ask the most passionate store professionals why they love working in retail, they’ll likely talk about customers. 

Jackie Stout, an assistant book store manager, loves engaging with them. “Even the little things like holding open a door or helping to carry packages — they all have weight and meaning,” Stout told LinkedIn. 

Others love providing for them. “All the great memories I have is experiencing what a customer feels finding that missing accessory to their outfit, the right shoes, the suit or dress for the wedding, that gift for their daughter or gift for the son-in-law,” says Rachel, a sales associate based in Southern California. 

But not all customer interactions are created equal. Just as making customers happy is a common upside to working in retail, there’s a common downside: Dealing with customers who attempt theft. 

“Being in retail the biggest change for me is my trust in people, the people that walk through my doors every day,” says Whitney Stewart, who’s been a store manager for over a decade. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell who will steal and who will shop. It’s heartbreaking.” 

Shoplifting is notorious for putting store workers in awkward positions. Even when store workers suspect theft, it can be in their best interest to avoid immediate action. In October 2018, multiple Victoria’s Secret employees told Business Insider that they were instructed to avoid confronting suspected shoplifters, or else the employees would risk reprehension. 

“Their main concern is our safety,” one of the employees said. “I have had shoplifters who have become violent and others who have waited at parking lots to hurt me.”

Inventory shrinkage — the loss of product through theft and fraud — costs American retailers over $40 billion each year, or around 1.4 percent of potential sales, according to an annual survey from the National Retail Federation.  

There are signs that incidents of theft may increase internationally, too, especially as retailers add self-checkout lanes. A study of over 140 million self-checkout transactions across the U.S. and U.K. found the more stores offered “scan-and-go” options, the more they lost product. 

“Temptations nowadays are enormous as contact and interaction with humans during shopping trip in shops are becoming less and less sometime not in existence at all,” Adetola Odukoya, a security manager at the British grocery chain Tesco, wrote on LinkedIn.

How workers combat theft

Sometimes, it’s not difficult to tell when a bad actor is trying to defraud a store.

“We know our merch, so you trying to get a top for $5.99, when the top is really $189.97, isn’t getting past us,” says Rachel, the sales associate. Rachel notes she’s seen customers attach false price tags on products. “Them asking for us to honor that price when it wasn’t that price in the first place isn’t going to happen.”

In other cases, specialists are necessary. That’s why some retailers hire asset protection workers, who are employed to “apprehend shoplifters, deter shoplifting, and detect possible refund fraud participants,” as one Bloomingdales job description says. 

Store associates can notify asset protection specialists about an incident in real time, and work together to prevent any loss of product, as one Walmart associate illustrated in a LinkedIn post during the past week. The problem? Some asset protection workers are not in-store everyday, as Victoria Secret employees told Business Insider, which is why employees may have no immediate recourse for combating theft. 

“We want to help, but we can’t because we aren’t allowed to say, ‘stop stealing from us or we call the cops," Rachel said. 

But when asset protection specialists are present, the benefit they provide to both workers and customers is clear, as Walmart store manager Brian Williams put it: “Aggressive hospitality to keep prices low for our customers and protect the bottom line.”

Do you work with asset protection staff at a store? Do you have stories about how your team combats against theft? Share your thoughts in the comments below.