Fred Tarasoff once challenged a friend who managed a grocery store to an experiment: Over three days, Mr. Tarasoff and an accomplice would try to rob him blind. "We ended up shoplifting about $2,000 worth of merchandise," he recalls, "and I was by no means an experienced shoplifter." A Nelson, B.C.-based who trains retailers on theft prevention, Mr. Tarasoff first realized the price that shoplifting exacts when a small record shop he ran went belly up in large part because a fifth of the stock was walking out the door. That's not an uncommon scenario, he discovered. External theft accounts for more than a third of retail shrinkage, and most stolen goods are gone for good: For every dollar recovered, $30 is lost.
While trained staff are the best defence against thieves, a floor plan that limits hidden areas and provides an open view of the store is not far behind. "The whole idea is to have potential shoplifters think twice," says Mr. Tarasoff, who interviewed many shoplifters in developing his training program. "You want to make them uncertain if and when they may be under surveillance." If a shoplifting gang identifies your store as an easy target, your losses will climb quickly, because the pros can get around most anti-theft devices, he says.
Mr. Tarasoff has more than twenty five years experience in retail and is now considered one of Canada's foremost experts in loss prevention. He is here now to provide insights and advice to anyone seeking to ruin a shoplifter's day. To ask him a question or leave a comment, please click here .
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Noel Hulsman, Globeandmail.com, writes: Fred, thank you so much for joining us today. We've got a number of questions waiting, so clearly this is an issue on a lot of people's minds, but before we get into the specifics of actually stopping shoplifters, can you give us a quick state-of-the-union on the problem today? Is shoplifting on the rise? Or becoming more sophisticated? When I was a kid, it was sort of rite of passage to rip off magazines, gum, chocolate bars, etc. from the local corner store (not that I ever did it, of course). Are kids still doing that? Or has that fad passed, or given way to more organized heists?
Fred Tarasoff writes: Shoplifting continues to be on the rise and there tends to be a direct correlation between the state of the economy and the level of shoplifting. During tougher economic times there tends to be a bit of a spike in shoplifting as well as other crimes such as internal theft. Other countries such as Australia and England have reported a drastic jump in external theft suspected to be due to the increase in fuel and energy prices. In Canada shoplifting continues to be the number one property crime and has doubled since the late 1990's.
It is believed that shoplifting techniques have become much more sophisticated than in the past and the information now available on the internet maybe to a large part responsible for this increase. It is estimated that a typical retail business will suffer between five and six percent of total sales in losses due to retail shrinkage. This translates to approximately three billion dollars in losses to Canadian Retailers.
Things really have not change very much since we were kids, kids still rip off small items like chocolate bars, magazines, gum, small toys, etc., as a rite of passage.
David Guy from Canada writes: Mr. Tarasoff, I've always been intrigued about this question - why do most shoplifters steal? Is it because of the challenge, or, in the case of the grocery store, because of a genuine human need for the goods and inability to pay for them otherwise?
