Five-Finger Felonies | Retailers fight large-scale theft
How do you stop a shoplifter? In some circumstances, the answer might be to bring her into the back room and threaten to call her parents.
But for many larger retailers, including The TJX Cos. Inc. of Framingham, it’s more likely to be: Set up reverse sting operations, check stores up and down the East Coast to find patterns and work with police and federal authorities to make sure offenders go to jail.
At the National Retail Federation conference in New York earlier this month, attendees heard about this sort of approach from Eliot Green, TJX’s national investigations director. According to press reports, Green said the company has 57 investigators, plus four managers, devoted to looking into suspicious activity and trying to stop crime rings that target the company’s stores.
TJX, which runs the T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods discount stores, declined to comment for this story, saying it does not talk to the press about its security measures.
But Jon B. Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, confirmed that TJX is known for aggressively fighting shoplifting.
“They’re a leader in the country, no question, on devoting time, investigative staff and effort,” he said.
Supporting The Police
Hurst said fighting the crime is a major focus for the entire industry. Theft from retailers costs $30 billion a year, he said, and that expense ends up being passed on to consumers. But he said it’s also an expensive problem to fight.
“You have to invest time and effort and have relationships with law enforcement,” he said.
Hurst said it can be difficult for police to handle retail theft investigations on their own, in part because groups of shoplifters commonly move quickly from one jurisdiction to another in the hopes that police won’t coordinate across state lines to bring a unified case together.
“These organized groups get in vehicles and drive from New Jersey right up the coast into Massachusetts and into Maine and meticulously hit different stores in different locations, going in for specific types of items,” Hurst said.
Just how big such crime rings are is the subject of some debate. Hurst said in some cases they go all the way up to sophisticated criminal organizations with a distribution network for stolen merchandise like designer bags or infant formula.
“They actually put in orders for this type of thing,” Hurst said. “These stringers that they send out into the stores are actually sent out with a laundry list.”
Ted Hurlbut, principal of retail consulting firm Hurlbut & Associates in Foxborough, said he’s seen groups that travel from one place to another stealing goods and reselling them, but rumors of links to large-scale criminal organizations may be overblown.
“I don’t have the sense that that type of organized crime is all that well developed and that it’s got a root and branch system to it,” he said. “Nobody really, really knows for sure.”
Regardless of how big shoplifting organizations are, in some ways they’re clearly more sophisticated now than in years past when it comes to technology.
Mike Tesler, a founding partner of Norwell consulting group Retail Concepts, recalls an operation from a few years ago where a group of thieves got their own barcode machine and printed duplicate barcode stickers from cheap sets of LEGOs. At the store, they put the stickers over the bar codes for huge LEGO sets selling for hundreds of dollars and went through the checkout during a busy time when the cashier was likely to be distracted.
Tesler agreed with Hurst that some police can’t or won’t do enough to catch shoplifting rings. But he said rather than helping to push investigations forward, some retailers just stop bothering to prosecute offenders in areas with particularly uncooperative police or district attorneys.
“The stores have learned ‘We don’t want to waste our time if they’re not going to help us out,’ ” he said.
Getting The Word Out
Hurlbut said he thinks most large retailers are serious when they promise to prosecute shoplifters, but he said broadcasting that policy in public is also part of their strategy.
“From a public relations standpoint, obviously being very proactive in terms of prosecuting any and all offenders is a vital and important part of corporate communications,” Hurlbut said. “But the real crux of the matter really comes down to store-level operations.”
Hurlbut and Tesler both said that some of the most important tools for fighting shoplifting are also just good business practice.
Many stores have reduced the amount of inventory they keep on hand to avoid having to make dramatic markdowns, particularly since the economic crash of 2008, according to Hurlbut. That also leaves less inventory lying around in back rooms and on receiving docks, spots that are ripe for employee theft, one of the biggest ways that merchandise goes missing.
Tesler said the best way to prevent theft is to engage employees and try to keep them enthusiastic enough about their job that they make eye contact with shoppers and offer help in an authentically friendly way.
“You just make great employees and it’s much less likely to happen in your store,” he said.
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