When it comes to preventing inventory shrinkage within your business, employing effective strategies is an absolute must. In the United States alone retailers lose approximately $35 Million dollars worth of goods daily, which adds up to be about $13 Billion a year. This is due to the fact that there are around 27 million shoplifters currently in the US. This equates to 1 out of every 11 people that enter your business being a shoplifter. With that being said only 10 million were caught in the last 5 years. Being mindful of the risk, and taking steps to reduce your exposure can save your business a considerable amount of lost revenue. Below are some tips on how you can reduce your risk, and keep more of the money your business earns.
Retail Shrinkage Reduction Strategies
Whether you’re looking for help building a culture of security awareness, assessing your CCTV system or ensuring your team stays tack sharp; S&T Solutions is ready to help you. Give us a call today to begin discussing how you can lessen your pain of a shrinking bottom line.
Retail Shrinkage Reduction Strategies
- Greeting your customers – when your employees are engaging your customers this is a great way to cause a potential shoplifter to move on to the next location. The engagement should start as the customer enters the store with a warm greeting. Creating a culture of high customer engagement with teammates working the floor or anytime a customer is passed. These interactions need to be positive, such as offering assistance, as this will also breed good customer service while discouraging potential shoplifters. As a store owner or manager, you can utilize your CCTV system to assist with ensuring compliance.
- Tighten the reigns on your registers – Each employee should have their own register during a shift. When multiple people have access to the same register, you’ve lost the integrity of knowing who caused your problem. Problems should be considered both shortages and overages at the conclusion of the shift. While the causes of a shortage are obvious, the cause of an overage could have been an intentional short change to a customer that the employee never had a chance to remove from register.
- CCTV – In today’s environment, having a reliable camera system is an absolute must. Take a couple minutes to read our blog post about CCTV. Well placed cameras will allow you to do reviews of the transactions for each register. It is beneficial to have the employee on camera as well as register and scanning device. It is also important to have your customers on camera while at the register. This will allow you to identify repeat customers’ transactions that are cause for concern and may also allow you to realize that a friend of the cashier happens to come into the store every time the drawer is short.
- Training – This may be a surprising category but studies show that a significant amount of loss comes from a lack of or improper training. Recurring training and testing will also prove to be beneficial with keeping your team sharp and reminding them how to handle tasks that might not happen regularly.
Whether you’re looking for help building a culture of security awareness, assessing your CCTV system or ensuring your team stays tack sharp; S&T Solutions is ready to help you. Give us a call today to begin discussing how you can lessen your pain of a shrinking bottom line.