Peter Whitehead writes:
I don’t know for sure, but I guess that ages ago silly trends terminated fairly quickly. If an early human had woken up with a great idea to make a colourful ‘sure to be seen’ leotard with curly shaped spear accessory (cool!) the chances are this didn’t get much further than the next meeting with a sabre-tooth tiger.
Although fashions can be strange, such as low-hanging jeans, these create an end-user ‘churn’ which supports a massive economy. When we look back at past styles we tend to see the absurdities more easily, but retail security has its trends as well. Thinking ‘outside the box’ can sometimes help to introduce new ideas to raise security, but like clothing fashions, security innovations can initially seem great, tail off to seem absurd, and re-emerge decades later as ‘new ideas’.
Here is a new idea being tried out by a British retailer. There are many shop thieves, but here are just two types: a) a regular shopper who steals a small expensive item during every trip to the local store, and b) a semi-professional who specialises in stealing cosmetics products. It’s obvious that both, if possible, should be caught. But b) causes serious loss and buys nothing, whereas a) might spend £112 a week at the store. So which would you like to catch first? Many store detectives tend to catch certain ‘types’ of thieves depending on where and how they patrol and what they look for. Some patrol ‘deep store’ to pick up on type a) and other thieves, because there is nothing much which helps to identify them as they enter. But one retailer has turned that round, because type b) thieves can often be noticed as they enter or approach stores. So that retailer’s store detectives are now being encouraged to discreetly watch entrances. As part of the same strategy this retailer does not want to ban a type a) thief. This might help to show their mindset:
‘Mrs Bloggs, you have stolen cheese and asparagus here at AKE foodmarkets, from which you are now banned for the rest of your natural life. So for ever and ever you must spend all your money and buy your £130 weekly shopping at Tescos, Asda, Morrisons and Waitrose …. so there! Err….. hang on!
And so…. even if Mrs Bloggs was seen to conceal an unpurchased item, the retailer would prefer it if she was discreetly deterred in the hope that she would behave better and spend lots of money there in the future. About 15 years ago a retailer needed to secure high-risk displays, and in the aftermath of serious losses decided to lock the high-risk items away in a security store adjacent to the checkouts, with its own manned till position. Customers who had inspected a chained, wired and alarmed display item could select a ‘product-card’ and take it to the security store’s till point for purchase. Where the customer had selected other products, these could also be purchased at the ‘secure-store’ till at the same time. The system not only helped protect high-risk items, but their sales surged because customers avoided till queues by going to the secure store’s till. The system flourished in ‘top-trend’ fashion for several years before losing momentum. Today that idea could meet with derision because few retailers would accept long queues at all, the secure-store reduced the front-end’s open-space, villains could target it in burglaries and the complicated sales process could be regarded as ‘stone age’ now. But like knee-length shorts, which were fashion crazy in the 1920s, laughable in the 60s, and back at top-fashion today, front-end secure stores could be back in some way, some decade!
Security trends can lie undiscovered by other trading cultures for years before becoming top-fashions over night. This happened in the 1990s. Some large food retailers had used ‘red routes’ for several years at that time, a route through a store connecting most of the high risk displays. The original idea was that all employees would walk this red-route every time they undertook any journey. This raised the number of minutes in any day that such aisles were frequented by staff, which caused a small security benefit. Tests conducted by one retailer 20 years ago produced results which suggested that the benefit was a 1.5 per cent lowering of losses, and since the retailer was losing £45m a year this pointed to a £675,000 benefit for very little outlay and training. Not bad! To continue, a few years later a non-food retailer was recruiting ‘super-guards’, and at the initial interviews the candidates were asked: what new security measures would you introduce? One candidate mentioned red-routes. A regional security manager was present and the explanation so excited him that he passed on this ‘new idea’. They soon crashed into the company’s training programme with massive impetus. Today I don’t know any company that uses red-routes as originally intended. ‘Red Route’ now seems to mean ‘high risk displays for guards to be responsible for’, rather than travelled by all staff on all non-urgent journeys.
A trend has been building over recent years for contract retail security guards to carry out increasing numbers of duties, patrols, inspections, responses and reports to bursting point. Not so long ago some contract security guards patrolled sales floors as a visual deterrent to crime and as a reassurance to customers, with maybe one or two extra duties, such as safety patrols, etc.. In those days retailers were encouraged (by people like me!) to add some other duties to the assignment instruction because this broke up a shift into a more interesting and varied working day for the guard. But this has become a crazy trend, where some stores now require security officers to carry out up to 15 different patrols, 13 inspections, seven types of searches, five special duties and completing up to 10 records, logs and reports. You could argue that these security officers are all managing fine, and that the new standards set by the security industry are pushing the boundaries of excellence far beyond past expectations, but such language is just another dying craze….. Last weekend I walked into a major retailer’s new shop and saw its mission statement ‘We …. are committed to giving you good, honest products at fair, honest prices’. The wheel has turned full circle on mission statements, it seems, because now they make instant sense to everybody!
And so, all you readers who feel that the above points are pants, if you’re not right today, you almost certainly will be when the wheel turns tomorrow! Thank you for your interest.
