[barsonme]

What are employees supposed to do? They’re not the police, they can’t arrest anybody for stealing. And they’re most certainly not a deterrent for these kinds of these bulk thefts.

Plus, it’s incredibly unfair to the employees to make it their problem. A cashier or stocker or whatever shouldn’t be responsible for doing anything other than calling 911.

[bsder]

For example, not having "self-checkout" helps dramatically. You can't bulk theft with a cart when said cart has to first go through an engineered checkout arena.

However, that would require an increase in the number of employees to ... you know ... check people out.

In addition, "normal" (read: not organized crime of some flavor) shoplifters will do a lot less of it if there are enough employees around that they think they will get observed--especially if you then ban them from even entering the store. If, however, there are two employees for a whole bloody store, people will have zero compunction about trying to pocket something since their chances of being called out are zero.

Again, you fix this by having more employees.

Instead, these retail companies are just whining hoping somebody else will spend the money to fix the problem that their own penny pinching caused.

> A cashier or stocker or whatever shouldn’t be responsible for doing anything other than calling 911.

I agree with this 100%. However, there are a lot of things you can do with psychology that will deter shoplifting behavior far short of accosting people.

Finally, not treating your employees like shit means that your internal theft won't be as high, either.