Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with briefly valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter. We get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information and will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 26. This is the first episode in a three part series talking mainly about what I'd like to call security and just making sure you don't get screwed over, making sure you're not stolen from or anything like that. The first episode's gonna be on customers, second episode's gonna be on employees, and the third episode's gonna be on vendors.

So let's jump right in. I was thinking about what we should do for these next few episodes, and I know a lot of what we focus on is, you know, increasing sales, using different sales channels to grow your business and things like that. But there's a big part of business that a lot of people don't cover, and it's just making sure that you're not getting taken advantage of. Now, in this episode, we're gonna focus on not getting taken advantage, not getting taken advantage of by customers. And there's two main things that come to mind. One of them is someone stealing from you, and the other is someone taking advantage of your systems. So let's first talk about the first thing when we, we talk about customer stealing from you. Now, you know, it's a little bit of a sensitive topic and nobody wants to talk about it.

Nobody wants to think about, you know, customer stealing from you, but it happens and it happens all the time and you'd be surprised, um, who is actually stealing from you. A lot of times it's not the person that you think would be stealing from you and things like racial profiling and trying to figure out who's stealing just simply don't work because theft doesn't work like that. A lot of times the people in the wealthy areas, a lot of times it's your best customer. It's not necessarily that customer that just came through the store one time and is acting a little bit shady or is a little nervous in the store. It could just be that that's their personality. Many times thieves know what they're doing and shoplifters are stealing from a lot of different stores. They're not just stealing from only your store. They do it for a living.

Um, they're stealing every day, maybe once a week, maybe once a year. What you know, it's chances are it's not that person's first time stealing, so they know what to do to make it like they're not stealing. In the, in the retail store that I used to work at, the manager of the store was telling me a story one time how she had a customer that would come into the store every single week for years and every week she would make a purchase. She would spend $30 here, $50 there, but she was one of the best customers in the store. And one day this customer slipped up and they caught her stealing. So, you know, they didn't confront her right away, but they, you know, next time she came to the store, they, they kept it on her and they started checking the cameras and they

Noticed that every single time she came to the store she was stealing two or three items and paying for one. So you have this best customer ever that you think is just amazing and she's finding a way to steal merchandise from the store. So with that in mind, you just gotta always have your your guard up. Now a basic thing that you can do to prevent customers from stealing is by implementing a checkpoint system in the store. Um, so everybody knows what the checkpoints are, they're very annoying, but you know, they're not gonna necessarily deter customers from shopping. Most big stores have them. They're little gadgets that go on the clothing and that the cashier needs to take off before the customer leaves the store or else they beep on the way out. And, you know, it's a few grand to implement this system and it's, you know, every item that you tag, you gotta put the checkpoint on the item, but at the end of the day, it's going to save you money.

A, you're gonna catch people's stealing and b, customers are not gonna try to steal from a store that has a checkpoint system because why would you do that if you could just go down the block and steal from a store that doesn't have a checkpoint system? If you don't want to install a full system in your store, you could just buy the checkpoints and put them on your clothing without even putting the sensor towers. You know, that's good enough cuz a thief will see that there's a checkpoint on it. They're not gonna know you don't have a checkpoint tower and they're just not gonna steal. Um, they'll go somewhere else. So deterring people is an amazing thing. The second thing that I'd like to call out being a little careful about the fitting room. So now obviously you can't go in the fitting rooms of customers.

You can't put up cameras in the fitting rooms, but you can, you know, open the fitting room door for the customer and have a fitting room attendant and know that the customer walked in with five items into the fitting room. And you don't really need to keep track that much. You just need to make sure that the customer thinks you're keeping track. Cause again, a customer who thinks you're keeping track of what they're bringing to the fitting room is just gonna be less likely to steal from. The third thing you can do is you can make sure that you can see the store from the cash wrap. So don't put the cash register in a place where you can only see 10% of the store because then customers will easily be able to go to a spot that you can't see and you know, have a few minutes to figure out how they're gonna steal the item.

So just, you know, having eyeballs and having employees in different parts of the store at all times will definitely help. And if you're a one woman show or a one man show, you gotta be careful with the way you lay out your store, where your cash rep is, you know what views you have of the store. It's very important. Again, if that customer thinks that you are watching, they will not steal the next thing I like to talk about. That's good. You know, we're gonna get out of the, the straight stealing aspect of it and we're gonna talk about something that's super popular, especially with online shopping. And it is wearing items and returning it. So that in my head is the same as Steph. They bought the item from you, they wore it, they got what they needed out of it, and they're returning it to you, getting their money back and it's just really, really not nice.

So the way to prevent this is a little annoying, but super simple. You can put a really obtuse tag on the outside of the garment so that when the, the customer can't wear it without people knowing that she's wearing something with a tag on it. Nobody's gonna wear, you know, a dress to an event with a tag on it that's, you know, bright purple or anything like that. And you could put on the tag, you know, you could print on it something that says like, if this tag's removed you can't return it. Um, now some customers, you know, are again like the professionals at this and they have, you know, ticketing guns at their home and they'll rip off your tag and put it back on. You could easily get around that by just, you know, using a different color tag. Like how many people have purple tags in their home?

Not many. And you could change the color, you know, by month, by year once you run outta 'em. The next thing I like to talk about is customers is just take advantage of your store policies. This is a customer who may buy something and then, you know, gets damaged and she returns it and or she orders something online and says, you know, didn't get delivered to her or something like that. And in this case it's really tough because you wanna be careful not to assume customers are mean and lying to you, but you also wanna be careful not to get taken advantage of. So what I recommend in this case is to just keep a list of customers who come in and tell you their goods are damaged. Customers who come in, who call you on the phone and say that they're online order didn't get delivered or that they got overcharged or that they paid for five items and then, you know, they, there are only four items in their bag.

And just keep a list of these people cuz if you keep seeing the same customer turn up on this list, you know, 3, 4, 5 times even, two times, that should be a major red flag. Mistakes happen, packages get lost, but it's very rare that these things happen to the same customers more than once. That's it. I guess if there's one thing you could take on this, it's just be careful. You know, there's a lot of ways to make money in business and one of the best ways to make more money in business is to make sure you're not losing it and make sure people are not taking advantage of you. So looking forward to episode 27.