5 ms·

I have a friend who works for Nordstorm doing this kind of work. She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in lar

by sieep 9mo ago

I have a friend who works for Nordstorm doing this kind of work. She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in large scale to be sold on eBay.

pavel_lishin 9mo ago
I remember a guy in high school basically taking orders for things to steal off the Walmart truck; expensive electronics (for back in the day) like XBoxes, Playstations, etc. And of course, while working at Kohl's, you had people occasionally put items away in the back, tucked behind shelves, so that when they went on ultra-clearance they could pull them out and buy them.
- Loughla 9mo ago
  That definitely brings an experience from college into focus for me. We were cleaning out the back room and came across a luggage set that had slipped behind some shelves and was missed for like 3 years. It was originally priced at $400 but was so old or was clearanced at $40. I bought it, thanking my lucky stars that we had luggage for our upcoming honeymoon. About a week later, loss prevention called me in and asked me a ton of questions about the luggage and how it came to be behind the shelves. It was before I worked there so I had no idea. The whole thing seemed weird to me at the time. Now it makes sense. Wild.
  - bombcar 9mo ago
    Yep, anywhere clearance is handled by "computer" and not someone physically noting and putting a sticker on it you have this happening. If you find something wedged behind a shelf it's sometimes a customer just putting something back where it doesn't belong, other times it's the long-con. Some stores won't clearance below a certain point because of this; they'd rather ship pallets off at 20% "loss" to an outlet broker than enable clearance shrinkage.
- technothrasher 9mo ago
  In a sort of reverse of that story, back when my teenage son was working at Target, my wife asked me to get a vacuum cleaner. So I went to the Target webpage and found a mid-range model, and texted my son to buy it and bring it home after his shift. He came home and said the only one left was the display model but that he got it for me. The next day, security called him in to the office, which freaked him out a little, of course. They asked him why he had bought that vacuum cleaner. He said I'd asked for it. They then all laughed, and told him that it was a commonly stolen model and they were using it as a honey pot. When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood. It was always the dad causing problems. And they sent him back to work.
  - lotsofpulp 9mo ago
    > When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood. What could possibly be confusing about a person doing what most normal people do in a store?
    - tekla 9mo ago
      I'm guessing because they expected him "employee disappear it" and not pay for it.
burkaman 9mo ago
Yes, keep this in mind when you see corporations pushing news stories about surging epidemics of shoplifting (https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/former-home-depot-ceo-organized-retail-theft-epidemic-spreading-faster-covid https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/former-home-depot-ceo-org...). Shoplifting is not growing, and external theft generally accounts for about a third of retail inventory losses. See for example: https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statistics https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statis...
- ryandrake 9mo ago
  I think part of the fixation on "shoplifting" is that a Reddit video showing someone walking in and filling up a bag of merchandise viscerally gets people going in a way that "statistics about wage theft," "invisible employee-caused shrinkage," and "process/control failures" doesn't get people hot-and-bothered. People will get mad because they visually saw someone steal a tube of toothpaste, but not care about other forms of mass-theft because it's not on YouTube.
  - mikkupikku 9mo ago
    There's also the part where reddit has communities of shoplifters who give each other tips and post propaganda about how more people should shoplift.
    - pavel_lishin 9mo ago
      Sure, and a large part of those communities are people just cosplaying.
      - mikkupikku 9mo ago
        Anything to maintain your belief that crime isn't real.
  - vondur 9mo ago
    Ha, I watched this happen at a Target here in SoCal. A group of people filled up their carts (3) with clothes and shoes, rushed out the door to a waiting van. Security didn't even try to stop them at all.
bitmasher9 9mo ago
Employee theft requires different tactics to fight and doesn’t pose the same consumer privacy concerns.
- sieep 9mo ago
  Great point! I know some pretty advanced statistical analysis is used in my friend's case to detect anomalies in ordering, shipping, etc.
  - tlavoie 9mo ago
    Back in the stone age, I worked at 7-Eleven while in university. Nothing was really computerized at the store level then, even cameras were rare. What was done all the time was a simple, templated, paper-based process that managers went through each month. I believe the gist of it was that it recorded sales for each shift in the month (7am-3pm, 3-11, 11-7), and who worked them. Some simple stats highlighted low sales correlated with employees, to point out who was likely entering smaller prices in the till and pocketing the difference. Now it's all bar-code scans of course, but it was a common problem at the time.
larkost 9mo ago
This is a longstanding problem. I worked at the receiving dock of a retailer long ago, and the amount of procedure and double-verification involved was a bit of a drag, all of it obviously aimed at making sure that neither I nor the guy driving the truck could make things "fall off the truck" without it being obvious. But even then, it was common knowledge that most "shrinkage" (generic term for stolen/damaged/expired/destroyed merchandise) was from employee theft (except in grocery stores... there it is second to expired goods).
- Avshalom 9mo ago
  Except at my store where internal shrink is dominated by me throwing things.
- jandrese 9mo ago
  If you go to a store and note the security camera locations one thing that is obvious is most of them are pointed at the employees.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
ecshafer 9mo ago
When I was younger, teen and early 20s, and working in retail. I noticed and thought it was kind of funny how in the job application process, these 100+ question interviews were all about trying to filter out criminals. They really treated employees as potential criminals first. Its ironically more paranoid than working in the financial industry.
- nekitamo 9mo ago
  Criminally minded employees are bad for the bottom line in retail. Criminally minded employees are good for the bottom line in finance. The firms in question will filter accordingly.
- technothrasher 9mo ago
  > Its ironically more paranoid than working in the financial industry. Having owned a liquor store for a while, it's not paranoia. The majority of the people you can get to work low end retail jobs will try to rip you off in any way they can.
  - red-iron-pine 9mo ago
    "if I only had a bartender that stole from me 1/3 of the time I'd keep him..." or so the saying goes
giancarlostoro 9mo ago
> She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in large scale to be sold on eBay. One of Kanye's early songs he mentions stealing kakis from his job before he quit to become an artist. Not surprised, if you're an employee you have access to all sorts of things a customer does not. I imagine you also have access to areas where there are no cameras.
yndoendo 9mo ago
I have a friend that does this for Home Depot. He describes his job as being a detective. Watching video to collect enough evidence so he can question employees shorting the company. Non-employees has their evidence given to the local police department once there is enough. Often employees with talk about the other crimes they committed while being interrogated. He just plays along, ".. yes we had that too ... and that too". Give them enough evidence and they will hang themselves. The hardest to catch are the slight of hand employees that can take money from the safe while it looking like they put all the money in. This is even with cameras watching the safe.
- kotaKat 9mo ago
  Once you get walked into the room and the folks on the other side of the table start into the Wicklander-Zulawski[1] playbook… it’s game over. “Take a seat, the door is unlocked and you can leave at any time.” [1] https://www.w-z.com/private-sector/ https://www.w-z.com/private-sector/
  - JohnFen 9mo ago
    > “Take a seat, the door is unlocked and you can leave at any time.” Why wouldn't everyone just leave at that point? That's what I'd do, since if I'm being investigated, then my job there is over anyway regardless of my guilt or innocence. I'd have nothing to gain by volunteering to be interrogated.
    - red-iron-pine 9mo ago
      you do a couple of things to distract them on the way, like lead them around to a harder to reach room, ask them unrelated questions e.g. "did you see that goofy guy at the counter this morning", and give the impression that you want to hear their side of the story. most people will comply esp. if slightly distracted or thrown off a little; the serious hoodrats would be picking a fight or pushing back and the pros would already be walking out the back door ASAP
    - ceejayoz 9mo ago
heathrow83829 9mo ago
i'm surprised by this because it's so hard to sell used goods. i have an old suit from graduation that's in perfect condition and looks quite nice. the thing will NOT sell, not even for 10$, at all even though it's practically brand new.
- sieep 9mo ago
  I can actually comment on this a bit as I ran an eBay business during college selling second-hand clothes. A lot of it is about volume and brand. For example, women made up a majority of our sales even if it was men's clothing. Certain brands like Nike, Polo sold better & having hundreds of items up vs. just one and having 5 stars. All of that combined allowed us to sell items daily.
red-iron-pine 9mo ago
biggest threats are insider threats back when bookstores were a thing most places I used to work in one, and had a manager watch us, the entire time, as we took romance novels we couldn't sell out back and ripped off the covers before tossing them in a ship-back bin. Ditto for a few others like best sellers and some mags she took two us out back to do it, leaving only one person on the floor to run the checkout -- field day for any serious thief. but they were more worried about us...

by sieep 9mo ago

I have a friend who works for Nordstorm doing this kind of work. She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in large scale to be sold on eBay.

pavel_lishin 9mo ago

I remember a guy in high school basically taking orders for things to steal off the Walmart truck; expensive electronics (for back in the day) like XBoxes, Playstations, etc. And of course, while working at Kohl's, you had people occasionally put items away in the back, tucked behind shelves, so that when they went on ultra-clearance they could pull them out and buy them.

Loughla 9mo ago
That definitely brings an experience from college into focus for me. We were cleaning out the back room and came across a luggage set that had slipped behind some shelves and was missed for like 3 years. It was originally priced at $400 but was so old or was clearanced at $40. I bought it, thanking my lucky stars that we had luggage for our upcoming honeymoon. About a week later, loss prevention called me in and asked me a ton of questions about the luggage and how it came to be behind the shelves. It was before I worked there so I had no idea. The whole thing seemed weird to me at the time. Now it makes sense. Wild.
- bombcar 9mo ago
  Yep, anywhere clearance is handled by "computer" and not someone physically noting and putting a sticker on it you have this happening. If you find something wedged behind a shelf it's sometimes a customer just putting something back where it doesn't belong, other times it's the long-con. Some stores won't clearance below a certain point because of this; they'd rather ship pallets off at 20% "loss" to an outlet broker than enable clearance shrinkage.
technothrasher 9mo ago
In a sort of reverse of that story, back when my teenage son was working at Target, my wife asked me to get a vacuum cleaner. So I went to the Target webpage and found a mid-range model, and texted my son to buy it and bring it home after his shift. He came home and said the only one left was the display model but that he got it for me. The next day, security called him in to the office, which freaked him out a little, of course. They asked him why he had bought that vacuum cleaner. He said I'd asked for it. They then all laughed, and told him that it was a commonly stolen model and they were using it as a honey pot. When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood. It was always the dad causing problems. And they sent him back to work.
- lotsofpulp 9mo ago
  > When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood. What could possibly be confusing about a person doing what most normal people do in a store?
  - tekla 9mo ago
    I'm guessing because they expected him "employee disappear it" and not pay for it.

burkaman 9mo ago

Yes, keep this in mind when you see corporations pushing news stories about surging epidemics of shoplifting (https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/former-home-depot-ceo-organized-retail-theft-epidemic-spreading-faster-covid https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/former-home-depot-ceo-org...). Shoplifting is not growing, and external theft generally accounts for about a third of retail inventory losses. See for example: https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statistics https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statis...

ryandrake 9mo ago
I think part of the fixation on "shoplifting" is that a Reddit video showing someone walking in and filling up a bag of merchandise viscerally gets people going in a way that "statistics about wage theft," "invisible employee-caused shrinkage," and "process/control failures" doesn't get people hot-and-bothered. People will get mad because they visually saw someone steal a tube of toothpaste, but not care about other forms of mass-theft because it's not on YouTube.
- mikkupikku 9mo ago
  There's also the part where reddit has communities of shoplifters who give each other tips and post propaganda about how more people should shoplift.
  - pavel_lishin 9mo ago
    Sure, and a large part of those communities are people just cosplaying.
    - mikkupikku 9mo ago
      Anything to maintain your belief that crime isn't real.
- vondur 9mo ago
  Ha, I watched this happen at a Target here in SoCal. A group of people filled up their carts (3) with clothes and shoes, rushed out the door to a waiting van. Security didn't even try to stop them at all.

bitmasher9 9mo ago

Employee theft requires different tactics to fight and doesn’t pose the same consumer privacy concerns.

sieep 9mo ago
Great point! I know some pretty advanced statistical analysis is used in my friend's case to detect anomalies in ordering, shipping, etc.
- tlavoie 9mo ago
  Back in the stone age, I worked at 7-Eleven while in university. Nothing was really computerized at the store level then, even cameras were rare. What was done all the time was a simple, templated, paper-based process that managers went through each month. I believe the gist of it was that it recorded sales for each shift in the month (7am-3pm, 3-11, 11-7), and who worked them. Some simple stats highlighted low sales correlated with employees, to point out who was likely entering smaller prices in the till and pocketing the difference. Now it's all bar-code scans of course, but it was a common problem at the time.

larkost 9mo ago

This is a longstanding problem. I worked at the receiving dock of a retailer long ago, and the amount of procedure and double-verification involved was a bit of a drag, all of it obviously aimed at making sure that neither I nor the guy driving the truck could make things "fall off the truck" without it being obvious. But even then, it was common knowledge that most "shrinkage" (generic term for stolen/damaged/expired/destroyed merchandise) was from employee theft (except in grocery stores... there it is second to expired goods).

Avshalom 9mo ago
Except at my store where internal shrink is dominated by me throwing things.
jandrese 9mo ago
If you go to a store and note the security camera locations one thing that is obvious is most of them are pointed at the employees.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

ecshafer 9mo ago

When I was younger, teen and early 20s, and working in retail. I noticed and thought it was kind of funny how in the job application process, these 100+ question interviews were all about trying to filter out criminals. They really treated employees as potential criminals first. Its ironically more paranoid than working in the financial industry.

nekitamo 9mo ago
Criminally minded employees are bad for the bottom line in retail. Criminally minded employees are good for the bottom line in finance. The firms in question will filter accordingly.
technothrasher 9mo ago
> Its ironically more paranoid than working in the financial industry. Having owned a liquor store for a while, it's not paranoia. The majority of the people you can get to work low end retail jobs will try to rip you off in any way they can.
- red-iron-pine 9mo ago
  "if I only had a bartender that stole from me 1/3 of the time I'd keep him..." or so the saying goes

giancarlostoro 9mo ago

> She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in large scale to be sold on eBay. One of Kanye's early songs he mentions stealing kakis from his job before he quit to become an artist. Not surprised, if you're an employee you have access to all sorts of things a customer does not. I imagine you also have access to areas where there are no cameras.

yndoendo 9mo ago

I have a friend that does this for Home Depot. He describes his job as being a detective. Watching video to collect enough evidence so he can question employees shorting the company. Non-employees has their evidence given to the local police department once there is enough. Often employees with talk about the other crimes they committed while being interrogated. He just plays along, ".. yes we had that too ... and that too". Give them enough evidence and they will hang themselves. The hardest to catch are the slight of hand employees that can take money from the safe while it looking like they put all the money in. This is even with cameras watching the safe.

kotaKat 9mo ago
Once you get walked into the room and the folks on the other side of the table start into the Wicklander-Zulawski[1] playbook… it’s game over. “Take a seat, the door is unlocked and you can leave at any time.” [1] https://www.w-z.com/private-sector/ https://www.w-z.com/private-sector/
- JohnFen 9mo ago
  > “Take a seat, the door is unlocked and you can leave at any time.” Why wouldn't everyone just leave at that point? That's what I'd do, since if I'm being investigated, then my job there is over anyway regardless of my guilt or innocence. I'd have nothing to gain by volunteering to be interrogated.
  - red-iron-pine 9mo ago
    you do a couple of things to distract them on the way, like lead them around to a harder to reach room, ask them unrelated questions e.g. "did you see that goofy guy at the counter this morning", and give the impression that you want to hear their side of the story. most people will comply esp. if slightly distracted or thrown off a little; the serious hoodrats would be picking a fight or pushing back and the pros would already be walking out the back door ASAP
  - ceejayoz 9mo ago

heathrow83829 9mo ago

i'm surprised by this because it's so hard to sell used goods. i have an old suit from graduation that's in perfect condition and looks quite nice. the thing will NOT sell, not even for 10$, at all even though it's practically brand new.

sieep 9mo ago
I can actually comment on this a bit as I ran an eBay business during college selling second-hand clothes. A lot of it is about volume and brand. For example, women made up a majority of our sales even if it was men's clothing. Certain brands like Nike, Polo sold better & having hundreds of items up vs. just one and having 5 stars. All of that combined allowed us to sell items daily.

red-iron-pine 9mo ago

biggest threats are insider threats back when bookstores were a thing most places I used to work in one, and had a manager watch us, the entire time, as we took romance novels we couldn't sell out back and ripped off the covers before tossing them in a ship-back bin. Ditto for a few others like best sellers and some mags she took two us out back to do it, leaving only one person on the floor to run the checkout -- field day for any serious thief. but they were more worried about us...