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Safe & secure: beverage alcohol retailers combine age-old common sense with the latest in technology to combat retail crime.

Article Excerpt
The figures, as always, are alarming. According to the latest "National Retail Security Survey" from the Security Research Project at the University of Florida, American retailers lost approximately $33.6 billion in 2003 to inventory shrinkage, the vast majority of which was caused by theft.

And that's not counting crimes that do not affect inventory, such as missing cash and check and credit card fraud. Those cost American retailers an additional $2 billion last year, according to the survey.

Survey respondents reported that 47% of their inventory shrinkage was due to employee theft, 32% came from shoplifting and 6% from vendor fraud. Of employee theft alone, the report says, "there is no other form of larceny that annually costs American citizens more money." The survey goes on to report that retailers of wine, spirits and beer reported even higher rates of employee theft. Those retailers in the survey reported that 65% of their inventory shrinkage was due to theft by employees.

But shoplifting is nothing to sneeze at, either. According to the survey, American retailers lost $10.7 billion to shoplifting in 2003, which is about the same amount that the nation loses to auto theft each year.

Long story short, if you're running a retail operation, you've been stolen from.

Just ask Joe Gomes, manager of Blanchard's, a busy beverage-alcohol store in the Boston suburb of Allston. What kind of crimes has Blanchard's experienced over the years? "All of them," said Gomes.

It was a wave of shoplifting several years ago that first spurred Blanchard's to get tough on crime. "It was very serious," reported Gomes. "These were groups and they were aggressive. If you confronted them, they'd attempt to fight. We had a number of fights in the store and my life was threatened on a weekly basis."

What stopped the problem? "As soon as the first person was arrested--and we made sure to be there, in court, so they'd get put away--it stopped," said Gomes. "For a while, anyway. Every few months, a new group would start, but every time someone got arrested, it would stop."

The effect, however, was cumulative. Gomes made it a point to press charges and show up for the resulting court appearances. Many times, however, defendants would postpone, reschedule and delay court dates, hoping Gomes and Blanchard's would give up. They didn't.

ESTABLISHING A REP

Blanchard's succeeded in establishing a reputation for itself among shoplifters. The last time Gomes had to go to court--and he had to go four times because the defendant kept postponing--was two years ago.

Yet even for the pro-active Blanchard's, as for all retail operations, the possibility of crime is ever-present. There will always...

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