Eventually we'll be Fort Knox.

[notalwaysright]

(Not sure where to put this, it's just me complaining about everything at my store)

Our store recently failed inventory, quite badly. Our shink was twice the number set by corporate. This is the second year its happened. The first was with New Manager, and now with Scary. I think that NM was partly the cause of both fails. She didn’t actually manage anything. Then, when inventory came around there were tons of mislabeled products, and since no prep was done (normally we start two weeks out), products were in the wrong places and were counted as the wrong item. Also there are many nooks and crankies in the store which we would have cleaned out if we had done any prep. Oh, and since the store was basically not functioning, a whole bunch of items were past discard and should have been written off in the computer but weren’t, so they all were counted as shrink. This was partly fixed this year, but Scary was only our manager for around 8 months. We didn’t even have a full year between inventories and for some baffling reason, this made our numbers look worse. Like, our store is supposed to make $X per year, but we only had 10 months, so we had two less months to make money, but they still expected us to make that total of $X. How does this make sense? Just minus the average profits from those months out of our goal number. But they don’t do that?

Okay, that brings me to another issue. When the store remodeled, our jewelry section got moved back about halfway into the store. Before the remodel it was right up front, in clear view of the registers. In corporate’s infinite wisdom, they wanted seasonal to be right up front. Our store previously had seasonal up front, but to the side, not front and center. So if you walked into the building, from left to right you would have seen fabric to the far left, jewelry in the middle, then seasonal to the far right. Now it’s fabric, seasonal, floral. Jewelry is behind floral. Want to guess the percentage of jewelry that got stolen over the last year?

25-33%

I just heard that we got approval to go against corporate’s official layout and bring jewelry back to the front. I don’t even think having increased employees would completely fixed this theft problem. You’d have to have three times as many employees on the floor, mostly in the evenings. Really, even then it wouldn't fix the problem, which can't be fixed as long as their are no consequences for thieves.

And more irritating are the repeat thieves. I mean, I know there are repeaters that go for jewelry, but they just pocket the whole product. The people I’m talking about take stuff out of the packaging and then stuff it all in one place. In the suiting fabric, in one specific place in the aisle. Today it was empty button cards. Which I actually find really stupid because those are tiny, why bother taking the time to rip them off? Why not just put them in your pocket? Most thieves know damn well that we aren’t allowed to ask them to empty their pockets, so once it’s in there, it’s essentially theirs. But anyway, it just irritates me that they're so confident that they use that same spot each time they steal.

Other than moving jewelry, we also have added a huge number of locking pegs. So if you go into one of these fabric store locations and notice a crap ton of items inside locked cages, on locking pegs, or with empty display boxes, you know why. Well, you probably already knew why, I guess now you’ve suffered through my giant rant about thieves and corporate insanity. *sigh*

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

My company did the same thing a couple years ago. Took out the jewelry cases in all the stores to cut payroll "make the department more accessible to shoppers." Then wonders why shrinkage in jewelry skyrocketed.

Of course this isn't because expensive jewelry that used to be locked up in the case is now out in the open, we have hardly anybody working, and the thieves know where all the blind spots in the store are and just go there to pocket it. Nope, it's because those darn employees just don't care. So now there's a checklist hanging up by the jewelry fixtures that has to be filled out hourly. Amazingly, this isn't stopping people from ganking our jewelry.

[XCashier]

Other than moving jewelry, we also have added a huge number of locking pegs. So if you go into one of these fabric store locations and notice a crap ton of items inside locked cages, on locking pegs, or with empty display boxes, you know why. Well, you probably already knew why, I guess now you’ve suffered through my giant rant about thieves and corporate insanity. *sigh*

We have much the same set-up. And we've been having to try to "theft-proof" merchandise by stapling the heck out of it, including adding the plastic hole replacers and stapling those. All it does is make the really determined thieves mangle the packaging beyond belief; I've already found a couple of twisted, torn, empty pen packages.

And customers yell at us, complaining about being "treated like a thief". Look, pal, everybody knows that shoplifting exists. You can't tell who's a shoplifter by looking at them, so you have to apply it equally to everybody. And frankly, the more you complain, the more I suspect you.

[EricKei]

Reminds me of GameStore after Katrina. We got our main store back online about a week before Thanksgiving hat year, in part, because of the fact that half of our stores weren't gonna be re-opening. The net result was that everybody there except the disposable XMAS temps had management experience. We got tons of fresh product, as well as "stuff they dug out of the darkest corners of the GS warehouse"...which included a good thousand PS1 games -- in 2005, right when some newfangled machine called the "360" was the new hotness.

The issue with the PS1 games -- just as it had been pre-storm -- was that there was no room to gut & display them, plus the fact that we seldom had more than one copy of any of the things, meant that we were putting out hundreds and hundreds of LIVE copies (the discs in "slimline"-type clear cases) out onto the floor. During our busiest time of the year. It took me and another veteran GS'er two hours just to alphabetize the gorram things the day before we had our big re-opening, filling up a couple of dump bins as we went. The rest went onto a double-sided, free-standing rack. Naturally, they were all a bit out of the way, as Corporate didn't care that much about racks full of $4 games. There were exceptions -- we got in two copies of Valkyrie Profile (discs only), which even GS knew to charge $70 a pop for. Some of us, including myself, wanted to buy those. They were, of course, gone before the end of day one, and never actually got sold.

That was also the fate of ...I'd say at least as third of the PS1 games overall, and a HUGE chunk of them on day one, as half of the aforementioned tiered rack was facing away from the cash wraps, where all we could really do was to sigh when we noticed packs of dudes all in jackets, all with their heads down, moving as a unit towards those racks. We had our hands full with the constant deluge of customers wanting to BUY BUY BUY!!!!

With all of the registers going non-stop, we had to have one guy pulling games from the drawers (to give to buyers), another manning the phones, and two more doing nothing but accepting fresh stock, all day long. This was in addition to the temps re-organizing/aplhabetizing the display cases non-stop because,by the time they could finish one three-foot section, the one next to it was a shambles. Each temp could only handle two sections as a result of all of our looky-loos in line, and just shuttled back and forth between them every half an hour or so.

The really scary thing is that, after everyone in town had come there to replace their game systems lost to the storm, our total store shrink for the Black Friday thru mid-January (end of XMAS returns period) stretch was under one half of one percent, even with hundreds of those live CD's vaporizing into thin air.

[notalwaysright]

We have much the same set-up. And we've been having to try to "theft-proof" merchandise by stapling the heck out of it, including adding the plastic hole replacers and stapling those. All it does is make the really determined thieves mangle the packaging beyond belief; I've already found a couple of twisted, torn, empty pen packages.

And customers yell at us, complaining about being "treated like a thief". Look, pal, everybody knows that shoplifting exists. You can't tell who's a shoplifter by looking at them, so you have to apply it equally to everybody. And frankly, the more you complain, the more I suspect you.

When I started we had no locking pegs at all. Also, before the remodel, the sewing machines were inside a locked cage. After the remodel, they are not locked up. So if we're keeping track, they pushed back the jewelry and unlocked a section of big ticket items. As an employee I haven't felt like corporate is blaming us for the theft, but it's hard to judge because Scary protects us from the majority of corporate nonsense. We just had visits from a few higher ups, and I haven't heard the fallout other than that we can move jewelry. Scary usually takes a few days to process and cooldown after these visits before telling us what happened. (Remember, New Manager used to just dump on us, tell us we'd all be fired, Scary's method is sooo much better!)

Re: treating people like thieves. I haven't had anyone mad at me yet over items that are locked up. So far everyone is just confused and I straight up tell them it's because of increased theft. They're all "oh that's terrible!" and that's it. We do "customer service" people who are giving off red flags, but only if we have someone to spare, which we hardly ever do. As Irv said, these people know when we're busy and our store has many, many, easy places to steal in relative privacy.