Stop Pushout Theft

According to the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, more than $13B worth of goods are stolen from retailers each year. Savvy shoplifters to organized crime rings have found that with the use of shopping carts, they can look less conspicuous and retrieve more items in one swoop, rolling large volumes of unpaid goods right out the door. Offenders committing cart-based theft, or "pushout theft," can be difficult to stop, as most LP technologies are not designed to physically stop carts or the people trying to leave the store with them. For instance, to catch or retrieve all items before they are taken out the door, video surveillance, a very effective loss prevention tool, requires additional personnel to constantly monitor footage. And EAS (electronic article surveillance) tags, another effective tool at preventing theft, will not prevent offenders from sprinting from your store with the stolen merchandise. James Estes, director of safety and LP (loss prevention) at The Markets, LLC, needed a solution that stopped pushout theft and achieved rapid payback.
The Markets, a Bellingham, WA-based supermarket chain with 21 locations, experienced major loss issues attributed to shoplifting and theft in a handful of its locations. Estes noticed that in particular stores, an excessive amount of loss had occurred, particularly in the meat and variety (e.g. shampoo, razors) departments. "Labor is tight in this economy, and we don't have an excess of employees wandering around the store floor," says Estes. "Customer service is high on our priority list, but thieves know to hit the store when it's busy. For instance, between 3 and 5 pm, they've loaded a cart with $400 worth of merchandise in less than 6 minutes and walked right out the door with it."
The grocer's LP methods, such as CCTV (closed circuit television) and EAS were not minimizing the loss. For example, Estes reports the grocer sells 6,000 to 8,000 meat products a day across the chain. The grocer doesn't put an EAS tag on every meat tray, only on expensive cuts, which accounts for about 4,000 trays. When a meat tray comes across the register, the tag is deactivated. The EAS promise is that 99% of the tags are deactivated. "When 1% of 4,000 EAS tags are not deactivated, that alarm is going off all day long, and cashiers start to ignore it," says Estes. "The EAS system works well and exactly as advertised, but our employees were ignoring it."