DT's $60m problem
Every year an estimate of $60m worth of products is stolen from Dollar Tree aisles, and nothing is done about it. These are my thoughts about that problem, and my recommendations for a fix.
I work at Dollar Tree. There is something we call “Shrink” which is a fancy way of saying “number of products that were stolen during X period of time.” Currently, we average about $20-30 worth of products stolen every day. As employees, we are not permitted to confront the perpetrators even if we catch them. We are told to identify the items stolen, and note the total worth of items stolen. After that we should make an Incident Report and call the police. Easy in theory, difficult in practice.
If someone steals $2.50 worth of goods, as an example, calling the police to report $2.50 worth of theft is almost like a waste of their time. They should arrest this guy for two dollars??? Now if across a day, 4 people steal, at different times, are we to call the police all 4 times, to report $2.50 or $10 thefts? The police determine theft severity based on the dollar amount of what was stolen so a $500 theft is higher in priority than a $2.50 theft. How are we to keep calling the police throughout the day to report $2.50 theft? It’s easy for management to say “call the police when someone steals” but in reality, just allowing the individual leave with the item (and hopefully making a report if you can find the time) is a lot easier to do. We’ve got duties to carry out and not enough time. Spending so much time doing all this “processing” for a $2.50 theft is not worth it.
Let’s do a little math: (assuming) in a day 4 people steal an average of $5 worth of items, that’s $20 Shrink for that day. In a week, that’d be $140 total worth of stolen items. In a month that’s $560 worth of items stolen and in a year, that amount climbs to $6720 worth of items stolen, from one DT branch. In Central Jersey alone, my guess is there are a minimum of 10 DT stores. So from Central Jersey alone, in one year, the company has lost $67200 to stolen items. $67200, from 10 stores alone.
On May 9th last year, the company released this press release stating they had grown to over 9,000 number of stores in the US. Assuming there’s exactly 9,000 DT stores in the US, and each store loses $6720 worth of goods to theft yearly (these numbers are conservative. The actual numbers will be a lot more), the company is losing $60,480,000 to thefts YEARLY. $60m worth of items are stolen from the company, annually. $60m. Again, these numbers are conservative. I expect the actual numbers to be much worse.
That’s the problem. Somehow it doesn’t seem to matter to management; the company is so big millions of dollars are being lost through the cracks, and there doesn’t appear to be anything being done about it. Well, it bothers me. There should be a way to protect products from getting stolen.
The easiest way I can think of is replicating what Flock has done in Florida, in the stores. People steal because they know there are no guaranteed consequences. Maybe the police may consider their $3 theft important enough to come or maybe not. One step we could take is setting up two large boards, a “Hall of Fame” and a “Hall of Shame.” The Hall of Fame board will have photos of the store’s best customers on them, with their first name, refreshed every week and the Hall of Shame will have photos of those who frequently steal on them too. On a daily basis, the store gets about 400-500 customers who come in and buy stuff, not including those who can’t find the product they want to buy so they leave. Using 450 as an example, if there was a section near the checkout where every customer going through the checkout sees these two massive boards on the wall, a Hall of Fame and a Hall of Shame, people are less likely to steal. Knowing that if you were caught stealing, your face would be shown to over 3000 people who will come in to shop that week, people will be a lot more reluctant to steal.
Currently, the store I work at has about 9 cameras. This number of cameras is not enough. There are 9 aisles, excluding the seasonal aisles. It is important to ensure that for every nook-and-cranny of the store, there is a camera seeing that. Some people go to the food aisle, take cans of food from there and put it in their pockets. We can’t tell what product they took or its cost because the cameras don’t cover the food aisles. Some may even eat something there, and we will not know. We also cannot call the police, because we have zero evidence they stole. For all we know, they could have bought the items in their pockets somewhere else.
Those are the two main things to fix: our vision is limited because there aren’t enough cameras, and our hands are tied because we cannot confront the thieves. These are my recommendations: add more cameras to the stores so we are able to see what’s going on in each aisle and implement the hall-of-fame thing so people self-restrain from stealing. These seem to me like the low-hanging fruits that have the biggest implementation-to-impact ratio. Easy to implement, very high impact. There are some other things that I think could be done, but I’d say let’s start from here first.