Nancy has been stealing since she was a kid. She does not know why but she has “an overwhelming urge within me telling me to (steal),” she said.
“I would go into a store and find something I like and hide it under my coat or throw it in the cart under other packages,” she said.
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While stealing, her heart races a mile a minute, her brain tells her it’s wrong. But her stealing did not stop at the local department store. As an accountant, she ripped off between 10 and 15 companies, she said.
Nancy, a 40-year-old from Wisconsin, is now part of the Cleptomaniacs and Shoplifter Anonymous support group and is attempting to understand and control her compulsion to steal.
For retailers, people like Nancy are perhaps the biggest threat to their business.
Total apprehensions of both shoplifters and dishonest employees in 2004 increased nearly 5 percent from 2003, according to the 17th Annual Retail Theft Survey conducted by Jack L. Hayes International, an inventory control consulting firm based in Florida.
Mark Doyle, president of Jack L. Hayes International, said via e-mail that the rising number of apprehensions indicates that retailers are getting better at detecting theft but more people are also attempting to steal.
According to the study, for every $1 recovered, $36.47 is lost to retail theft.
Losses from retail theft are reported to be more than $30 billion annually in the United States, triple the number of 10 years ago, according to the study. This increase means higher prices, job loss and store closings for workers and consumers, wrote Doyle.
But is the biggest danger right under retailers’ noses?
On a per case basis, dishonest employees steal nearly seven times more than the amount taken by shoplifters, the Hayes study said.
In a sampling of more than 1.7 million employees, nearly one in every 28 was apprehended for theft from their employer, according to the study.
Another study, the 2004 National Retail Security Survey, said employee theft accounts for 47 percent of such losses. There is no other form of larceny that annually costs Americans more money than employee theft, according to the report.
Shoplifting is credited for 34 percent of the retail industry’s total losses – and it’s been growing each year since 2000. According to the FBI’s uniform crime reports, shoplifting is nearly equivalent to the cost of auto theft, the report said.
Dan Butler, vice president of marketing and retail operations for the National Retail Federation in New York, does not necessarily agree that employee theft is a larger problem than customer shoplifting. Retailers track the crimes that they catch, not what the overall debt is, he said.
“Most retailers know most customers are honest,” said Paul DeRoche, executive director of the Rhode Island Retail Federation. “But (the stores) need systems to combat fraud and theft,” he said.
To prevent employee theft, retailers are using point-of-sale exception reporting technology that indicates when there is a transaction outside of the norm, said Butler. Twenty years ago, a manager would have to investigate reams of register tape, he said.
DeRoche said retailers must prosecute to deter shoplifters from stealing again. Ninety-eight percent of shoplifters are repeat offenders, he said.
