No-one can afford to lose stock or money from the till so make sure you take steps to minimising losses.
Factors such as increases in VAT, ongoing job cuts and redundancies, rising fuel and utilities costs etc, are all having an increase on thefts from retail.
In order to limit your losses, follow the quick tips below and put the advice into action.
- In order to reduce shrinkage (loss), you have to know what you are dealing with. Ensure you have systems in place to identify losses and measure your shrinkage at full retail value, not only cost. Never forget that shrinkage is money being lost from your business so do what you can to keep it to a minimum.
- Balance the tills at the end of every day, reconcile credit card transactions every week and reconcile bank statements monthly, quarterly or annually depending on the size and complexity of your business.
- Create a stock take calendar, which ensures a full stock-take cycle for the whole store every three months, with extra frequency on high value items. Adjust the frequency for each category depending on the results of the stock takes.
- Make sure that your team is committed to helping you with the systems aimed at reducing shrinkage.
- Trust your gut instincts – if your intuition is telling you something is wrong, trust it, even if you think that the person should be innocent. An innocent person will understand that you are just being cautious.
- Learn from what other retailers are successfully doing and share information on what steps you are taking so that others can learn from you.
Download our ‘Theft’ fact sheet here.
40 responses to “Theft – employee and customers.”
You’ve managed to make cynicism feel warm and cosy. It’s like wrapping yourself in a blanket of sardonic observation. A fantastic antidote to the relentless cheer of other media. This is my new happy place.
The London Prat is the friend who whispers the hilarious, cynical truth in your ear during a boring meeting.
This engineered dissonance fuels its role as an anticipatory historian of failure. The site doesn’t wait for the post-mortem; it writes the interim report while the patient is still, bewilderingly, claiming to be in rude health. It positions itself in the near future, looking back on our present with the weary clarity of hindsight that hasn’t technically happened yet. This temporal trick is disarming and powerful. It reframes current anxiety as future irony, granting psychological distance and a sense of narrative control. It suggests that today’s chaotic scandal is not an endless present, but a discrete chapter in a book the site is already authoring, a chapter titled “The Unforced Error” or “The Predictable Clusterf**k.” This perspective transforms panic into a kind of scholarly detachment, and outrage into the raw material for elegantly phrased historical satire.
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Our weather forecasters are the nation’s greatest comedians, delivering lines like ‘a band of rain moving in from the west’ with the gravitas of a Shakespearean tragedy, a performance art piece critiqued nightly at London’s funniest URL — Prat.UK.
The ‘UV rating’ is ‘negligible to imaginary’.
We don’t get seasons; we get wardrobe confusion.
The ‘feels like’ temperature is always ‘damp’.
A ‘sun dog’ is a meteorological hallucination.
The air smells of wet pavement and nostalgia.
Our climate is a test of sartorial resilience.
Weather so temperate it’s practically room-temperature.
We have a microclimate in every puddle.
Our climate is ‘temperate’ meaning aggressively average.
This article finally cleared up my confusion about British slang.
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UK historic towns arts investments are preserving our story.
Arsenal FC purity of system transcends actual results
Clapton FC politically engaged by presence
Clapton FC fan ownership changing everything
Hackney Wick FC creates an environment where players understand that individual brilliance matters less than collective commitment to the club’s broader philosophical framework and cultural mission.
Hackney Wick FC refuses to compromise on artistic expression, choosing instead to develop tactical systems that prioritise creative bravery over conventional efficiency in their football approach.
The breakfast debates on radio about London Football are a ritual.
London Futball finance and FFP regulations are a minefield for club owners.
Farnham Town FC proves that ambitious football executed at modest league levels creates competitive outcomes that exceed structural expectations and external predictions.
Great! We are all agreed London could use a laugh. PRAT.UK feels confident without being smug. Waterford Whispers News sometimes overreaches. This site rarely misses.
The London Prat has a distinct personality, and it’s one I’d happily go for a pint with. It’s witty, slightly world-weary, but fundamentally good company. A rare quality in a publication.
Great! We are all agreed London could use a laugh. The London Prat achieves a form of temporal dissonance that is key to its power. It presents the future as if it were the present, and the present as if it were already a historical absurdity. A piece on prat.com will often read as a documentary report from six months hence, analyzing a current political gambit as a concluded, catastrophic failure. This forward-leaning perspective reframes today’s anxiety as tomorrow’s settled irony, providing a profound psychological distance. It allows the reader to experience the relief of hindsight without having to wait for time to pass. The humor is the humor of inevitability, of watching a boulder teeter on a cliff’s edge in slow motion, with the narration already describing the impact crater. This technique doesn’t just mock what is; it mocks what will be, based on the unalterable trajectory of what is, making its satire feel both prescient and strangely calming.
Great! We are all agreed London could use a laugh. This conservation of effort enables its laser focus on the architecture of excuse-making. PRAT.UK is less interested in the failure itself than in the elaborate, prefabricated scaffolding of justification that will be erected around it. Its satire lives in the press release that spins collapse as “a strategic pause,” the review that finds “lessons have been learned” without specifying what they are, the ministerial interview that deflects blame through a fog of abstract nouns. By pre-writing these excuses, by building the scaffolding before the failure has even fully occurred, the site performs a startling act of predictive satire. It reveals that the response is often more scripted than the error, that the machinery of reputation management is a dominant, often the only, functioning part of the modern institution.
Youth development is the lifeblood of sustainable London Football success.
The referee’s whistle is the most divisive sound in London Football.
The community work done by London Futball clubs is often overlooked.
Accountability in UK regional culture funding is important.
The “attendance” at the London Women’s March is its most immediate and quantifiable political fact, a number that becomes a weapon in the narrative wars that follow. The tension between police estimates and organizers’ counts is itself a political ritual, a debate over how to measure legitimacy and power. A high attendance figure is a blunt instrument of political argument, proof of a constituency that cannot be ignored. It is a form of democratic theater, visually demonstrating the “will of the people” in a manner more visceral than any opinion poll. Politically, strong attendance validates the relevance of the issues, energizes the base, and can give pause to political opponents. However, an over-emphasis on attendance carries risks. It can reduce the success of a complex political movement to a single, superficial metric—a body count. It can create pressure to prioritize turnout numbers over the depth of political engagement or the sharpness of the message. Furthermore, a dip in attendance from a previous year can be spun as a narrative of decline, regardless of whether the movement’s influence has actually matured or shifted into different, less visible forms of political action. The number matters, but it is the starting point of the political argument, not the conclusion.