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.
18 Responses
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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.