Take It to the Bank

There used to be a time when stores and restaurants located in low-crime neighborhoods felt safe and secure, “trusting our employees and customers,” says Pam Carson, co-owner of two franchised McDonalds restaurants in Kansas City.

“Our managers took our deposits, about 70 percent in cash, to the bank several times a day for nine years,” she says. “But in this day and age, that’s not a good business practice.”

Between 2007 and 2010, Carson’s restaurants were hit by armed robbers about “every six months,” she says, “and our restaurants are not in high-crime areas. Plus money was missing from our safes every 20 to 30 days, and it was hard to determine who was accountable since several managers had access to the safes.”

That story sounds familiar to a loss prevention executive at women’s specialty apparel chain Chico’s FAS. When Leo Doran joined Chico’s as vice president of LP four years ago, the company was experiencing “at least 10 armed robberies a year” and “every couple of months our deposits, which we kept in a locked box in the back room, would go missing and it would be hard to tell who took them because several people in each store had access to those boxes.”

Six-month ROI
The solution for both was Dunbar Armored, which services approximately 19,000 retail locations. Carson says Dunbar “came across as having the best service that fit our needs”; Doran says the company “really hit it out of the park with their pricing and service and reliability.”

Like many retailers who haven’t researched the cost-effectiveness of Dunbar’s armored services, “we felt it would be too expensive for us,” Carson says. “But we found out … we were spending more on vendors such as landscapers than we were on our security system. Now we have a system that keeps our people safe and saves us money.”

Strictly from an operational perspective, Doran says, “we saved enough in payroll costs to get an ROI in six months.

“Our managers used to go the bank every morning,” he says. “We calculated conservatively that cost us an hour a day every day of the week. With the Dunbar service, it turns out that for every store, we are now saving about five hours of payroll a week just by keeping our associates in the store.”

That, in turn, increased productivity. “We get a lot more done now in the mornings and our insurance rates have gone down because we don’t have managers driving to the bank,” Doran says. “We’ve also eliminated some 14,000-plus expense reports that our managers used to file for mileage and related reimbursements, so our accounting department is happy and more productive.”

The switch has made Chico’s “a better place to work,” he says. “Our store associates are less frustrated. They don’t have all that running around and they’re safer.”

There haven’t been any armed robberies at Chico’s or in the Carsons’ McDonalds restaurants since they began using Dunbar’s armored services, and missing cash deposits at Chico’s have declined 75 percent.

The Carsons also invested in Dunbar’s Cash Manager Safe. Signs in their restaurants advertise that managers can’t open the safes, “so criminals think twice when they are planning a robbery,” Carson says.

An added benefit, notes Dunbar vice president of national accounts Ed Walsh, is that daily receipts typically increase once a retailer has adopted an armored car service and once they have a Cash Manager Safe. “It discourages and makes it harder for employees to engage in behaviors that cheat or steal.”

Counterfeit detection
Cash Manager Safes recognize bill denominations and authenticity, “so when a customer comes in with a $50 or $100 bill or even a suspicious $20 bill,” says Carson, “we immediately put it in our Dunbar machine, and if it’s counterfeit, the machine won’t accept it. No one else offered that when we signed with Dunbar.”

And the restaurants’ cash line has vastly improved, she says. Before, “we were $300 to $500 short per restaurant per month on average,” Carson says, “and now we average $2 to $5 a month short. We’ve improved our cash line by almost $6,000 in the trailing 12 months, in each of our restaurants.”

Doran says there are benefits for his LP team, as well. “Rather than investigating robberies and missing deposits, they now have more time to focus on our training, coaching and awareness programs.”