Taking a Swipe at Sweethearting

Internal theft is an unfortunate fact of life in retail. While merchants have made progress in some areas, “sweethearting” or “sliding” has proven to be one of the most difficult practices to deter. Big Y Supermarkets, a 58-store chain based in Springfield, Mass., believes it has found a solution in the form of a video recognition software system from Bedford, Mass.-based StopLift.

STORES contributor Len Lewis recently spoke with Big Y director of loss prevention Mark Gaudette about how sweethearting has been significantly reduced — and could eventually be eliminated — thanks to a system that is also providing some unintended benefits.

StORES: Sweethearting has been around forever. Do some employees think no one is watching?
Gaudette: That’s probably true, and for good reason: For a long time no one was watching. We’ve had CCTV and exception reporting in place for quite a while, but nothing specifically addressed sweethearting. We couldn’t have a person watching every checkout every hour we’re open. The mere fact that people got away with it validated the idea that no one was watching.

StORES: So this activity tends to take place over a long period of time?
Gaudette: Absolutely. The folks we caught prior to engaging the new StopLift technology said they had been doing it for a while. We’ve also seen that the case value for sweethearting was always higher than the average employee theft. That being said, the technology has enabled us to filter that out so we’re not seeing long-term employees committing this crime.

StORES: Do you view sweethearting as an organized activity?
Gaudette: For the most part, people are not trying to resell the merchandise for profit. Most often they are just hooking up a friend or family member and, like other things, it’s a theft of opportunity.

Part of the problem we had in identifying it was the fact that it is a largely random activity. As such, we couldn’t really use exception reporting or KPIs. Additionally, we’ve found that it’s not confined to items like high-end meats or health and beauty care products. It’s largely a matter of opportunity.

Maybe the customer service manager is out of view, or the service clerk is helping another cashier and no one is watching. When that happens a cashier may sweetheart seven or eight items then go back to his regular behavior of scanning everything.

StORES: Have you tried to get associates involved in reporting these activities?
Gaudette: We have an employee hotline — phone and Internet. Our target audience is 16- to 19-year-old kids. They use cell phones for texting. This gives them another vehicle for contacting us if they are unhappy with the culture of honesty around them. It’s been pretty productive for us. We used to get one call a month. Now we get five or six hits a week off the Internet.

StORES: Is it hard to convince young people to turn in their peers?
Gaudette: We don’t encourage them to rat out their friends, but people don’t want to work in a dishonest atmosphere and this gives them an anonymous vehicle to report it.

One of the advantages of the Stop¬Lift technology is that it enables us to do things objectively. We’re not just watching one person; we’re watching everybody.

StORES: What got you looking at StopLift?
Gaudette: “We first talked about it a couple of years ago when the product was in beta at Hannaford Bros. If you go by statistics from FMI or the University of Florida, employee theft represents about 40 to 45 percent of retail losses.

CCTV had done a great job for us in reducing cash losses as well as fraudulent returns and refunds; we also knew our back doors were pretty secure and that we had a good handle on external theft. We knew there was a huge opportunity to address sliding.