Real World Advice for Retailers - Loss Prevention, Chapter 3

A favorite method of "theft" is to sell merchandise to friends and family at special, lower prices by manually discounting them in the POS system.  Your POS system should allow you to disable discounting for specific users, or cashiers, thus forcing them to sell all items at the correct price.  If some customers get special discounts on certain items, these should be maintained in the system so that when those customers are linked to a sale, the correct discounted price is automatically charged - no manual discounts required.   If discounting is necessary for programs like senior citizen discounts, a special "macro" key should be created to force the amount of the discount, thus preventing cashiers from turning a 10% senior citizen discount into a 50% "Sweetheart" discount. Some supervisory staff may need the ability to perform some level of manual discounting to address customer complaints or other management functions.  Your POS system should be able to force the user to enter valid reason codes for all ad hoc discounts, then provide reports to management that show who did the discounts, when they were done, where they were done, how much the discount was for and who got the discount.

Another form of theft that most employees regard as practically guiltless is to purchase articles on layaway at the height of the season at greatly reduced prices, then wait until the end of the season (when the prices have dropped) to pay off the layaway with the marked down prices.  This is common in fashion retail environments where most merchandise is seasonal and therefore is marked down further and further as the season progresses.  A good POS system will allow you to generate reports on all layaways so that you can see layaways that are aging beyond normal periods.  Furthermore, cashiers should not be able to mark down the price of the merchandise in a layaway, thereby ensuring that the full price is paid when the layaway is picked up.

Another favorite method of "theft" is for someone to shoplift an article then bring it back to the store (or another store that sells the same product) and request a refund, claiming that they lost the receipt.  Some thieves actually create counterfeit receipts to aid in returning stolen merchandise.  So even if you have a "no refund without receipt" policy, you can still be at risk.  A good POS system can process returns by requiring you to enter in a receipt number, which will enable the system to validate that it is a true receipt.  Furthermore, it should also print out a store copy of the refund receipt that requires the customer's name and phone number.  This information can then be used to contact the customer to confirm that the refund was actually provided.

Another popular trick that thieves (and employees) use is to purchase products on sale and then attempt to return them without a receipt after the sale is over.  This would cause the cashier to perform a refund at the regular retail price, the thief then pockets the difference.  A good POS system will prevent this from happening because when the cashier enters the transaction number from the receipt, the items will be listed with the actual sale price that was paid, not the current non-sale price.