Hayes International Releases 21st Annual Retail Theft Survey

The retail industry's leading Theft Survey, conducted by Hayes International has released it's 21st annual results!! This report is full of great information including statistics on retail theft gathered by Hayes International on 22 large retail companies with 19,151 stores, and over $570 Billion in sales. In addition, Hayes International expert insight into causes and effects is extremely helpful to the Operations, Loss Prevention, and Finance executives reading this report.

Some key points I found interesting include:

• 72,120 dishonest employees were apprehended in 2008, up 3.01% from 2007
• One in every 30 employees was apprehended for theft from their employer in 2008. (Based on over 2.1 million employees).
• On a per case average, dishonest employees steal a little over 7 times the amount stolen by shoplifters ($969.14 vs $135.81)
• For every $1.00 recovered by surveyed companies, $27.64 was lost to retail theft. Therefore, only 3.62% of total retail theft losses resulted in a recovery. Much room for improvement here.
  
• Survey participants apprehended 832,106 shoplifters in 2008. That is an increase of 7.65% from the prior year.

Survey participants contributed the following to increased employee theft:

1. Enhancements in POS Exception Based Reporting
2. Less management supervision over employees
3. More employees are stealing in the poor economy
4. More focus placed on internal theft cases

Hayes International believes the following contributes to the employee theft problem:

• Ineffective Pre-Employment Screening.
  
• Less Employee Supervision creating more opportunities to commit theft.
• Decline in Honesty.