Theft reduction in a grocery store through product identification and graphing of losses for employees

Shoplifting and employee theft constitute a major problem for retailers. Previous research has described techniques for effectively reducing either type of theft but has not addressed the problem of thefts of unspecified origin. In a grocery store we evaluated the effect of identifying for employees frequently stolen products from three groups of items and graphing, twice weekly in the lunchroom, losses for the separate groups. After the products were identified and losses graphed, thefts from the three groups dropped from eight per day to two per day.