- Giving away products for free or at a deep price cut
- With plans to get, in return, an extra tip, increased social status, or a product for free or at a deep price cut from the sweethearting recipient
- And all this violating policies set by the store owner/operator
A pioneering study of sweethearting conducted at Michigan State University and Florida State University, when combined with findings from other consumer behavior research, suggests ways to stab the practice in the heart.
- Set policies which are unambiguous and easily understood. What sorts of items can be given away or deeply discounted? Which employees are granted the discretion to do this and under what circumstances? What practices, such as trading discounts, are forbidden? To audit the extent and the effectiveness of the practices, what degree of reporting and accountability are required from those employees? Research suggests that the reporting not be made too complex, since this will discourage employee initiative and the use of appropriate gifting.
- Enforce the policies by punishing offenders, but be careful not to make the punishments out of proportion to the offense. The research finds that increased severity of punishment is not associated with a decrease in subsequent sweethearting by staff.
- In staff training, periodically give evidence of how employee theft damages the organization. Do not discuss the topic at every training session, though. Research suggests continual discussion makes thievery seem to your employees almost routinely expected.
- Take special care with employees who show a high need for social approval and/or a love of risk-taking. The researchers found these characteristics made sweethearting more likely. Consider using pre-employment integrity testing with professionally validated inventories.
Click below for more:
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Psych Out Employee Theft
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Indeed, “sweethearting” takes a bit bite out of retail profits, particularly in the supermarket industry which has low profit margins.
ReplyDeleteI work with Malay Kundu, founded of StopLift Checkout Vision Systems, who developed the only technology that detects sweethearting at the checkout. You can see real videos of sweethearting at www.StopLift.com, both at the manned and self-checkout.
Kundu says the new sweethearting study you refer to underscores what his technology has been detecting from the beginning. StopLift has caught 450,000-plus incidents in just two years.
The technology grew out of Kundu’s Harvard Business School research study “Project StopLift” after retailers identified this “under the radar” theft as a major source of shrink with no means of detection.
His technology (and videos) show cashiers and customers covering bar codes, scanning two items together, leaving items in the shopping cart or your reusable bag, playing the “banana trick” on the scale with more expensive items, or simply going around the scanner.
Working with existing overhead video cameras, the technology can read the body movements of the shopper or cashier (monitoring 100% of the security video) and flags the transaction as suspicious. It quickly reports the incident, identifying the cashier and the date and time of the theft.
Sherry Alpert