Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

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>Those cameras in retail stores are, first and foremost, used to track employee theft

In my history, before finding my terminal career, I worked retail management. I worked for a chain that is no longer open, so I'm fairly certain I can say whatever I want about it now.

I was fast-tracked for upper-level corporate management (I think it was the combination of not-giving-a-fuck based on depression and low-grade sociopathy that did that). During this process we were asked to optimize a store in our region. This optimization process included outlining for store staff the process to remove "internal shrink" read: employees stealing.

One of my stores had the highest "internal shrink" and "employee arrests" in the entire chain. My solution was to make a differential pay scale for that store. I increased all wages across the board by $3/hr up to the store manager level.

"Shrink" stopped in the first month. Not just "internal shrink" but external as well. The employees were actually NOT stealing and ACTIVELY stopping people from stealing.

I was told it wasn't as cost effective as installing cameras in common theft areas and outsourcing security to a third party, and it was scrapped after a year.

That was when I decided to leave retail and the corporate world in general.

I worked at a company during college who at the end of the year would give every employee a "Shrink" check depending how well/poor their store performed over the course of the year.

If you came in mid year they just pro rated the amount you would have gotten if you stayed the whole year.

I remember this helped employees keep an eye on each other as you were essentially stealing from everyone else's shrink check.

Oh yes, delation... Nothing like not trusting anyone, especially your peers. Lovely!

I worked there for 3 years.

First year we received close to $1200 and in 2004 being a poor college kid this was an amazing bonus.

The 2nd year there was a series of high value thefts so we only ended up getting like $250 or so.

Our Lost Prevention employee who was just some guy who looked at security cameras all day, went out of his way on his own time to research all the same stolen items looking for them in local craigslist/pawn shops and finally e-bay.

He found one account on e-bay that coincidentally was selling all the same items our store kept missing! (Some of these were brand new laptops)

The account name of the seller was firstinitial+lastname+numbers

He took that account name, and cross referenced it with our employees and found a match. He then forwarded all this information to the police.

I remember one day going to our monthly manager's meeting (once a month had a store wide meeting where managers went over everything with all employees)

We did the entire meeting, free pizza and donuts, talked numbers shrink etc, and the best part was that on the last page of the presentation they had the guy running the Lost Prevention department come up to talk shrink. He explained everything above and then flipped the presentation paper to the last page which had the e-bay account giant sized on the paper. He said this is the person who has been caught selling everything and they will be taken care of.

We all turned around from our meeting and there were police offers waiting to arrest the perpetrator on the spot.

Said person was a 20 year old who had everything handed to him on a silver platter. He drove a $40,000 car his parents paid for type of thing where most of us had rusted beaters to drive around.

He was doing it only for the thrill, worked in the electronics department so he was able to steal things from the cages when trucks came in and you are supposed to unload all the pallets.

I just remember that meeting so vividly because they let the kid go through everything, thinking everything is normal and I wish I was able to see his face when his username was shown right away.

I won't forget his face and cries as he was being arrested saying, "You cannot prove that is me!" even though it was his first initial + last name and year he was born in.....

.

Why would it be illegal?

They aren't docking the employees pay for shrinkage (which is illegal), they are paying out a bonus based on company performance (the performance being level of shrinkage).

There is no guarantee after a few months this wouldn't go back to the way it was. Too often people think the change will affect permanent behaviour, when change itself affects behaviour.

This makes me wonder what the numbers are for Costco, who pays their employees very well.

Kind of hard to sneak out a 20 lb rack of ribs or 50 lb bag of rice.

Not really, put it in the bin, collect outside later. And how is that any different to other stores? Does costco not sell chocolate or tampons or things that are easy to steal? Even if in big packages, break it open, it goes out the back.

Maybe for small stuff. But the bins are well locked up for that reason. The garbage goes out in a sealed bin accessible only within the store. Returns get palletized for 3rd party resale and then forklifted into a trailer.

Could just scan out your friends and “miss” scanning some items for a cut.

Or “overlook” their 20lb of ribs scanning as 20lb of rice.

Can’t do it entirely because of the exit checks, but the checks aren’t 100%.

Though when buying a gift card, they don’t let you pick it off the rack: you get a receipt to ask someone else.

This is what gets referred to as "sweethearting".

What was the cost difference? Did the shrink reduction exceed the $3/hr raise in value but not by enough? Or was the raise not offset at all by the reduction?

In the end who cares, everyone would have been way happier without resorting to big brothery solutions and solving anyway he problem. But no, we gotta chase that additional profit at the cost of any other metric!

I mean, the business cares how much profits they make. If it was cost effective, it is easier to justify moving it to other stores.

That's my point. Businesses care only about profit, even when its clearly detrimental to everyone else. There's no consideration for happiness or quality of life and no ethic if you only chase profit. For how much we've been pushed to believe this is perfecly normal, to me it's insane.

you guys are cynical but lets take this one step further. the real reason the OPs plan wasn't implemented was because some cto or ceo had stock or got a kick back from some surveillance company ;-)

You know what would quickly increase happiness and quality of life for a whole bunch of people? If you would just donate your entire life savings to charity tomorrow. Your not doing that is clearly detrimental to all those people you would have helped. Please consider happiness, quality of life, ethics, etc, and stop chasing profit.

Oh please, do a favour to yourself and use your intelligence before engaging in discussion. I as an individual have barely what I need to survive. My choice is not between huge profit and slightly less profit, but between paying the rent or ending on the streets. Businesses on the other hand have proven again and again that they will do anything to increase the profit even when already largely profitable.

Yeah, the ceo of charity would be really happy.

Why doesn any argument about "a LITTLE less profit" must be countered with reducting to absurd? I really would like to know why did you make such argument.

Or does this simply show a cultural problem among upper-management types, where they exclusively use the stick over the carrot because it makes them feel powerful, important, and morally superior?

It's it just the management types? Plenty of users here in HN defend abusive practices like these just to save some money.

Agree on this...

I only had one quarter to measure. We were on track to show a massive reduction, just under the cost of the raises. Had we stuck to it for two quarters or even a year, the trend was that we would've broken even around month 8, and showed a positive return after one year.

I bet the bigger problem was that the raise went into operating costs, whereas investment in surveillance goes into capital costs. The corporation doesn't get to list any money it pays out to employees on its balance sheet, but that Orwellian surveillance system is capital and counts as an asset the corporation can leverage for a higher valuation.

It's all part of how Capitalism reduces humans to a drain on the system in favor of material.

Capital depreciates. It's an expense.

But it still shows up on the balance sheet, so it doesn't look like you're bleeding money the same way an operating expense like a raise does.

> What was the cost difference?

Doesn't matter. I bet it adversely affected someone's bonus and that was why it was scrapped.

What if instead of an extra $3/hr, the differential pay were an extra $10,000/hr? Obviously then the cost difference would matter. So, there must be a cutoff somewhere. Is the cutoff more than $3 or less than $3? We don't have enough information to know, nor do we have enough information to know whether upper management were just being comic book villains or whether their decision was based on crunching the numbers.

Might be the type of cost.

Outsourced = expense Salary increase = fixed cost can only write-off %.

It's probably the other managers who don't have the issue not wanting to increase their wages. Or explaining why the worst employees were paid more etc.

> explaining why the worst employees were paid more

except they were likely only viewed as 'worst employees' because of the theft. stopping theft - internal and external - would normally be chalked up to 'best employees', who would be quite deserving of raises (in a hypothetical world).

So you're saying retail is offensive the moral sensibilities of a sociopath?

I'm not sure I understand your statement, I think you're missing a word in there.

What I'm saying is that I was deeply depressed and therefore didn't give a shit about myself or the other people around me. And that is the personality trait that seemed to put me ahead of my co-managers.

I'm not sure "Want a raise? Start stealing!" is the greatest incentive structure...

Otoh "Want employee loyalty? Start treating them reasonably." probably is.

Yeah, there may have been other long term benefits that were not accounted for in the cost comparison. For example, people like to shop at places with happy employees. The commenter mentioned that the place doesnt exist any more.

Company pays minimum wage. Employees give minimum effort. Company: shockedpikachu.jpg

Paying more only motivates higher level people. Lower level only respond to the stick. That’s how a lot of people seem to think.

bullshit; Agree on that "lower-level" do not always respond linear to better wage, however that's not the only thing of motivation. What about trainings? Holidays? And not the stick...

You don't treat reasonably your tools. That's how some companies see their employees.

You believe this?—ask any tradesman, mechanic or PE—"Take care of your tools and they will take care of you" is gospel in those fields.

The same, then, should apply to "living tools" if your analogy obtains.

> "Take care of your tools and they will take care of you"

In my increasingly out of date experience in that area, this definitely applies to "don't leave your wrenches out in the yard overnight, dummy" but usually not so far as "don't use that as a pry bar". In either case though, if the tool breaks you toss it and move on...

You may care about an expensive tool as long as it works, but you'll throw it away as soon as it breaks. A tool has no rights, and you'll never care about it enjoying working for you. Yes, the analogy still work for me.

There's plenty of people in the trades who consider their tools disposable like work gloves but on a longer time line.

In most of the western world labor is so absurdly expensive compared to material goods that it usually makes sense for anyone paid by the job (most people in the trades) to just treat tools as a cost of doing business and treat them whichever way gets the jobs done the fastest.

> Start treating them reasonably

This is stupid though. Is $3 more treating them reasonably? Where is that definition?

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