Shop theft: how to prevent losses in retail

• External theft: concealment, ticket switching, walking out without paying, organised groups targeting specific categories.
• Internal theft: goods or cash leaving through staff, “discounts” for friends, collusion with a supplier or driver.
• Process errors: unchecked deliveries, wrong prices in the system, till voids with no reason given, unrecorded damage, counting mistakes.

The distinction matters in practice: a guard at the door does not fix a receiving error, and a better till procedure does not stop an organised group. Start from the data you already have — stock counts, till voids, logged incidents — and put each loss into one of the three categories.

A stock-count gap does not prove theft. Before you blame theft, check deliveries, returns and damage for the same period.

• Sight lines: lower shelving in the middle, taller units along the walls; the till should see the entrance and the main aisles.
• Blind spots: walk the store and mark every point nobody can see — corners, behind displays, near the fitting rooms.
• High-value goods: near the till or in a locked case, never beside the exit.
• Entrance and exit: one controlled flow where possible; emergency exits never left open without reason.
• Stockroom and loading bay: closed when not in use, open only to those who need them.

Staff are part of visibility: an employee who greets every customer at the door shows that the store is watching. OVIT starts every retail engagement with a walk of the site that maps its blind spots (retail security).

A retail guard works for a company operating under Greek Law 2518/1997 and must hold a personal work licence, category A or B, valid for five years (art. 3). Ask for the licence number of anyone guarding your store.

• Visible presence: at the entrance and in the aisles where deterrence counts most.
• Observation: repeated behaviour, problem zones and problem hours.
• Alerting: the store manager and, where needed, the police.
• Recording: every incident with its time, place, description and actions taken.

What a guard may do about a suspected shoplifter is not something to improvise. The guard acts only within the law and hands over to the police; the procedure is set by written post orders that you agree with the security company before the first shift.

The post orders should answer at least: who decides whether to intervene, who calls the police, what gets recorded and who is told afterwards. A procedure that is not written down is applied differently by every guard.

The Hellenic Data Protection Authority states that its Directive 1/2011 on video surveillance still applies alongside the GDPR and Law 4624/2019, read together with the European Data Protection Board’s Guidelines 3/2019. For a store this means:

• Signs: clearly visible and placed before anyone enters a camera’s range, saying who the controller is, the purpose, and whom to contact to exercise data-subject rights (Directive 1/2011, art. 12).
• Retention: delete within 15 working days at most if no incident occurs. Footage of an incident against the controller may be kept for 30 days; of an incident involving a third party, for 3 months (art. 8).
• Employees: cameras may not be used to monitor or evaluate staff (art. 27 of Law 4624/2019, as the Authority sets out).

That last rule shapes how you tackle internal losses: not by pointing cameras at staff, but through procedures — checked deliveries, a reason for every till void, regular stock counts by category.

• Time and place: the exact time, zone or aisle, and which camera covered it.
• Description: what the guard or employee saw — facts, not opinions.
• Actions: who was alerted, whether the police were called, what was handed to them.
• Goods and value: what is missing or was recovered, with product codes.
• Material: which video clip or photos belong to the incident.

With video, watch the retention limits: decide the same day which footage is kept as an incident, so it is not deleted in the normal cycle.

OVIT records observation, intervention and recovery on mobile as they happen, on the same case. Through the Guardly platform the client sees patrols, incidents and reports in one live picture.

• Christmas, Easter and sales seasons: more customers per employee, fuller shelves, pressure at the tills.
• Opening and closing: few staff, cash on the move, doors and shutters open.
• Shift changes and breaks: moments when the floor goes unwatched.
• Deliveries: the stockroom door open, staff busy checking goods.

Look in your own incident log for the days and hours that repeat, and reinforce there — an extra guard, staff on the floor or a layout change. The arithmetic helps: a second guard for 4 peak hours, 6 days a week, is 24 extra hours of cover — far fewer than the 168 of a post covered around the clock.

1. Set a baseline: the stock-count gap from your latest counts, by product category.
2. Introduce one measure at a time where you can, so you know what caused the change.
3. Count the same category at the next stocktake, using the same method.
4. Read the incidents alongside: where, when, what was recovered.
5. Compare the cost of the measure with the reduction in loss.

An example with hypothetical figures: in one category, book stock of 10,000 items and counted stock of 9,400 give a gap of 600 items. If at the next count, over the same cycle and with similar sales, the gap falls to 350 items, the measure saved 250 items per cycle — and that is the reduction to set against its cost.

If you do not measure by category and zone, a fall in one place can hide a rise in another.

OVIT starts with one store and one recurring loss pattern, so the result can be measured before anything is scaled. Request a proposal for your store.