A HOME Depot employee has revealed the lengths that some thieves will go to steal merchandise, despite the store’s new anti-theft measures.
The leaders of some of the country’s biggest retail stores have been sounding the alarm about the growing problem of theft in recent years, leading to a slew of new efforts to crack down on crime.
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Customers have complained that some of these security changes are extremely inconvenient, like when stores decide to put a majority of their items behind lock and key.
But one retail worker has shared why stores like Home Depot must go the extra mile to protect their goods.
“I work at Home Depot. The amount of theft is staggering, we lock everything up, people still use crowbars, axes, anything to get it,” JP (@midwestblu) wrote on TikTok.
He showed viewers a security wire loosely blocking the removal of a large electrical appliance from a store shelf in the video.
Home Depot employees told The San Francisco Standard that they started seeing items get locked away in some stores in the Bay Area of California starting in January.
They said it started with power tools and more expensive gadgets, but now small items like gloves and cell phone chargers are locked away.
“It used to be big-ticket items, but now even the detergent is locked up,” one California staffer told local reporters.
Some staffers have criticized the measure.
“I can’t unlock hardware because I don’t have the code and they can’t unlock plumbing because only I have the code,” one employee said.
Home Depot’s vice president for asset protection, Scott Glenn, issued a warning about organized shoplifting and the growing theft problem in June.
“Organized retail crime is what I call theft for greed, not theft for need,” he told ABC News.
“I can tell you that in our world, we know that crime is increasing. We see it every day in our stores,” he said.
Earlier this year, he told CNBC that crime was spiking into the double digits.
Many of Glenn’s colleagues seem to agree.
“The country has a retail theft problem,” Home Depot CFO Richard McPhail told CNBC last month.
“We’re confident in our ability to mitigate and blunt that pressure, but that pressure certainly exists out there,” he said.
Home Depot CEO Ted Decker confirmed that the trend had become a big problem in retail to CNBC’s Squawk Box.
“This isn’t the random shoplifter anymore,” he said.
And the problem extends beyond a dip in profits, he added.
Two Home Depot employees were killed this year – Gary Rasor, 83, and Blake Mohs, 26 – in separate attempted theft incidents.
Organized retail crime has become a particularly difficult issue that has cost some national chains billions in losses.
A review by the National Retail Federation in 2022 found that organized retail crime is the main reason for shrinkage in stores when a retailer has fewer products than what is recorded in the books.
Retailers lost $94.5billion in 2021 from shrink – an increase of over $4billion from the year before, according to the survey.
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