Your Store Is Protected. Is the Merchandise Protected Too?
Are your premises protected?
You've installed an alarm system, surveillance cameras and access control so you justly feel protected. These devices will effectively deter burglars who try to enter after business hours, or will catch them in the act. But the small thieves can still eat into your profits.
Shoplifters And Dishonest Employees
With the big professionals neutralized, any losses you still suffer occur in broad daylight.  Merchandise is stolen by people who entered your premises legally, through open doors. The Retail Council of Canada found that the average Canadian retailer lost 1.02% in 2007, down from 1.8% of sales to shrinkage in 2000. This decline is thanks to the strategies and technologiesapplied by Canadian retailers, but still amounts to a huge loss. Shrinkage is the difference between the quantity you bought from your supplier and the quantity that you have available for sale. It is estimated that 62% of the loss was to theft by customers and 33% to theft by employees. Average loss per shoplifting episode was $370. And keep in mind that these figures are averages: some businesses are more prone to shoplifting and employee theft than others. The shrinkage range ran as high as 5%. With the thin profit margins many firms are experiencing now, these losses might even put some of them out of business. You may be among the many retailers who are losing profits to many small thefts.
Losses due to shoplifting and employee theft are actually much greater than the out of pocket costs. Because of theft, you have to raise prices, making you less competitive. Your service staff is busy watching the suspicious "customers" and aren't offering your honest customers the service they deserve. And if you are locking up expensive items to protect them, you lose sales because honest customers, who would like to touch and handle them, may simply move on to another store. Lowe's Home Improvement Stores found that "since we took faucets out of lockup in EAS stores, there was a 25 percent increase in sales for that product group". Wow! What a difference!
Loss Prevention
To complete your protection, you need a system to help reduce shoplifting and employee theft. Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) may be the answer to your merchandise shrinkage problem. That's a fancy way to refer to those tags or labels attached to items to make them difficult to steal. Some experts believe that shrinkage can be reduced by 60% with a good EAS system in place. That would pretty well cover losses due to shoplifting and employee theft.
Visible and prominent EAS devices deter potential shoplifters and catch actual thieves before they leave the premises. You can increase sales by leaving high value items on tables and shelves And because the system is passive, your staff is free to serve your honest customers better. An EAS system together with surveillance cameras and an access control system constitute a reliable loss prevention system and can significantly reduce merchandise shrinkage due to shoplifting and employee theft. Theft prevention can pay for itself in a very short time, possibly in as little as one to two years.
What Kind of Loss Prevention System Is Right For Your Store?
 Magen can help design a Loss Prevention system based on the nature of your products, the layout and architecture of your premises and on the other loss prevention facilities installed.
How the Anti-Theft EAS System Works?
Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) Systems employ a number of different technologies for theft prevention, but all systems apply a similar approach: any attempt to remove an article from the premises or to remove a tag from the article while on the premises, will trigger an alarm to alert the staff. Some systems will also render a stolen article useless to the thief, thus adding deterrence: even if the thief succeeds in removing the article from the premises, he or she will have gained nothing.
Since shoplifting in these circumstances is both risky and unrewarding, it is reasoned that the rational thief will refrain from stealing. When a legal purchase is made, the tag or label is removed or deactivated by the staff, permitting honest customers to carry their purchases out of the store without setting off an alarm.
Theft prevention devices are tags or labels with sensors, which may be attached to articles in a variety of ways depending on the size, shape, material and value of an article. Tags or labels may be disposable or reusable. In addition to the tag itself, the Loss Prevention system requires hardware: Detectors and Deactivators or Detachers.
False Alarms
While you want to prevent theft, you also want to avoid false alarms that occur when a legitimate purchase sets off an alarm for whatever reason. An honest customer who has been embarrassed may refrain from visiting your store in the future. You want your system and the equipment to be reliable. Let Magen help you choose the most dependable and suitable system and install it for you. Magen has a long record of reliable service. If you are renovating your facility, now is the ideal time to install the hardware for your EAS system.
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