Theft is Already Costing You More Than You Think.
Most small retailers know theft is a risk. Fewer realise how much it's already costing them, or that it's coming from more than one direction.
There's the financial cost, which shows up eventually in stocktake variances and margins that don't add up. And then there's the other cost, the one that doesn't appear on a P&L: what repeated theft does to the people running the business. Discovering that customers have been stealing from you regularly, or that someone on your team has, changes how you show up each day. It affects the feel of the place. Some business owners find it harder to shake than the dollar figure.
Both need to be managed. Neither manages itself.
On customer theft
The starting point is knowing what's actually going missing. Your stocktake data will give you a broad picture, but spot stocktakes on specific products, done weekly and recorded somewhere staff can see, give you something more useful: a visible number that the whole team is aware of and working against.
From there, the response is mostly practical. Move high-theft products to positions with camera coverage. Remove the blind spots that make theft easy. Put a portable work table near the area and shift tasks there — pricing, invoice checking, anything that keeps someone present without making surveillance obvious. Try different locations for the same stock and track whether the numbers change. Stand outside your own shop and watch how people interact with the display. The patterns become clear.
If you gather actionable evidence, involve the police. The other option is to note the problem, do nothing, and keep absorbing the losses. That's a choice too, just not a good one.
Tower worked with a retailer who had been losing stock at a consistent rate without anyone noticing. Once the pattern surfaced in the business data and a proper response was put in place, the first year returned $20,000 to the bottom line. Nobody had been making any particular effort to steal. They simply believed, correctly, that nobody was watching.
On employee theft
Employee theft gets less attention than customer theft, which is partly why it's more expensive. It's harder to catch because it rarely looks dramatic. It's a discount applied to a personal purchase. A refund processed against a return that didn't happen. Stock moved out in small quantities over time. Hours logged that weren't actually worked. None of this shows on a camera. It's in the transaction data, if you know what to look for.
Tower has spent decades learning what to look for. This happened gradually, through years of working closely with independent specialty retailers and through some genuinely difficult situations. Tower staff have assisted police and prosecutors and given expert witness evidence in court cases involving employee theft. The most recent version of the software includes AI tools that surface patterns in transaction data that a human reviewer might take considerably longer to identify.
The things that actually help
A written theft policy, explained properly to staff before anything goes wrong, matters as much as any software feature. People should know what the business tracks, what constitutes theft, and what happens when it's detected. The goal isn't to create an atmosphere of suspicion. It's to make clear that accountability exists, and to protect the people who are already doing the right thing.
Review frequency matters more than most people realise. An annual stocktake tells you how bad the damage is. Weekly till reconciliation and monthly stock variance checks are what actually catch problems before they compound.
Tower Systems builds POS software for independent specialty retailers across Australia and New Zealand, including newsagencies, garden centres, gift shops, jewellers and bike shops.
Call 1300 662 957 or email
