The Pandemic and The Vulnerability of Retail Store Workers.

Since the sudden outbreak of the pandemic, retail stores had been facing a greater impact for in store theft, creating greater problems for the staff that must deal with all the different and creative ways that people have developed to be able to take stuff with them, without anyone noticing. Many of the reasons why people have decided to get involved in this type of criminal activity, may be related to coping mechanism to many personal situations that could have gone through during the past year and the current one, situations like the loss of close relative, losing their jobs, or being completely flooded by debt and other money consuming actions that demand too much from them.

Focusing more on the side of the people that must withstand these small criminals and not be able to react, or as marcel Chamorro said, “just give a good customer service.”. Retail store works are forced to receive daily abuse from costumers that wan to outsmart them, by stealing clothes, small home furniture, toys, and even food. They’ve created various methods that help them to not get detected by the security cameras and the tag detectors, like using various pieces of clothes underneath the ones that they were using when they came inside the store. Alongside these strategies, verbal abuse is the most common, and prominent response, when they are caught stealing from the store shelves. Rude responses like “watch me take it” or “try to stop me If you can” are heard through many sections of the retail store where Marcel Chamorro works at. But as he stated while he has been interviewed, the problem of in store theft isn’t recent at all, has been going for years back and all the employees aren’t able to do anything now.

The  only method that they keep as a backup plan for dealing with thieves, is by checking the security cameras and creating profiles for each of the regulars that like stealing from them, and when they’re seen entering the establishment the security guards are alerted to “keep an eye on them” for when they leave the store they could be checked if some type of criminal activity  is commonly related to their profiles. Then another factor comes to the equation of identifying these small criminals, the fact that most of them don’t steal from the same store twice in the same week, makes an even slower reaction time as the profiles of other caught thieves get mixed up with the older files and make it even impossible to keep a good track of them.

Maintaining the same concept that retail store workers are easy to fool, and even easier to outsmart, but is that they can’t stop anyone at all and at the same time they can’t rely on the security of the building. They just can smile, look at people and ask them to be nice enough so that they don’t steal anything and aren’t categorized with the regular thieves and other criminals.