What to Do About Shoplifting and Theft at Your Retail Store
By Mike Moglia, Founder of Columbia Protection
Shrink is a polite word for what is actually happening: people walking out of your store with your merchandise, sometimes daily, sometimes in groups, and your staff has been told not to intervene because it is not safe. They are right. It is not safe. That is why it is our job, not theirs.
Retail theft in Spokane ranges from opportunistic shoplifting to organized groups hitting the same stores on rotation. The common thread is that thieves target stores where they know nothing will happen. Here is how to make your store the one they skip.
A visible uniformed presence is the strongest deterrent
This is not complicated. Thieves do not steal in front of armed, uniformed officers. A visible officer at or near the entrance changes every calculation a shoplifter makes on the way in. Most retail theft prevention fails because it is invisible: cameras, tags, and locked cases that thieves defeat in seconds. A person in uniform cannot be defeated. They can only be avoided, by going to a different store.
Cover the high-risk hours, not all hours
You do not need an officer standing at the door 40 hours a week. Retail theft follows patterns: after school, evenings, weekends, holidays. Concentrated coverage during your actual high-risk windows costs far less than full-time presence and deters the large majority of incidents. We help you identify those windows from your incident history instead of guessing.
Monitor entry and exit without harassing customers
Good retail security is visible but not aggressive. Officers watch entry and exit points, note repeat offenders, and maintain a presence that honest customers barely register and thieves cannot ignore. The goal is deterrence first. When deterrence fails, the officer is already in position to act.
## Document every incident the same way
Repeat offenders get caught because of paper trails. Every incident needs the same documentation: time, description, what was taken, photos or footage, and whether the individual was trespassed from the store. That file is what turns the tenth visit into a felony shoplifting charge instead of ten separate misdemeanors nobody connected. We document incidents to a standard that holds up, because we have seen what happens when it does not.
## Trespass repeat offenders formally
The same trespass process that works for commercial properties works for retail. Once a shoplifter is formally trespassed and documented, their next visit is criminal trespass, and our officers can detain them for law enforcement. Organized groups that rotate through stores learn fast which locations have this process in place.
## Protect your staff by taking them out of it
Your employees should never have to confront a thief. It is dangerous, it creates liability, and it is not their job. When you have an officer on site, your staff can do what you hired them to do: sell, stock, and serve customers. The confrontation, when it is needed, belongs to trained, armed professionals.
## What it costs
Retail coverage is typically an armed officer at $65 an hour during your high-risk windows. For many stores, that is a handful of hours on the days theft actually happens, not a full-time post. One prevented incident a week usually covers the cost, before you count what it does for staff morale and customer confidence.
If theft is eating your margins, the answer is not another camera or another policy your staff cannot safely enforce. It is a person in uniform at the door. Call Columbia Protection at (509) 342-7233 for a free security assessment, and we will look at your incident patterns and tell you honestly what coverage you actually need.