Tis the Season To Be Wary

There are 18 shoplifting days till Christmas

Montgomery Ward has remodeled its spacious outlet in Skokie, Ill., installing new surveillance posts that blend into the decor. Observation towers are disguised as structural supports; protruding mirrors along a wall conceal guards who scan the throngs of shoppers crowding the aisles. Retailers around the country are taking similar security measures. Reason: business is booming in the weeks before Christmas, but so is shoplifting.

Shoppers who neglect to pay for their merchandise are criminals for all seasons, and their numbers are increasing at an alarming rate. The FBI reports more than 600,000 shoplifting arrests across the nation last year, nearly three times as many as in 1970, and the U.S. Department of Commerce estimates merchants' losses from thefts in 1976 at some $8 billion. In the past eight weeks police in Hialeah, Fla., have arrested six members of a band of shoplifters called the Chilean Commandos, trained in Fagin-type schools in Valparaiso and Santiago. South American rings have been collecting booty worth between $150 million and $200 million a year in and around such major Hispanic centers as Miami, New York City and Los Angeles. But the problem of shoplifting is particularly severe at Christmas time, when saturation advertising whets the appetites of consumers, including larcenous ones, and makes the poor feel particularly deprived in an affluent society.

While merchants are stepping up their precautions against dishonest customers, one of their biggest concerns is the rate at which their own employees are doing the lifting. The Commerce Department asserts that at least half of inventory loss is due to theft by employees. As a result, more and more companies are making job applicants take lie detector tests or written "honesty tests." A sample question: "Do you think a person should be fired if he cheats a company out of money several times each month on his expense account?" One Chicago firm of polygraph examiners, John E. Reid and Associates, which conducts both types of tests for business clients, reports that it will have administered more than 107,500 of them this year, compared with only 20,000 seven years ago. In the retail field, 35% to 38% of job applicants failed the test. People seeking work with vending machine companies flunk at the staggering rate of 75%. The testing firm claims that companies that screen applicants will end up with only 13 potential thieves out of 100 new employees. Otherwise, it says, 40% would be likely to steal.

Such security efforts notwithstanding, store owners know the Christmas rush will include a high quotient of thieves. Gerald Lauritzen, director of Southern California's Stores Protective Association, notes that 35% to 40% of the year's total loss from shoplifting occurs in the final quarter--the direct result, he says, of "increased traffic during the holidays." qed

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