Summary
This article goes on to talk about employee stealing from their own employers. A study taken in 2004 actually proved that 79% of employees have stolen or have thought about stealing from employers. The article also talked about a case of a Safeway employee theft. The company had to install more security cameras to finally catch the thief in action. In just one year, Canadian employers lost about $120 billion just for employee theft. Employee theft is a big problem, as said in the article, about 30% of business collapses due to this.
Connection
In the article, Safeway, they had started to notice shortages in their inventory. This relates to our chapter, which talks about physical inventory, a procedure to count and value the unsold merchandises. This article goes to show that having a physical count of inventory is very important. Also, this relates to the chapter since the chapter talks about cost of goods sold. If items are stolen, or broken, it is considered as cost of goods sold. This means for Safeway, all the amount of merchandise stolen would be considered as COGS, and their gross profit and net income would be lower.
Personal Reflection
I always imagined it would be customers that do the stealing, and I never would have thought that such a high percent of employees would steal. I think that companies should have higher security, by installing more security cameras, or set up store alarms. For example, the store I currently am working at, has no alarm, so if somebody steals and run out of the store, no one would have known. On the other hand, if someone stole from Zellers or any clothing stores, the alarm would start ringing once they walk out the store, and attention would be brought upon them. Even though it will be a large expense, security is something worth investing in.
http://www.canada.com/story.html?id=702695
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1 comment:
Although I believe employees of a company would steal, I'm quite surprised that the employee theft rate is so high. I agree that security is an important and crucial investment to make because it can prevent huge amounts of money loss. All of the statistics show that theft is really a huge problem. However, alarm systems may not work very well to prevent employee theft since the employees would know how to get around it. I think both security cameras as well as alarm systems are necessary to keep the theft rate as low as possible. If possible, I think that inventory checks should be made more often to keep track of losses.
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