Visible security: seeing is believing - The Customer Connection

Discount Store News, May 6, 1996

Security has come out of the closet. Retailers are realizing that not only is it OK to talk about the security measures taken to protect their customers, but it's also a necessity to prevent customers from shifting to another store or mall that they perceive as safer. The shopper perception of security is crucial to offset the negative publicity that crimes in retail settings engender.

In a 1995 survey for the National Retail Federation, the University of Florida found that the average discount store in 1994 had 0.09 crimes against customers, ranging from simple assault to rape and murder. That translates into a rate of about 20 crimes against customers per year for chains the size of Wal-Mart and Kmart. Department stores had 0.34 crimes per store.

In raw numbers, the survey of just 341 chains that responded--out of 1,614 queried--found that almost 200 retail customers at all types of stores were the victims of aggravated assault and about 1,500 more were the victims of simple assault in '94, the latest year available.

Armed robbers held up almost 2,000 retail establishments, while arson fires at 40 other stores also endangered customers. Gang-related fights, often involving indiscriminate shootings, threatened the lives of customers in almost 600 incidents.

In serious crimes directly against customers, assailants raped or sexually assaulted 29 customers, murdered four shoppers and kidnapped or took nine patrons hostage.

Among the more serious crimes at discount stores over the past several years were:

* Target: In September 1995, three robbers armed with a submachine gun and semiautomatic handguns attempted to hold up the Target store in San Leandro, Calif., at 11 p.m., but fled empty handed after shooting and killing a Target employee. The trio got into the store's employee entrance during a shift change by donning Target uniforms consisting of red shirts and khaki pants.

* Kmart: Over the past six months, customers at 11 stores were the victims of violent crime, including two rapes.

* Wal-Mart: In September 1995, a 7-year-old girl was kidnapped while shopping with her parents in the Wal-Mart in Pascagoula, Miss., at 11 p.m., but police recovered the child unharmed the next morning.

* Price Club: In April 1994, two armed robbers attempted to take over the warehouse club in Norwalk, Calif., before it opened, but fled when they discovered more employees inside than they had expected.

Events like these have prompted retailers to develop new response programs. Before opening a new store, Kmart makes an initial security survey, said Ben Guffey, director of loss control for Capex, a security firm that also provides services for Target. When a store has a higher degree of risk, increased security measures are taken. Typically, that would involve establishing a police presence or uniformed security guards in cars or on bikes patrolling parking lots, Guffey said.

For example, a new Kmart in the tough Dorchester neighborhood of Boston opened last year in a strip mall. The developer built a police substation in the parking lot, in which operating costs are shared by all tenants. At 15% of its 2,145 stores, Kmart hires either uniformed security guards or off-duty police to patrol parking lots, either in cars or on bikes.

Wal-Mart, at about 7% of its 2,700 stores, supercenters and Sam's Clubs, employs 200 guards on electric golf carts to patrol some of its parking lots and to give customers lifts to their cars in remote sections of the lots, a company spokeswoman said.

However, the Pascagoula store, scene of last September's child kidnapping, isn't one of them. The store does use closed-circuit TV cameras to watch its parking lot, though, and employs uniformed security guards in the store.

At any Wal-Mart, associates will escort customers to their cars if they ask, a spokesman said, although no store signs advise customers of the policy, at least in its East Coast units.

At the Pascagoula unit, store associates put Wal-Mart's Code Adam alert system into action, dropping everything to search the store and its parking lot upon the report of the missing child, but the abductor was already gone.

However, the Code Adam program did stop the attempted kidnapping of a 3-year-old girl from the Wal-Mart store in Crawfordsville, Ind., in November 1993, a Wal-Mart spokesman said.

Kmart employs a similar program, using the name "Code Adam" in Florida and other Southeastern stores, and a generic name elsewhere, Guffey said.

Ames operates a similar program it calls Code Sara, and it has helped find more than 100 children lost in its stores over the past two years, a spokesman said.

Target declines to talk about its efforts to protect customers against crime. But key elements include putting police trailers in high crime area parking lots and giving grants of at least $1,000 to local police departments for crime-fighting programs.

In addition, Target observes entering customers on CCTV cameras and lets them know they are being watched by flashing their pictures on overhead TV monitors.