This store is safe.

That’s the message operators want to send to their customers and employees—and an important reality they make sure to protect.

But how does safety seamlessly blend with customer experience and brand messaging? If some safety measures make a convenience store less convenient, at what point do they stop being a net positive?

An easy example: Doors. Having multiple points of entry makes it easier for customers—as well as bad actors—to grab and go.

Another example is messaging around safety at the pump. Signage or audio or video messages reminding customers to lock their doors and take their valuables with them if they go inside are great ways to keep everyone safe. Will customers interpret these messages as a sign that the retailer is focused on safety—and want to come back—or as a sign that the location is unsafe?

Striking the right balance of security and safety and customer experience isn’t easy, but a growing force of dedicated convenience store leaders are fully engaged in working through these challenges. The inaugural NACS Loss Prevention and Safety Symposium gave operators a chance to learn from each other, learn from industry leaders and share problems and solutions. Attendees included a mix of everyone from single-site operators who manage all aspects of their stores to long-tenured security and safety professionals—both from within and outside the industry—who share a relentless focus on safety, asset protection and loss prevention.

Escalating the Importance of De-escalation

Imagine a homeless person has taken up residence on a c-store site.

What should the store manager do?

A good answer in most situations looks something like this: Approach the person on a human-to-human basis. Ask their name, give them a cup of hot coffee and say something like, “Can you do me a favor? You can stay for maybe another 45 minutes and then you have to move.” It’s the right way to treat people but also more effective than dialing 9-1-1, calling the store operations center, escalating the situation verbally or hoping the problem solves itself.

De-escalation is about playing chess instead of checkers. It’s about thinking about the desired outcome and being strategic about how to get there. And it can be about stopping problems before they start—call it pre-de-escalation.

Michael Loox, senior manager of store security and loss investigations at Sheetz, and Courtney Trieger, manager of retail asset protection support at EG America, shared concrete examples and advice around de-escalation during a breakout session at the Symposium.

• Loox shared the concept of prevention through service, which looks something like this: “Excuse me, but I notice you’ve selected a few of those candy bars. You might want to buy more since it’s a limited time offer.”
• Beer caves can be a sore spot. Adding a monitor so that people can see themselves walking into the cave and/or requiring that they scan an ID to enter the cave are ways to get ahead of the problem.
• In a similar vein, body cameras for security officers are promising—particularly ones that have a screen so that people can see they’re being recorded. If security officers aren’t present, the store manager might be a good candidate to wear the tech.
• Here’s a specific tip: Train frontline workers not to say “have a nice day” to a departing customer after after an angry encounter. It might trigger the individual and restart a confrontation.
• Training around de-escalation (and any other safety related topic) is valued by employees and reinforces the importance retailers place on their most valued asset: people. If for some reason your particular store culture is challenging around this topic, start small and get buy-in from a handful of stores or a few key leaders. Younger employees grew up in an environment where they’re used to doing active shooter drills in schools. They expect safety and security to be a point of conversation.
• If an in-store situation continues to escalate, the key is to just leave a person alone. Train your people to not make eye contact or engage in any other way.

Using Data to Manage Safety and Security

Not all stores are created equal. When it comes to balancing safety and security with customer experience, it’s vital to know which stores require what level of risk management.

The basic concept is relatively simple: Group your stores into tiers and assign different interventions to different stores. A store that is in the lowest risk tier may not require any additional resources, whereas a store in the highest risk tier may require an all-of-the-above approach.

Britt Davidson, senior manager of asset protection at Parker’s Kitchen, shared in a breakout session important advice and insights for gathering and making data-driven decisions, as well as how operators can execute a safety strategy for their business.

Start with a spreadsheet. For each store, enter data such as sales, age-verified sales, transactions, incident reports, 9-1-1 calls, alarms triggered, shrink and employee turnover rate, as well as information about the area that it’s in, such as CCTV requests. Various sources can offer neighborhood-by-neighborhood crime scores and cameras or alarm systems can track things like gunshots heard in the area.

Younger employees grew up in an environment where they’re used to doing active shooter drills in schools. They expect safety and security to be a point of conversation.

Customer count is another important metric, and one that can be calculated via AI through your camera system. Davidson shared that stores with a high customer count-to-transaction ratio are most prone to shrink.

You can also add checkboxes for variables like whether a location is open 24 hours, whether it has multiple points of ingress and egress and whether it sells liquor.

There might be pockets of useful information in your organization that you don’t know about. What sort of data does the team that picks locations for new builds use? The exchange of information can work both ways—the security side should have a voice in analyzing possible sites, and looping loss prevention into discussions around new builds can prevent costly mistakes.

In the same tracking document, add details about the store’s security system. For example: How many cameras does it have, and what kind?

Don’t assume that your store count should be evenly split into tiers, either. If you’re creating four tiers, for example, don’t put a quarter of your stores in each level. The tier system will be used to make decisions, so be intentional and separate out the stores that most need resources. As an example, you might end up with 10% of your stores in the high-risk category, 10% elevated, 40% medium and 40% low.

Once you have your tiers, determine what makes sense for your operation. Guards, physical enhancements like shatterproof glass, better cameras and alarm systems, removing or permanently closing doors, not stocking high-theft items—what is the full toolbox your operation has available? Your high-risk stores may get all the tools, while your elevated-risk stores may get half, and your lowest risk stores only a few.

Protecting the Fuel Pump

Skimming has come a long way over the past decade. The techniques and tools thieves use to compromise fuel dispensers and ATMs have evolved significantly, from overlays on keypads to proportional valve tampering.

The challenge for retailers is to know what to look for, said Byron Coleman, manager of asset protection and security at Wawa Inc. “If you don’t think you’ve got a problem, you’ve got a problem,” he said.

He explained that skimmers are overlays placed on top of POS systems, while shimmers, which contain computer chips, are thin metal devices inserted into payment systems to steal customer data. Shimmers can be difficult to detect with the naked eye. Store employees are advised to gently tug on a card reader, which will often reveal the inserted device.

The use of stolen cards is often associated with another crime that is costly to convenience stores: fuel theft. “Think about the loss of revenue that’s associated with this,” said Coleman, adding that fuel pump manipulation can result in a significant loss in fuel sales. “If there’s a 100-gallon volume drop within 15 minutes, then there’s something going on at that location” he said. Here are a few techniques to be aware of:

• Pulser tampering, which involves disconnecting the fuel flow input shaft and reconnecting it to a homemade motorized device with a speed controller. This results in a deceptive flow rate being measured, although the actual flow rate remains unchanged. This crime typically occurs when a dispenser is activated with a gift card or stolen credit card, causing the point of sale/fuel controller to fail in properly recording the sale. Consequently, a criminal can dispense 200 or more gallons of fuel and drive away without paying anywhere near the full cost.
• Proportional valve tampering, a technique that involves manipulating the proportional valve, which regulates the flow of fuel through the dispenser unit’s internal electrical system. Criminals clamp wires to the proportional valve coil wires and attach them to an external battery, signaling the valve to open and dispense fuel without the sale being recorded on the POS unit.

Unfortunately, thieves are good at staying ahead of solutions to thwart their efforts. The takeaway is to be alert, stay on top of how thieves are stealing both cardholder data and fuel, and conduct frequent sweeps of the fuel island.

Convenience stores are the great public square of society. Everybody goes to convenience stores. You all have a constituency, and if you speak up with one voice, either through your national association or your local state associations, I promise you people like me will listen to you.” —South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson

Measuring and Reporting Total Loss

In 2019, the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) released a report that analyzed the global retail industry’s adoption of Total Retail Loss (TRL), a concept of defining and managing loss within a retail organization. An increasing number of retailers are adopting this comprehensive approach, pioneered by University of Leicester professor Adrian Beck, to managing financial loss across their business.

Casey’s has adopted this concept, explained Mark Stinde, vice president of asset protection at the Ankeny, Iowa-based company, and approaches TRL from both the shrink and overall safety perspective across the business.

Stinde shared some of the strategies and tools that Casey’s uses to reduce losses and improve efficiency throughout the company. “For us, it’s been a real cultural shift,” he said.

Initially, the total loss program focused on general merchandise and grocery and later expanded to prepared food, dispensed beverages and safety. Stinde explained that quantifying all loss components in the business was key, along with industry benchmarking and business partner alignment.

Total loss program components he highlighted include:

• Mitigation strategies like deploying an exception reporting tool that uses data analysis to flag spikes in inventory loss/shrink to help identify theft. Stinde explained that Casey’s simultaneously invested in a central investigations team, where several investigators can go out into the field and track issues like missing deposits and theft.
• For data reporting, analytics and visualization, Casey’s uses Power BI as its primary solution, replacing Excel almost entirely.
• Implementation of a total loss matrix, which categorizes losses by store and category, as well as performance matrix, which ties back to store operations bonus calculations.

Protecting Your Supply Chain and Deliveries

Glenn Master, head of asset protection, security and crisis management at McLane Company, walked through a troubling case of cargo theft, where millions in cigarettes were brazenly stolen from delivery vehicles just as they pulled up to a retail location.

Cargo theft refers to the criminal act of stealing goods from a delivery vehicle (i.e., truck or trailer) at a specific location or during delivery. This can involve criminals stealing a few crates of product or the entire trailer itself.

A case study Master shared highlighted the pervasiveness of cargo theft.

The “Oakland Bandits” were an organized retail crime ring specifically targeting cigarette deliveries in northern California, often in broad daylight. Thefts occurred two to three times a week by four to six thieves. In total, they were able to steal over 4.5 million cigarettes.

Given the areas that thieves were targeting, Master noted that the investigation faced challenges due to the involvement of multiple police departments across different cities, which were not initially communicating with each other.

Trackers were placed in cigarette cartons to trace stolen goods, which led investigators to an apartment complex that they were able to surveil. Investigators followed individuals leaving the complex with large bags of stolen product. One was delivered to the California State Welfare Office, where a social worker was selling stolen cigarettes to welfare recipients as they picked up their welfare checks. The second was to unlicensed smoke shops owned by relatives of one of the suspects.

The criminals were also posting on social media, which provided valuable evidence for district attorneys. Eventually the investigation led to the arrest of key players in the crimes and recovery of stolen product.

Master noted that cargo theft spiked 57% in 2023 compared to 2022. The nature of cargo theft has changed, with factors like the ability to resell stolen goods on the internet, the rise of organized retail crime and lack of visibility to the public and in the media about this type of theft. The impact of cargo theft also varies by geographic location, with varying levels of response and communication from law enforcement.

While it’s a significant problem within the convenience store ecosystem, the experts noted personal employee safety always comes first. Just like staying out of a robber or disgruntled customer’s way if they become violent, not engaging with cargo thieves is the smart course of action, said speakers.