Post #5

For this week's blog, I am focusing on unobtrusive research in the fashion industry, specifically unobtrusive research conducted in a retail environment setting. This past summer, I was lucky enough to have my first retail employment experience working for a very well known clothing company, which had its positives and negatives. One of the first things we were trained on was 'loss prevention', aka, how to catch people stealing from the store, and how to prevent it. My store had a unique policy- even if someone was witnessed to have shoplifted, we were not allowed to confront them on it. Under ANY circumstances. The reasoning behind this was legal- if we had wrongly accused someone of taking from the store, there would definitely be a lawsuit in our future, and additionally, more work for the PR department to handle.

During training, we were given a statistic which I found interesting. There are 27 million shoplifters in the United States- 1 in every 11 people. The United States found $15 BILLION dollars in losses last year from shoplifting. Furthermore, my boss was quick to point out that if people think they aren't being watched, they WILL steal.

I often wondered, how do they know this? We often assume that the majority of people are good with a conscience, however, this knowledge must have been gained through unobtrusive research of some kind. In a study I found online,  the researcher watches a store over a period of time, with various shoplifters. The shoplifters, if not being closely watched by the staff, always walked away without problem. Furthermore, if another shopper witnessed the theft, they almost never said anything to the offender or store personnel. This statistic astounded me.

In recent year, unobtrusive research has done a lot in prohibiting shoplifters. Store employees are trained to looks for suspicious people - not to judge on what they look like or wearing, but on their behavior. If they fail to make eye contact, barely look at any of the items for sale but take huge piles of clothing anyway, neglect to grab the proper sizes or constantly refuse help, they are showing blatant signs of possible shoplifting. The knowledge of all of these behavioral tactics was a direct result of the performance of unobtrusive research in retail stores.

Overall, shoplifting for retail corporations is a problem, but measures are being taken to ensure its prevention. It is definitive that anyone who works in a retail setting has been trained in loss prevention, and knows which behaviors and signs to look for in a customer. It can most definitely be said that this is all attributed to careful and important unobtrusive research!