5 Ways To Secure Your Store From “Smash-And-Grab” Burglars
The prevalence of smash-and-grab retail burglaries is ever growing. Groups of desperate burglars using the element of surprise quickly smash into a store and grab whatever merchandise they can before someone arrives at the scene. Since almost 80 percent of robberies go unsolved, and because these robbers are able to get in and out so quickly, getting attacked often means retail stores lose valuables for good. How do you know if your retail location is in danger? What can you do to protect it from this sort of fast, harmful break-in? To help answer these questions, here’s a look at what can make your store vulnerable and how to protect it from smash-and-grab theft.
What Retail Burglars Look For
Whether you sell jewelry or home décor, protecting your shop starts with knowing what makes it vulnerable. Smash-and-grab burglars tend to look for: stores in isolated areas, stores with poor lighting or bad locks, stores with no formal security system and stores where it will be easy to get in and out. Do any of these characteristics describe your shop? If so, it is susceptible to attack and less protected than it could be. It’s time to do something.
How You Can Protect Your Retail Location from Burglary
Below, consider five key strategies that are designed to increase security and insulate your shop from danger.
Install Security Features: Security features not only make it harder for someone to break into your store, they also create a visual deterrent to would-be thieves. They signal that your store won’t be easy to rob. Reinforced glass doors/windows make it harder for burglars to break through entry points. Roll-down security panels or screens add extra protection to glass doors that smash-and-grab robbers like to break down. Also consider adding security cameras to monitor the premises, a monitored security system that can alert law enforcement the minute the system is tripped and an on-site safe or vault for storing valuables securely.
Light Everything Up: Because most smash-and-grab burglaries occur at night, work against the cover of darkness that robbers love. Add both indoor and outdoor lights to your property in order to keep your location illuminated and protected from sneaky break-ins. A lighted store is a store that someone is caring for and that seems a little harder to steal from. Also, as an extra security measure, look for outdoor lights that are made to withstand vandalism so burglars can’t smash them and find cover again.
Minimize Overnight Cash: Cash lures robbers, so keep less cash at your store overnight. The cash register, the cash box and all money-holding locations are obvious first choices for burglars — don’t leave money there. What’s more, cash drawers are expensive to repair, so leave them open and empty at night to show there’s nothing inside. This keeps burglars from taking time to damage them.
Train Your Team. All of your employees should understand not only how to help prevent against robberies, but also what to do when one is happening. Create a clear, actionable list of steps and train your employees to know what to do when they face a robber or see something suspicious. Through a company-wide understanding of how to prevent and respond to danger, you’re better equipped to protect your store.
Care for Your Property: Criminals are attracted to retail locations in poor condition because they indicate that the owners or tenants don’t pay much attention to what’s going on. If the owners and tenants aren’t watching a store, it’s a perfect place to rob, as it will likely go unnoticed for a while. For this reason, one additional way to protect your store from robbery is to take care of it: clean up trash, repair broken windows or screens, keep landscaping trimmed, etc. Tending your location signals that someone is watching what happens at your shop.
Whatever your industry and location, when you’ve added the right security features, installed indoor and outdoor lights, kept cash safe, trained your team and found a way to keep up with your property, you have a retail location that robbers won’t want to mess with — follow the steps in this post to protect your property today.
About Opus Retail Solutions
Opus Retail Solutions specialise in providing Retail, Wholesale, & Integrated e-Commerce Solutions through its Software suite Opus Retail Manager. The entire EPOS operation is managed from Opus’s Headquarters in Belfast, Northern Ireland, along with regional development and support offices in the UK. Opus has been developing software for over 30 years and was one of the first Windows based EPOS systems in 1997. Opus Retail Manager is hardware independent and we offer hardware depending on client requirements, policy or budget.
The key to Opus’s success lies with its ongoing investment in Research and Development and Training to keep our Software products and services and staff world class. Services range from specifying client requirements to providing custom modifications, system implementation, training with a special emphasis on after-sales support so our customers can get the most from their system. The Company invests c £100k pa in R&D to ensure it’s software remains world-class.
The entire Opus operation is managed from Opus’s Headquarters in Belfast, Northern Ireland, along with regional development and support offices in the UK and Russia. Opus has partners all over the world and currently ships the software in five languages. Please contact us if you would like to discuss a partnership.
Although our Retail Manager Software and services procedures have evolved over the years from DOS through Windows enabling us to stay ahead of the curve, our core objective is still to provide innovative, best in breed, easy to use and robust EPoS solutions, no matter what the industry, the size or the individual need.
