Or you stop in to buy a lotto ticket when the jackpot is especially big? Each store might serve hundreds or even thousands of customers daily. With over , convenience stores operating in the United States and growing, they continue to be one of the easiest targets for robberies.
Though experts have a range of explanations as to why this is happening, they can all agree on certain truths and ways to prevent it from happening. Most of these stores are open late into the night or 24 hours a day. The late evening and early morning hours offer more opportunities when fewer customers and witnesses are present to see the crimes to take place.
One of the ways to reduce the danger of being open so late is to teach your staff safety measures should they find themselves held-up at gunpoint. Additionally, many states require convenience stores to have a silent alarm and bulletproof glass if they remain open late or overnight for the protection of their staff. Have you ever noticed more than two staff members working at a convenience store at the same time?
Most convenience stores usually have a maximum of two staff members on duty at a time, and this is often only during peak hours. As such, the small number of employees per store makes it extremely difficult to deter, let alone stop criminals. An easy safety solution is to install a mobile security patrol unit that regularly checks in on your convenience store.
If you own more than one store, this unit could work throughout the night, surveilling all of your stores continuously. This might be a logical solution instead of having to hire another staff member for each of your stores. The smaller size of convenience stores makes it considerably easier for criminals to navigate its floor plan. They can enter and exit close to the cash register and can see the full layout of the store very quickly after entering.
There is typically a single set of doors that allow access to the store, so a criminal does not risk being surprised by a police officer arriving from another entrance. Not to mention the promotional posters that are affixed to them as well.
These items are vital to the operation of a successful business. Still, they block a clear line of sight into and out of the store, which will make a would-be criminal less likely to follow through with a robbery. As a convenience store owner, make sure people can see into your store and that it is well lit on the inside. Consider installing security cameras both in and outside of your store.
If a criminal is looking for an amount of quick cash, then robbing a convenience store is one of the best ways to do it. These types of stores stock items such as cigarettes, candy, beer, frozen foods, and sodas. Items of convenience that are usually paid for using cash as opposed to an electronic transaction, thereby leading to a relatively large amount of money in the register.
Convenience store owners can limit the amount of money kept in their cash register. Unfortunately, for those independently owned stores, losses may be unrecoverable, due to the inability of many small operations to afford insurance coverage. Other less direct costs include the various criminal justice activities of state and local governments, including police investigations, prosecutions, and incarceration and supervision of offenders. Victimization can further limit the ability of these stores to attract and maintain employees for the night shifts, particularly in stores that operate 24 hours a day 20 and those with a high volume of cash transactions, a characteristic of such stores.
The combination of operational expenses and security challenges can be financially burdensome. Victim employees can also suffer psychological harm. Psychological problems resulting from victimization may not only affect the employee's subsequent workplace performance, but also can affect the store's daily operations. Understanding the factors that contribute to convenience store robbery will help you frame your own local analysis questions, determine good effectiveness measures, recognize key intervention points, and select appropriate responses.
Research has identified many factors that influence a robbery's likelihood or outcome. In some cases, the findings are inconsistent or contradictory. This may be because it can be difficult to interpret studies based on small numbers of stores or difficult to determine if certain store features influenced the robberies, or were changed in response to the robberies. Operation hours are by far the strongest factor contributing to convenience story robbery, particularly for stores open 24 hours a day.
Several characteristics of a store's interior layout can influence its vulnerability to a robbery. Common among these is visibility, from two perspectives. First, employees should be able to see their surroundings, and second, people outside the store, including police on patrol, should be able to see into the store. Visibility is also a factor outside the store. Poorly lit gasoline islands and parking lots increase the chances of a robber's selecting a particular store, 28 since employees cannot see what is occurring outside the store.
There is also a relationship between parking lot size and store vulnerability in that a large parking area in front of the store reduces the ability of passersby to provide informal surveillance of the store's interior and exterior. For instance, poorly designed fencing or landscaping can facilitate a robber's quick flight from the store, thereby making the store a more attractive target.
There may be a relationship between the location and surrounding environment of a convenience store and its risk of becoming a robbery target. For instance, one study found that stores located in shopping complexes or strip malls had fewer robberies than those not in more concentrated commercial settings.
Convenience stores can be distinguished from other retail establishments by the hours they operate, store size, and products sold. Most are open every day until late in the evening, with some open 24 hours a day. Some are corporate franchises, others are independently owned. Single-store businesses that are owned and operated as a one-store business or franchise dominate the market. There are generally six convenience store formats. Each is categorized by the size of the store and the products it sells, as shown in Table 1 below.
Risk of robbery based on a variety of administrative and environmental factors has been proposed. For instance, stores with gas pumps, sometimes referred to as convenience gas stations, are less likely to be robbed than stores without pumps. The security and crime prevention measures convenience store owners employ vary considerably with the type and structure of ownership.
Several studies have evaluated the presence of two or more clerks to reduce the risk of robbery. The findings have been inconsistent, and are highly debated. The handling and storage of cash has a significant influence on the targeting of stores for robbery.
The Athena Research Corp. Again, both the ability to purchase such units and the implementation of strict cash protocol depend on the ownership type and structure. A strict cash control protocol can significantly reduce the chances a store will be targeted by potential robbers.
Credit: Nancy Leach. Incident response policies. This includes following the offender's instructions, staying calm and quiet, avoiding eye contact, not making any sudden movements, remaining inside the workplace, not attacking the offender, while making mental notes to provide to the police regarding the offender's physical description.
Other suggestions include installing a visible drop safe to allow for natural surveillance throughout the store Faulkner, Landsittel, and Hendricks Like robbers in general, most convenience store robbers are male 95 percent with about two-thirds of them under the age of Most are seeking quick cash, often to buy drugs. Serial robbers, particularly those that victimize the same location on more than one occasion, appear to be more professional, even determined, in their approach.
They are significantly more likely to carry a gun, to have been in prison before, to wear a disguise, and to choose a specific time for the robbery. They are also more likely to be violent, and cause a higher rate of employee injury. Since it has been found that certain stores are more vulnerable to repeat victimization, we can conclude that robbers are selecting those stores because of the opportunities they offer for successful completion of a robbery.
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