Last week, a woman who claimed she won $1.5 million in the lottery and offered to buy clothes for customers caused a riot inside an Ohio Burlington Coat Factory. According to police officials, when shoppers found out the whole thing was a hoax, angry customers threw merchandise around and looted, leaving the store looking as though a hurricane had passed through it.
On October 6, Dwight Howard from the Orlando Magic started a treasure hunt game with thousands of fans via Twitter. Howard, who is featured on the cover of NBA Live 2010, said he would give away copies of the game to the first five people that showed up to meet him and proceeded to give clues online leading them to a local GameStop store. The employees working in the store had their hands full that morning.
While rare, the examples above are just part of what retail employees may experience. For a retailer or shopping center, these incidents can be a blessing or a curse: offering unique brand awareness or causing a company to become the center of controversy.
Planned events, such as the upcoming holiday season, offer time to prepare, train and execute–hopefully with flawless precision. By and large, stores and shopping centers serve millions of customers each day. Fashion shows, celebrity appearances, parades and center courtyard concerts are just part of doing business. These events drive traffic, develop brand awareness and can be a lot of fun.
That said, any seasoned loss prevention executive can share a few stories about event planning “challenges”. In rare cases, things can quickly spiral out of control with devastating outcomes.
Last year’s Black Friday began with a tragic trampling and death of a store security associate working at a Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, New York. When the doors opened at 5:00am, customers rushed the doors, killing one and leaving four others injured, including a pregnant woman. When Police and Fire officials arrived on the scene, they were jostled by customers and hampered rescue efforts.
In September during the G-20, stores in the Pittsburgh area were evacuated and boarded up. This was a defensive measure following the G-8 summit experiences in 2007, where retailers such as Starbucks and Gap were targeted and had stores vandalized. Retailers made the right decision closing that day as police fired pepper spray at protesters marching in the street.
Retailers are making their list and checking it twice before Black Friday. I’ve heard of several retailers planning table-top and in-store training weeks before November 27th. According to one blog, Best Buy has trial runs scheduled a week prior to kick-off.
This week during NRF’s recent Loss Prevention Senior Executive Summit, I moderated a session on event planning and crowd control. The panelists, Tina Sellers from GameStop, Steve Crumrine from General Growth Properties and Detective Keith Allen from the Dallas Police Department, offered great advice for retail executives.
In summary, the panel unanimously agreed that conducting an in-depth risk assessment, identifying potential internal and external stakeholders, carefully evaluating security and crowd control resources and meeting with onsite personnel responsible for the premises are critical first steps to planning any event.
Cross-functional internal team meetings along with members of mall management (including security) and local law enforcement can help identify event protocols and contingency plans. Effective planning and communication was cited over and over again as the key ingredients to a successful event.
While some crowd control issues can never be predicted, or entirely anticipated, retailers agreed that staff training and constant communication can help mitigate even the most unforeseen events.