The Retail Guard

"Guilty until proven otherwise"...

As your Serbian language knowledge is probably not so good, I can not recommend you to read some blogs here discussing that customer approach. "Customer orientated attitude" needs hugh improvement.

Please try not to criticize but to give some options useful to the improvement of this approach. Eg. how would you make it win win, so customers are happy (not feeling guilty as soon as they enter some store) but also making "security" invisible, so the store is secured against the loses caused by temptation of some clients to have a toy without paying.

Also some CSR would help, giving some toys to the poorest etc.

My view on the myriad ranks of overpriced and over-specific toys available in Dexy and elsewhere is that they are rarely worth the prices asked

This is an uderstatement. When someone sells for 100e something that I myself bought in US for 30 dollars (full price, no discount), then there is only one word for it: cold blooded robbery. Unfortunately, in Serbia toy market is in hands of one man, just like cellphone and IT market - every toy store has everything that all other have, nothing more and nothing less.

You know that's how many companies operate (presuming everyone is guilty until proven so). Take a look at nsa for example. Or visa where teams of people don't trust you at all and verify your financial activities. Or google, or or or... Some people are physically next to you so you get pissed since you feel them. The best thing is just to tell em to buzz off. Or move your business elsewhere. No need to get frustrated.

I had an ugly experience in a toy store when an employee prevented my toddler from playing with one of those Fisher Price toys (the musical ones that have *TRY ME* written on the box) by physically grabbing the toy off the shelf and raising her voice at the kid.

Apparently sadistic tendencies that can be best exhibited by snatching toys from one and a half year olds and leaving them in tears are a bonus when they screen for shop employees.

The shoplifting in stores in Serbia is handled with cameras, buzzers (it took us a whole month to discover why my wife buzzes whenever she walks through a shop door. Meanwhile we found and removed over a dozen buzzers from most unbelievable places), but mostly it is handled by a simple cruel solution:
If anything is missing (or is damaged) at the end of a period, the employees in the shop must pay for it out of their own pocket. The only allowance they are given is that they can divide the total sum of loss between themselves.
What you saw that day wasn't a soldier on duty, but a desperate person whose shameful monthly paycheck is further, regularly depleted by shoplifters.

"Niko nema što Srbin imade, što nemade to rado ukrade."

Unfortunately, this country has fallen from grace quite some time ago - if I was to be facetious I could claim that Serbia is not a country or that we were never 'in grace' - and that has some serious repercussions. One of them is that thievery has become a national sport of a sort, certainly practiced by the majority and tolerated by almost everybody.

I'm not talking only about shoplifting, pickpocketing, (armed) robbery and such direct examples of thievery - fortunately the vast majority of citizens still have some shame (or fear?) left in them not to engage in those - I'm talking about all examples of unrightful acquiring of goods or services. From fixing tenders and stealing en masse on public procurements so well established by our politicians down to the workers stealing nuts and bolts from their factories. From politicians taking their mistresses on 'business trips' under the pretense of doing public good to your regular Joe who will come up with a thousand excuses for not paying for the mass transit. Not to mention widely practiced tax evasion, grey market and economy and similar... I don't want to claim that Serbia is the worst place on the planet, far from it, but I dare you to find another country where manhole covers have to be welded shut so that they don't get stolen (and some citizen breaking his/her neck by 'stepping' on a missing cover).

In such environment, shop owners have to take a great care at protecting their goods so it's not surprising that whenever you enter a shop you feel as if somebody has eyes on your back all the time. I knew quite a few shop owners and heard from them some unbelievable stories regarding the magnitude of shoplifting that occurs each and every day. It can go up to 10% of the daily revenue, in dependence of the shop type. Once they've caught a guy who had a magnetic stripper used for removing those ugly security tags from clothes - he claimed he purchased it openly on Buvljak

Cameras can be useful in letting customers feel more comfortable but it's hard (and expensive) to cover the whole shop properly, especially if it's a busy shop, and even then there are good thieves which know how to work out from the camera angles how to steal without being noticed. Not to mention that many shop owners buy mockery cameras in an attempt to at least keep the 'rookies' and junkies away from trying to rob them.

And then there is the law where the state will not prosecute anyone who steals less than 15,000 RSD of value (they said they'll lower this value but I don't remember passing that law change) which in many parts of the country is almost a monthly wage. If you, as a shop owner, can prove that somebody stole from you less than that amount you might take them to a civil court but with our court system it will probably cost you quite more than what was stolen from you in the first place and there is always a chance that you won't be alive by the time the process completes.

Thus, having the clerks keeping a close eye on the customers is still the best shoplifting prevention method there is. To make that work, as I'm sure that the clerks don't really enjoy being policemen in their shops, shop owners usually make that as a job obligation so you can lose your job or you'll have to repay everything that was stolen from your salary. The latter is commonly practiced not only to prevent shoplifting by thieves, but also by the clerks themselves - some shop owners I knew didn't want to punish their employees for the mischiefs of others only to catch some of them stealing and attributing that to non-existing thieves.

Who should we blame? Politicians and the society in general. You can blame the clerk for being rude, or the shop / shop owner for outrageous pricing, but you really cannot blame them individually for trying to protect the goods from thieves the best way they can. You might not be a thief, but the clerk cannot read your mind to discern if you are there to shop or to rob, so they're just playing it safe. Keep that in mind the next time you feel the stark look on your back in some other shop...