StateWays is the only magazine exclusively covering the control state system within the beverage alcohol industry, with annual updates from liquor control commissions and alcohol control boards and yearly fiscal reporting from control jurisdictions
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/286992
StateWays Q www.stateways.com Q March/April 2014 44 Hedonism Wines, for instance, recently began using such caps, customized with the store's logo and colors, to protect wines worth up to £100,000 each. The caps were produced for the store by Alpha High Theft Solutions, a division of Checkpoint Systems (alphaworld.com). The advantage of these systems is the product is there, to see, to touch, to examine, but is also protected from theft. Security and loss-prevention people from control- state agencies fi nd themselves contemplating other types of crime. One concern: following the payment card industry (PCI) rules and regulations about debit- and credit-card transactions. Although payment-card security breaches have been much in the news lately, control-state operations, because they are small com- pared to other retail operations, are not considered likely targets for hackers. However, they do have to be PCI-compliant to avoid fi nes in the case of fraudulent transactions. And control state agencies can have special obstacles to overcome. The Mont- gomery County DLC, for example, uses a network used by all the entire government of the county. It was not practical to make it, with all its uses and users, PCI-compliant. The solu- tion for the DLC: "We use a sepa- rate company, Shift 4 (www.shift4. com)," to process transactions," ex- plained Gus Montes De Oca, chief of operations. "We store no informa- tion on our own system." Wurdeman explained, "Once the card is swiped, the transaction is immediately re- routed. We don't keep any of the information, not even encrypted or tokenized. It's not anywhere in our computers or wires." Another crime control state stores sometimes see: counterfeit bills. "We see that on a pretty frequent basis," said New Hampshire's Dunn. "We've got a great working relationship with the Secret Service." (The Secret Ser- vice's original mission, which it still carries out, is to prevent and inves- tigate the counterfeiting of United States currency.) The NHLC stores use counterfeit detector pens on large bills. Recently, Dunn reported, there was a wave of $20 bill counterfeits, which aren't usu- ally pen-tested, in his state. "The coun- terfeiters spend all day 'washing' their bills into the system," he explained. "They might come to us and buy a nip bottle with a $20, then go to Burger King and buy something for 99 cents with a $20. At the end of their day, they might collect $2,000 of washed, clean money." The NHLC has begun pen-testing $20 bills. AN INSIDE JOB F or retailers in general, employee theft is a big- ger problem than shoplifting. Employees tend to steal more than shoplifters do. According to a survey done by Jack L. Hayes International, a loss-pre- vention fi rm, the average loss per case for employee theft is $715.24, which is fi ve and a half times more than the average for shoplifting cases, $129.12. And employees tend to steal continuously, over time. "If you try to ignore employee theft, it is just going to get worse," said Bregar. And employee theft is very common. According to Gus Montes De Oca, Chief of Operations, Department of Liquor Control, Montgomery County, MD, and Diane Wurdeman, Retail Operations Manager, by the checkout cash register and a signature capture device in one of the county's retail outlets. "What I teach store employees is that, when you talk about customer service, when you talk about preventing underage sales, when you talk about preventing shoplifting, you use the exact same approach: say hello to everyone, ask everyone if they need help." — DIANE WURDEMAN RETAIL OPERATIONS MANAGER, DEPT. OF LIQUOR CONTROL, MONTGOMERY COUNTY, MD.