Having spent nearly six years within AP, i can honestly say that these dramatic cuts to the payroll of Assets Protection is ultimately going to cost Target HUGE bucks!! Lets take a look at the past year-- First, they had a lot of restructuring of Investigations (Plain clothes AP/Intelligence Center). They restructured the roles of the Investigations Specialist (IS) and reduced the roles/eliminated the positions. These were the people that get sent to stores in plain clothes to apprehend shoplifters that cause LARGE amounts of shortage to the company, usually affecting multiple stores (aka Boosters). This also affected the hierarchy above the IS role, including the Investigators (IS' bosses) and their role in managing their teams (now that they're virtually non-existent). The communication centers (IC's) then got severally understaffed.. the reporting is NON-EXISTENT! They fail to stay on top of trends, alert stores, collect data effectively, and really took such a huge step backwards that it's like they're practically not even there. Then, the company downsized the AP Business Partner role (APBP) and gave an even larger workload to an already overwhelming position.. now with the APBP's left, you're seeing them struggling to over several districts (vs 1 or 2 in past) and cannot possibly effectively manage it all. Then you add the extra workload for the ETL-AP, including extra LOD shifts due to the severe ETL/TL cuts & restructuring at the store level, and that gives the ETL-AP even less time to work in their own department (not that they had much time before) when they're busy managing the store. And we finally get to the TPS position-- the backbone in every store. The TPS' are essentially all that's left in: A) Identifying theft, B) Documenting it, C) Preventing/Resolving it. Now with many TPS' out of the picture, there is less staff to educate the store-side teams, to add merchandise protection, to build relationships with law enforcement, to communicate to other stores (since investigations is finished), and handle all the day-to-day tasks like receipt lookups, guest service calls, team member problems, security incidents, ect. Not only are all these cuts ultimately going to really hurt target's profitability, BUT they will ruin the relationships with the communities they're entrusted in, make AP unreliable, and diminish the safely inside the stores our guests have come to expect. It's much more than just numbers and metrics. Just wait until you need AP assistance and you call the LOD who has no clue about AP whatsoever, and tells you they can't do anything about it. Target has NEVER made such drastic cuts to AP hours and staffing.. maybe they can fake a few metrics here and there, but ultimately I can promise you that it will catch up to the company and they will see a losses on a scale never seen before. It will eat away at the company's profits and limit the number of actual sales (due to merch getting stolen). I hope they reconsider what they're doing because it's certainly not in the long-term interest of the company.
