Today's guest post is from Allisyn Deyo, Webmaster and editor for the Pinnacle Publishing Group.

One of my first jobs (and second, and third, and fifth) was working in the specialty coffee industry. I worked for a large corporation out of Seattle (not that one.. a smaller, but direct competitor) that was intent on having their employees be the most well-educated employees in the coffee industry, and as such, I had several days of training at our corporate headquarters.

While I learned how to pull shots, steam milk and sell espresso machines, they never taught me what to do if money was missing from the till, or if I caught a shoplifter. Granted, our shops didn't sell a ton of products, but we definitely sold high-end merchandise ($699 espresso machine anyone?) and of the four locations I worked in over three years, two of them weren't in the choicest areas of town.

By the time I left that job, I'd held management positions for two years, hired and fired numerous employees and dealt with three shoplifting incidents… one that involved firing an employee.

At the time it happened, I still hadn't received any formal training (or literature, for that matter) on how we dealt with shoplifters, but the one previous experience was with a couple of teenagers, and I had used an age-old method I learned from my mom—I put the fear of god into them. In other words, I called a beat cop (who worked our area and regularly got coffee from us) and he came in and verbally thrashed them, all the while threatening to call their parents. In the end, the tears were enough for me to not "tell on them." They came into the shop a time or two after that, and while we were all on high alert, I never had a problem again.

The employee theft shook me the most. It was someone older than I who had worked with the company for a long time, and I had just been placed in charge of her store. (I had a great manager when I first started, and because of her, I became a "fixer" manager, who went into stores that were problems and helped get them up to speed.) We fired her (one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life), hired some new blood and the store turned around quite nicely.

There's an article today in the Bradenton Herald about how much retail crime costs stores per year ($30 billion), and reading through it, I realized they didn't mention employee training to prevent the thefts. Oh they discussed security cameras, and locking high-ticket items behind the counter, but this article never mentioned how employers could teach their employees how to spot a shoplifter.

My question is this: do employers nowadays (my coffee job was almost a decade ago) teach their employees how to spot a thief? Do they tell them who to call if they do see one? Or is most of the teaching about how to be friendly and sell?

Don't get me wrong, it's important to sell well and lord knows I hate when someone follows me around a store, but I wasn't trained and part of me wonders are employers really doing all they can to train their employees to stop theft?