Asset Tag Recovery Stories
by Maverick Label | September 12, 2019
Asset tags can help to recover your lost items. Annually, TSA says 90,000 to 100,000 items are left behind accidentally at their checkpoints or in airports across the US. This doesn’t count the things left in the seat backs on the airplane. Those are handled by the individual airlines, which don’t generally release lost and found statistics.
FAA numbers show that 1,018,339,442 passengers flew via US airports in 2018. If just one person per day left an item behind on an airplane, that would be over 2.7 million lost items annually. And that's just airline travel!
Lost & found departments have a huge amount of stuff to sort through. A visible asset tag greatly increases the likelihood that you can recover your lost items, and it may also speed up the process. We know that our asset tags have helped return at least two business devices, because we got involved with the recovery process.
Our Stories
Delta Lost & Found
Donene, one of our customer care reps, got a call from Delta, saying they had a laptop that had been turned in at LAX with our tags on it. I’m the keeper of the asset inventory (in addition to writing the blog posts), so she sent the call over to me. I didn’t know any of our staff who had gone through LAX recently, so I was very curious.
The Delta agent told me there were 8-10 labels on the laptop. That was odd; we only put one on each item. Then she gave me the serial numbers. They included PRE-0001, which is a barcode & number we use on many of our sample labels. Seems whoever owned the laptop was trying out a sample kit to see what material worked best.
Those weren’t going to help recover any lost items. So I called the Delta lost & found agent again, and asked if she could boot up the computer. She did, and luckily, there was a company name on the login screen. Eric (IT) did me a favor and searched our recent sample requests for that company name - and found it!
We spoke to the person who requested the sample kit, she found out who had checked out the laptop with all the sample asset tags, and he reached out to Delta to get the laptop back. (In the meantime, the company had ordered asset tags, so we won’t be involved if another of their laptops gets lost!)
A Good Samaritan
The other recovery was pretty amazing as well. One of our asset tag customers found a device with what looked to him like a MaverickLabel asset tag. It didn’t have a company name or phone number, just a logo and an internal department name.
He sent Connie, his customer care rep, a picture of the tag. When she checked with our prepress people, they confirmed it was one of ours, but couldn’t identify the company or order.
Luckily, the company used unique wording that Louanne (QA) was able to find in our database, and when she checked, the artwork matched. Connie called Customer #2 and let them know Customer #1 had found the device.
It’s back in the right hands now, and the next order of asset tags for Customer #2 will include contact info! (We recommend at least a company name, if not a phone number, unless your logo is immediately identifiable. This helps to recover your lost items.)
What’s Your Story?
Have you recovered a lost item because of a MaverickLabel asset tag? Share that story with us at [email protected] and you could win a set of personalized IDmyStuff® labels! They’re great for protecting personal items (the way our asset tags protect your business property).