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Expert: Crooks Are More Creative
By: By MARK ALBRIGHT
Retailers' losses to theft hit a 14-year low in 2004, but a private army of loss prevention agents isn't breaking out the champagne.
Theft by retailers' workers is now a bigger problem than shoplifting. Professional theft rings are getting more violent. The war against retail theft is being won with a boost from technology, but there's more to come including biometrics such as retina or fingerprint scanning that could replace the credit card.
Dan Doyle, 47, is vice president of loss prevention and human resources at Beall's Inc., a Bradenton chain with annual revenues of $1 billion from 550 outlets and department stores.
The chairman of the National Retail Federation Loss Prevention Council, Doyle talked about this changing field that still works mostly in the shadows.
Q. The old image of loss prevention is a gum-shoe store detective who tracks prey through a peephole. How has the field changed?
A. It's become more sophisticated, complex and driven by technology. We're considered more of a career opportunity. About a third of the people in the field have a college degree. Most wanted to enter this field by choice. We recruit college interns among our 200 loss prevention agents at Beall's. Most of our agents work the sales floor, but our role has become far broader. We're responsible for disaster preparedness, inventory control, Homeland Security issues as well as handling internal investigations of sexual harassment and discrimination cases. We've become sort of the internal police departments for retailers.
Q. How has technology changed the business?
A. When I started in 1980 as floor agent at a Lord & Taylor in Texas, the store had one video camera and every transaction was done on a handwritten ticket. Today a typical department store has 15 to 20 cameras plus cameras covering the parking lot. We have antishoplifting tags on more merchandise. The cameras zoom in enough to show the serial number on a dollar bill and superimpose the register transaction on the same frame. In a lot of cases we're using computer files for exception reporting that leads us to suspects rather than spotting them on our own. Vendors are working on software that's programmed to direct the cameras automatically to record gestures like customers putting things in their pockets.
Nobody knows exactly how much merchandise is stolen, only how much turns up missing. If you don't adjust for sales growth or inflation, missing inventory remained steady at about $31 billion over the past five years. But losses nationally reached a 14-year low of 1.5 percent of $2 trillion in sales in 2004, according to the National Retail Security Survey that is compiled by researchers at the University of Florida. That's down from 1.95 percent a decade ago.
Q. Inventory losses were once evenly split between employee theft and shoplifting. Now shoplifting has declined to 34 percent while employee theft is 47 percent. Who is the typical shoplifter?
A. There is no typical shoplifter. We get them from 7-year-old kids to 90-year-old grandmothers in every income group. We watch for behaviors. People wearing clothes that are out of season. People's eyes darting about before they put something in their pocket. I've seen people push 40 shirts down their pants or two pairs of Nikes. We've had people hide jewelry in body cavities. We've caught grandmothers dropping rings into half-full soda cans. Some people even use their children as a prop to steal. They'll stuff things in a blanket tucked around their baby in a stroller. People even try to chew off the antishoplifting tags. I've seen blood on them.