Anyone who is familiar with the retail industry knows that theft is a common problem.
It’s a pervasive threat to the industry that affects businesses large and small. It’s something that hits everything from small mom-and-pop stores in a city’s downtown to major luxury stores and their associated priceless goods.
The threat of ‘shrink’
In a new article for Security Magazine, James Stark outlines how modern physical security technology and advanced strategies can help businesses tackle retail theft. Stark reports that shrink — or the loss of a store’s inventory by many ways, including theft — accounts for major losses.
He highlights that, in 2022, the “estimated losses due to shrink reached almost $100 billion.”
The National Retail Security Survey (NRSS) delves even deeper, showing that during the pandemic years, there was a 26.5% increase in “organized retail crime” that retail owners witnessed between 2021 and 2022.
This is where comprehensive physical security approaches come in.
Stark explains that modern retail business owners can leverage AI-driven analytics and cloud-based devices that offer the most robust security for their stores. In the article, Stark states that modern surveillance cameras are designed to address modern threats, specifically.
“Today’s devices are also significantly more powerful, allowing them to run advanced analytics on the network’s edge rather than sending video to a server or the cloud for analysis,” he writes. “Thanks to edge processing improvements, only metadata — and perhaps a short video clip — needs to be sent to the server or cloud, dramatically reducing both storage and bandwidth costs.”
Powerful, intelligent new surveillance systems
In many ways, modern analytics is the wave of the future.
Stark states that one can place their security camera outside their store, which will utilize “object recognition analytics” to pinpoint human figures that are walking toward a business in the middle of the night. The metadata from these recordings is then sent immediately to a security professional who will be notified that a “potential incident is occurring.”
Internal cameras that are found within a business can zero in on customers who are acting in an aggressive way or loitering.
“They can be programmed to notify security if a large group of customers walk into the handbag or jewelry department minutes before closing,” he adds.
These modern surveillance systems are all data driven. They can classify data and then look for patterns of behavior.
Embrace modern technology
In his conclusion to the piece, Stark stresses that business owners should do everything possible to avoid being an easy target or mark for a criminal.
“The problem of shrink is here to stay — which means it is up to retailers to decide what to do about it,” he writes. “Fortunately, modern security technology has put new tools in the hands of loss prevention teams, allowing them to detect potential security incidents more accurately and deal with them more quickly and effectively — and integrating those solutions creates a valuable force multiplier effect that can help retailers avoid becoming an easy target for criminals.”
Peter Cavicchia II 