OpenEye White Paper

The Ultimate Guide to Investing in a Retail Security Camera System

A comprehensive security camera system can be a game-changer for retailers, offering peace of mind and a wealth of actionable data. By closely monitoring their stores, business owners can identify potential threats, prevent losses, and ensure the safety of both employees and customers. In addition, a well-designed security system can go beyond physical security and help retailers analyze customer behavior and employee performance.

Improve Retail Security with Advanced Surveillance Technology

For those looking to take advantage of comprehensive video security for their business, make sure to check out OpenEye's in-depth guide which covers the many uses cloud-managed video security has for the retail industry, including:

• Centralized user management remotely
• Advanced operational analytics
• Video verification for transactions and alerts
• Automated health monitoring
• Point-of-sale integration
• Streamlined clip sharing

Download Now
 

Retailers Take The Theft Fight Into Their Own Hands
CNN: Retailers use police-like investigation centers to fight surging theft
Increasingly, this is how it goes today for retailers trying to battle theft and fraud by organized crime rings. A CNN review of court records and interviews with more than two dozen retail and law enforcement officials shows that persistent problems with sophisticated organized crime networks have led many private-sector companies to not only assist law enforcement but to often deliver the bulk of the evidence that leads to criminal prosecutions.

Anyone who has shopped at retail stores in recent years has encountered everyday products like laundry detergent, medication and beauty supplies locked up behind metal gates or plexiglass. Retailers say those in-store security measures are emblematic of the ongoing threat of organized retail crime, which typically involves groups of low-level thieves who steal items for middlemen who in turn sell to unsuspecting customers hunting for deals on marketplaces such as Amazon or eBay.

Efforts to counter this crime, however, have come with some costs. Security investments can translate into higher prices for consumers, and civil liberties advocates argue the surveillance technology used by retailers can infringe on individuals’ privacy.

While retailers have long partnered with law enforcement, the industry has bolstered its role in recent years, devoting more staff and financial resources to thwarting theft. Some retailers are researching body-worn cameras for employees. Others, including Home Depot, have invested in police-like investigation centers to sift through data and pinpoint theft-group members.

“A lot of times, local and state resources don’t have the capacity to investigate these crimes at that scale,” said Sean Browne, senior manager of asset protection for Home Depot. Browne said Home Depot, which has nearly tripled its investigative team since 2016, has started using license-plate readers in some store parking lots. “We try to full-service the investigations and ensure we cut off the head of the snake.”

Where law enforcement agencies sometimes face jurisdictional limits to their investigations, retailers can track cases across state and county lines with increasingly sophisticated tools – such as artificial intelligence that identifies patterns – and choose agencies with which to share cases.

“Retailers themselves are really taking the ball and running with it and then partnering with law enforcement at all levels,” said David Johnston, vice president of asset protection for the National Retail Federation (NRF), a top lobbying group for the retail industry. NRF surveys of retailers last year found that more than half reported budget increases to combat organized retail crime.

A complex crime - Calls for more federal action: cnn.com


Retail Theft Surge: Sign of Societal Decay -- or an Exaggerated Problem?
Thief mobs and self-checkout shoplifters: Is society in a state of moral decay, or are stores exaggerating the problem?
Daphne Howland of Retail Dive said: Theft is a big problem — just not as big of one, based on her reporting, as retailers have often said.

Howland said she couldn’t say for sure, but “people hate it when stores close, so maybe [retailers] feel like they need a good excuse.” She said store closures have tended to disproportionately impact store formats — like smaller city-center locations — where big-box retailers have struggled more in general compared to their suburban strip-mall strongholds.

Howland said she doesn’t doubt the susceptibility of self-checkout lanes to shoplifting, but total retail shrink as a percentage of all sales hasn’t increased over the years, which leads her to believe theft as a percentage of all sales hasn’t risen significantly either. In other words, different people might be stealing — or the same people might be stealing in different ways — but overall, people probably aren’t stealing significantly more, relative to the size of the industry.

Marie Helweg-Larsen, a social psychology professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, said she’s similarly skeptical of the idea society is in a state of moral decay, although she does think self-checkout lanes could be encouraging some people to steal even if they wouldn’t otherwise do so.

The reason: People rationalize nearly everything they do wrong, she said, and self-checkout lanes can facilitate that.

Howland, of Retail Dive, said between the shoplifting they seem to be facilitating and the frustration they seem to be causing some honest people, self-checkout lanes will have to change. But she thinks the benefits — labor cost savings, for example, plus convenience for customers who do like them — are so compelling that they won’t disappear.

She said even with all the anti-theft technology stores are deploying at self-checkout lanes and throughout stores, there’s another fundamental reason the kiosks might be facilitating some theft, which isn’t specific to the kiosks themselves.

Kiosks enable stores to get by with fewer employees, and “it’s just always — my sources tell me — more conducive to shoplifting when when there just aren’t as many people working in a store,” Howland said.   abc27.com


New Bills to Fight Theft & Drug Addiction Move Forward in California
CA Senate OK’s Sen. Skinner’s Legislation To Curb Retail Theft And Reduce Fentanyl Addiction
The California state Senate today approved two bills by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, that are designed to curtail retail theft and prevent fentanyl addiction. Both pieces of legislation, SB 1144, Shutting Down the Market for Stolen Goods, and SB 950, Healthy Recovery, Successful Reentry, won bipartisan approval and are part of the state Senate’s Safer California Plan.

SB 1144 would strengthen California law regulating online marketplaces by ensuring that these platforms are not facilitating the sale of stolen goods and incentivizing retail theft. And SB 950 is designed to reduce the incidence of fentanyl addiction among those returning home after being incarcerated.

“Online marketplaces are a valuable tool to buy and sell legitimate goods and services, but increasingly they’re also the method organized retail theft operators rely on to unload stolen goods,” Sen. Skinner said. “By requiring high-volume sellers to prove the legitimacy of their business and the goods they’re selling, SB 1144 will make it a lot harder for retail thieves to use online marketplaces as giant fencing operations.”

SB 1144 would strengthen Sen. Skinner’s 2022 law, SB 301, landmark legislation that established the state’s first-ever regulations governing the sale of stolen goods on online marketplaces. According to many brick-and-mortar retailers, the rapid growth of online marketplaces has spurred retail theft, with a significant portion of goods sold on online having been stolen from stores. According to some estimates, $500 billion worth of stolen or counterfeit products change hands via online marketplaces each year.

Sen. Skinner’s SB 301 helped combat the sale of stolen goods online by providing higher standards of accountability and verification and by helping marketplaces identify and take action against sellers of stolen goods. SB 1144 would strengthen SB 301 by also requiring online marketplaces to regulate high-volume sellers that advertise goods online but who complete their sales transaction offline rather than through the marketplace. According to retailers, many of online sellers of stolen goods do not complete their sales using the online marketplace transaction function, thus allowing the seller to avoid the regulations created under SB 301. sd09.senate.ca.gov


Illegal Immigration Fueling Crime?
Societal Rot, Part 3: How Blue Cities’ Flouting of Federal Immigration Laws Has Proved Fatal

Third in a five-part series. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Does it make sense for cities and states to decide which illegal immigrants can stay in the country? No. Should cities and states be allowed to flout federal immigration law, or any other federal law they don’t agree with? No.

Are cities and states that have sanctuary policies for illegal immigrants harboring and enabling lawlessness? Yes. Do we have hundreds of thousands of crime victims across America because we don’t fully enforce federal immigration law? Yes.

It’s time to make common sense common again. Societal rot is a choice.  dailysignal.com


Lawmakers advance bills aimed at retail theft crackdown

No shot: Why America won't pull the trigger on gun control
 

Retail Foot Traffic Will Surpass Pre-COVID Levels by Next Year
Foot traffic expected to rebound to pre-pandemic levels: report

Though not yet fully restored, retailers are reporting a corresponding uptick in sales, which have surpassed pre-pandemic levels, according to CBRE.

Foot traffic is expected to fully recover to 2019 levels by Q3 this year, and surpass pre-pandemic levels by 2025, according to a report released May 13 by CBRE. In 2023, average monthly foot traffic in 10 prime retail districts recovered to 81% of pre-pandemic 2019 levels, CBRE found.

Offline sales surged to 78.1% in 2022, while digital growth tapered off at 21.9% compared to 2019 when digital sales saw 53.5% growth. Brick-and-mortar saw 46.5% growth that year, the report said citing Forrester’s 2023 Retail Competition Tracker.

It’s no secret how COVID-19 impacted retail. At the height of the pandemic, shelter in place orders led to an abrupt halt to in-person shopping while digital sales soared. Many retailers shuttered stores and, at the time, it was uncertain if or when full recovery was possible.

Recent reports are putting some of those speculations to rest.

Physical stores remain crucial and data suggests they’re needed to drive digital sales. Per an ICSC report, opening a retail location temporarily increases a brand’s digital sales by 6.9%, whereas closing decreases its online sales by 11.5%.

While 70% of retail sales are digitally influenced, CBRE data found that brick-and-mortar retail became the primary driver of sales growth. By 2022, 78% of growth came from in-store purchases compared to 46% in 2019. retaildive.com
 

AI is Changing The Store Experience for Walmart Employees & Customers
How Walmart is using generative AI

Jon Alferness, chief product officer of Walmart U.S., spoke with Retail Dive about how the big-box retailer is deploying tech to serve customers and frontline workers.

The retailer began deploying generative artificial intelligence late last year to answer customers’ mission-based searches and empower frontline employees with information that enables them to serve customers better and in real time.

Generative AI can make connections and serve results to customers with context and personalization, Jon Alferness, chief product officer for Walmart U.S., told Retail Dive in an interview. The technology can also help customers identify what they want to buy and discover new products. Alferness said the company’s data backs up why advancing the implementation of generative AI-powered search is important.

Alferness said Walmart has also deployed generative AI to empower its associates with more information that can help them better serve customers. The technology serves as a cheat sheet for customer interactions by bringing all the tools an employee might use under a single umbrella to offer contextualized answers to customers’ product questions.

Associates can also use AI to get an answer if a product isn’t on the shelf. Within moments, they can find out if the supplier is out of inventory, if the product is on its way to a store on a truck, or even the approximate time it’ll get moved from the truck to the backroom and then a shelf on the sales floor. Connecting all those dots requires the power of AI.  retaildive.com


1,300 New Stores
TJX, the world’s largest off-price retailer, is poised to get a lot bigger

The company said it could expand its global fleet by 1,300 or more additional stores in coming years, spurred in part by department store closures.

TJX Cos, which runs more than 4,900 stores spanning nine countries, could expand its global fleet by 1,300 or more additional locations, CEO Ernie Herrman told analysts on Wednesday.

This year alone, the off-price retailer plans about 141 net new locations, expanding its footprint to nearly 5,100 and reflecting growth of about 3%, Chief Financial Officer John Klinger said in February. Also, about 480 stores will be remodeled and about 40 will be relocated, he said.

In the U.S. this year, plans are to add 45 net new Marmaxx locations (T.J. Maxx and Marshalls), 40 HomeGoods locations and 26 Sierra locations. Outside the U.S., plans are to add 10 stores in Canada, 15 in Europe and five in Australia, Klinger said. retaildive.com


Dangerous Hurricane Season Coming?
NOAA forecasts extraordinarily busy Atlantic hurricane season
The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season features an unprecedented combination of air and ocean conditions, and is likely to be extremely active, according to the U.S. government's official seasonal outlook released this morning.

The NOAA is forecasting the season will bring 85% odds of an above normal season, with 17–25 named storms of tropical storm intensity or greater, eight to 13 of which will become hurricanes, and four to seven major hurricanes of Category 3 or greater. axios.com


Walmart chops 500-plus jobs at two Bay Area tech hubs as layoffs widen
Walmart has decided to slash well over 500 jobs at two of the retail behemoth’s tech hubs in the Bay Area, offering fresh evidence that wrenching reductions in the technology sector still afflict the region.

The job cuts affected workers in Sunnyvale and San Bruno, according to documents Walmart sent to the state Employment Development Department (EDD). All told, Walmart has decided to eliminate 568 jobs in the two Bay Area cities. mercurynews.com


Walmart goes bigger with new Neighborhood Markets

Wayfair opens its first large-format store — complete with restaurant