C-Stores Fight Retail Crime
Employee training, technology and store layout all play a role

Rmarts, EG America, Atlantis Management share tips to combat crime

C-store chains talk theft prevention, training and safety

In today’s convenience retail landscape, crime isn’t just a nuisance, it’s a threat to the bottom line. C-store operators must shape employee training, technology and store layout to prevent crime.

While shoplifting gets more attention, retailers should focus on employee theft, which can account for 55% of losses on average, said Sharon Cruz, security manager with Chicago-based McDonald’s Restaurant Corp.

To track theft, Rmarts conducts inventory audits with store and district managers every three months with the goal of less than 1% shrink, said Dan Razowsky, marketing operations manager at the Northbrook, Illinois-based convenience-store chain that has 12 locations in the Chicago area. District managers working with store managers in loss prevention has helped drive success by creating strong partnerships, he said.

If an Rmart employee sees a customer stealing, they are instructed to inform the manager and let him or her handle it, Razowsky said. The manager might say something to the offender, “but we’re not going to be chasing them out into the lot,” he said.

Instead, Razowsky said, it’s more effective to threaten calling the police. He adds that if a customer is causing a disturbance, the employee just pretending to call police can help diffuse the situation.

To address the growing complexity of in-store challenges, EG America, a 1,578-store chain, launched a customized Workplace Violence Awareness Program in 2024 to further train employees, developed in partnership with a consultant, said McMillen.

The program features short, scenario-based videos starring real EG America team members and covers topics such as shoplifting de-escalation, suspected drug use and respectful engagement with unhoused individuals, she said. These modules are embedded into new hire onboarding, assigned annually and reinforced through ongoing store-level discussions.  cspdailynews.com


The Legislative Fight Against ORC
Lawmakers and retailers address growing threat of organized retail crime

Convenience stores push back on threats to safety of store operations

In recent years, criminal organizations have increasingly turned to organized retail crime (ORC) to generate illicit profits, especially in the convenience-store channel.

“The nature of organized retail crime, opportunistic theft and aggressive behaviors in stores has continued to evolve post-pandemic, pushing us to adapt faster and smarter,” said Liz McMillen, senior manager of retail asset protection, EG America, Westborough, Massachusetts.

To combat ORC, federal lawmakers this past spring reintroduced a bipartisan bill in response to the rise of retail crime. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada) reintroduced bipartisan legislation to crack down on flash mob robberies and intricate retail theft schemes.

On the state level, frustration is mounting as well. In New Jersey, a bill was signed into law that cracks down on ORC. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed the legislation on April 1, which requires the state’s attorney general to take actions to combat organized retail theft. cspdailynews.com


UK Grappling with Retail Crime Surge
Shop staff 'scared' as shoplifting cases rise
A shop owner has said his staff have been left "scared" as shoplifting cases continue to rise. Jabar Farooq, who runs a phone shop in Slough, Berkshire, said thefts now occurred two to three times a week.

Retail crime across the UK has surged, with 20.4 million incidents of customer theft reported in the year to September 2024 - up 3.7 million on the previous year - costing retailers an estimated £2bn, according to the British Retail Consortium.

Thames Valley Police said it remained "committed to tackling shoplifting and retail crime". The force recorded a 22% rise in shoplifting between May 2024 and April 2025. Mr Farooq said: "In Slough High Street we are facing many issues.

"We have to be careful with how we deal with them, we don't want trouble every day."

Andrew Goodacre, chief executive of the British Independent Retailers Association, said: "For individual shop owners it is just a horrible situation. They feel powerless to deal with it."

He added that stronger police presence and local wardens could help deter offenders. Thames Valley Police urged the public to report incidents via 101 or its website. bbc.com


Perception is Reality, Especially with Crime
UK: Fear of crime is a useful political tool, even if the data don't back it up
"We're actually facing, in many parts of our country, nothing short of societal collapse." This was the dire warning from Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, in setting out his party's goal of halving crime.

In an op-ed in the Daily Mail and a press conference, Farage framed Britain as a nation in crisis from rising crime and lawlessness. But, he said, Reform had the solution: mass deportation of foreign offenders, the construction of prefabricated "Nightingale" prisons, and a wholesale crackdown on offending.

He insisted that British streets were out of control (although recent rises in crime come mainly from online fraud and shoplifting, according to the latest data), pledged to simultaneously increase prison sentences and reduce overcrowding, and vowed to restore order with a "higher and physically tougher standard of police officer."

Invoking crime as a threat, and the politician as its solution, is a tried-and-tested political maneuver. We've seen it deployed from both left and right, in many parts of the world, for decades. Stuart Hall and colleagues famously examined this phenomenon in the 1970s in their seminal book Policing the Crisis. phys.org


Some tips to help retailers with the ongoing issue of theft

Durham sheriff’s data shows drop in crime in first half of 2025
 

Is Understaffing Retail's Biggest Shrink Culprit?
The biggest culprit in shrink is in the store — but it’s probably not a criminal

Inefficiencies in store operations cause more inventory loss than organized retail crime, which has been the industry’s focus in recent years.

Understaffing a store isn’t headline-worthy. Yet, at many retailers, such inefficiencies forfeit more inventory than the smash-and-grab robberies that go viral or make the news.

Organized retail crime continues to hold the attention of policymakers and retail industry groups. But some loss prevention experts say the impact of external theft on inventory loss or shrink is overstated, while the causes of nearly two-thirds of shrink are going largely unappreciated and, therefore, unaddressed.

Inventory loss is out of the spotlight to a great extent, in part because many, if not most, retailers that had been complaining about shrink levels have reported improvements. After about 30 years, the National Retail Federation last year said it would no longer report on shrink trends in the industry.

Still, laxity related to labor, pricing, promotions, stock management and other store operations lead to shrink and cost retailers billions, according to a recent study from Coresight Research. The percentage of gross sales lost to in-store inefficiencies stands at 5.5% on average, up from 4.5% last year. Overcoming those inefficiencies could save U.S. retailers in the home improvement, drugstore, grocery, mass merchant and warehouse club sectors as much as $162.7 billion, up 27% since last year, per Coresight.

Tackling this requires a hard look at store operations and, for most retailers, a more holistic approach to loss prevention, experts say.

“When I started, I was a bad-guy catcher. I wanted to catch bad guys, I was good at catching bad guys. I loved the adrenaline, I loved the cat and mouse. That’s all I wanted to do,” said Johnny Custer, senior director of retail risk solutions at ThinkLP. “I’ve evolved from that. There are some very progressive retailers where the relationship between operations and LP is seamless, where loss prevention is a specialized extension of the operations team. That’s ultimately where we all need to be. But they are few and far between.”  retaildive.com


The Great Debate Over Workplace Deregulation
The Deregulation of EHS 2025: Common Sense or Nonsense?

Are the government’s efforts to administer occupational health and safety wasteful or helpful? The debate continues.

Regulatory compliance is one of the most popular topics that we cover here at EHS Today, and that’s probably been the case dating back to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the early 1970s. Today, more than a half-century later, EHS professionals are still seeking clarity as to what exactly the various federal and state regulatory agencies expect from them.

One thing we know for sure: Regulatory compliance can be expensive, in some cases even exorbitant. According to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the cost of federal regulations to the U.S. economy is over $3 trillion. Going by NAM’s calculations, the average per-employee cost of regulations for a manufacturer is $29,100, and it gets even more expensive for small manufacturers: $50,100 per worker. Keeping the workplace safe and healthy is a good thing, but why does it have to be so expensive?

That’s the question that politicians—and the constituencies that have elected them—have wrestled with for decades. The direction of the regulatory agencies historically has been subject to the whims and political postures of whichever party is in dominance at any given time. At the moment, with the Republicans firmly in control of all three branches of government, there is an obvious movement towards deregulating as many existing rules and sidelining as many proposed rules as possible, throughout all the various agencies. But let’s just focus on EHS-related regulations. ehstoday.com


AI Agents Being Used By 900K Walmart Associates
Walmart bets big on AI with ‘super agent’ strategy

The retailer is centralizing AI capabilities to avoid fragmentation, noting that the technology is already being utilized by 900,000 associates.

Unifying its approach to the technology, Walmart launched a new companywide artificial intelligence framework centered around four “super agents” to support various business touchpoints, according to a blog post from Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer Suresh Kumar shared with Retail Dive Thursday.

The mass retailer has quickly built AI agents across the business and is now implementing a streamlined approach, where several agents will support a larger super agent to minimize user confusion. The four super agents include: the customer-facing Sparky agent that launched in June; the partner agent Marty for suppliers, advertisers and sellers; a store-centric associate agent; and an agent for company tech developers.

Walmart will continue adding specialized subagents to the super agents over the next year, making them “a more visible part of the Walmart ecosystem,” per Kumar. The news coincides with the announcement Wednesday that Walmart tapped Instacart executive Daniel Danker as its executive vice president of AI acceleration, product and design. retaildive.com


Bringing AI Into the Store
Ulta Beauty eyes AI agents amid growth plans

The company is working on the tech foundation to enable adoption, which it hopes will lead to improved employee and customer experiences.

After a three-year effort to modernize core technology systems, Ulta Beauty isn’t ready to coast. The beauty retailer is using the momentum to launch into what it sees as the future of work: AI agents.

The company is working on improving its tech foundation to enable agentic AI adoption, which it hopes will lead to enhanced employee and customer experiences, according to Mike Maresca, chief technology and transformation officer at Ulta.

“Some of the agents we can deploy to our associates so that they’re in the moment with our customers and we can advise them on how to best engage them, pulling up past purchases and making product recommendations,” Maresca said.  retaildive.com


UK retail downturn stretches into 10th month, CBI says

Walmart slashes some prices to win customers from Target, Amazon

Bed Bath & Beyond to accept old coupons at new store