Comprehensive Look at ORC Impacts & Strategies
Alleviating the Financial and Operational Impacts of ORC
Organized retail crime (ORC) is no longer just a loss prevention issue — it’s a multibillion-dollar crisis affecting consumers, communities, and entire retail organizations. ORC poses a severe financial burden on businesses, directly affecting profitability and operational efficiency. During earnings calls, major retailers such as Target, Walgreens, and Walmart have openly cited ORC as a primary driver of increased shrinkage. Beyond financial losses, ORC threatens employees' safety, drives workforce turnover, and undermines customer trust. To mitigate ORC’s far-reaching impact, retailers must implement new strategies to protect their businesses and ensure a safer shopping environment.

Applying the Lens of Total Retail Loss

Shrinkage is a key component of total retail loss (TRL), described in a report commissioned by the RILA Asset Protection Leaders Council in partnership with Professor Adrian Beck from the University of Leicester in the UK. TRL encompasses all factors that reduce a retailer's profitability, including theft, fraud, administrative errors, and waste/damages.

Retail loss refers to the overall financial impact of missing or devalued inventory, whether due to external theft (shoplifting, ORC), internal theft (employee fraud), operational mistakes (wrong shipment, wrong locations, wrong demand), or vendor discrepancies (shipped less than ordered/billed). Shrinkage specifically measures the difference between recorded inventory and actual stock at good condition levels, making it a crucial metric for retailers to monitor and mitigate.

Operational Impact

ORC disrupts supply chain operations by increasing cargo theft, raising security costs, delaying inventory replenishment — all of which drive up prices for retailers and consumers. Verisk CargoNet reported record-breaking cargo theft activity across the U.S and Canada in 2024, with 3,625 reported incidents representing a stark 27 percent increase from 2023. The estimated average value per theft rose to $202,364, up from $187,895 in 2023.

Employee and Consumer Safety

Rising incidents of theft have contributed to employee turnover, as frontline workers face increased risks and workplace stress. A 2023 survey of 1,000 retail employees showed that 40 percent of employees feel scared to go to work due to increased theft incidents. Increased theft disrupts store operations, pulling staff away from customer service roles to address security concerns. As a result, the overall shopping experience declines, negatively impacting customer loyalty.

Developing Retailer-Driven Strategies: mytotalretail.com
 

Retail Threats Continue to Evolve
How experts navigate retail’s key threats

The future of retail protection comes together at NRF PROTECT

By David Johnston - VP, Asset Protection & Retail Operations, NRF

Retailers today face a dynamic landscape of increasing threats and areas of loss that can significantly impact their operations, brand reputation and profitability. Recognizing that this broad scope of risks, threats and loss can transcend across the physical, cyber and digital realms, retailers today must collaborate with peers — within their department, cross-functionally within their organization and throughout the industry for a wider perspective.

Asset protection professionals continue to focus on rising theft due to shoplifting and organized retail crime. Theft events, along with active threats and acts of violence, have escalated the need to maintain a viable threat assessment and workplace violence prevention program across retail and non-retail environments. Internal theft remains a significant issue, as does recognizing how shrink and loss can occur across one’s organizational landscape.

Cyber and digital crimes have become more prevalent in theft of goods. Strategic cargo theft sees product “disappearing” enroute as thieves pose as legitimate brokers after crafting false personas or stealing identities of legitimate companies. Digital thieves ideate new scams that result in gift card fraud or steal gift cards to initiate nationwide and transnational gift card draining.

Retailers are increasingly targeted by ransomware, leading to significant disruption, financial loss and damaged reputations. Phishing emails and cyberattacks have retailers not only monitoring their own networks but constantly aware of third-party attacks from their vendor partners.

The risk and threat landscape has and will continue to evolve. Those responsible for the protection of their organization must understand that security is no longer the responsibility of a single person, department or function. It requires an enterprise-wide responsibility with multiple partners leading different aspects of risk coming together to build the structure of an organization’s enterprise security risk management. nrf.com


Invisible Barcodes Help Walmart Fight Shoplifting
Walmart uses a hidden trick to catch shoplifting and ‘skip scanning’ — here’s how
Walmart shoppers are losing their minds after learning that the store’s budget-friendly Great Value items come equipped with invisible barcodes — a secret hiding in plain sight since 2019.

In a viral TikTok clip posted by Walmart worker @beatsbycait, the employee used a handheld scanner to zap six products right in their middles — far from the obvious barcodes — revealing that the goods are plastered with covert codes.

“Real ones know almost all great value items have hidden bar codes,” she wrote in the caption, sending jaws to the self-checkout floor. The clip has racked up over 287,000 views and left viewers stunned — and slightly paranoid.

How it works is that bar codes are hidden so self-checkout scanners can recognize products even when customers aren’t aiming directly at the traditional barcode — making theft harder, since traditionally it’s easy for people to skip scanning at item at self-checkout registers.

The tech was developed by barcode company Digimarc and has been around for five years.

“Walmart is a forward-thinking technology leader with an unwavering focus on customer experience,” Digimarc CEO Riley McCormack said in a statement in 2022. “We are thrilled to expand our partnership with them and look forward to sharing more details about this expansion in the coming months.”  tech.yahoo.com


Americans Aren't Buy the Positive Crime Data
Something remarkable is happening with violent crime rates in the US

Americans remained scared of violent crime. The numbers tell a different story.

In the first full year of the pandemic, the FBI tallied 22,134 murders nationwide, up from 16,669 in 2019 — an increase of roughly 34 percent, the sharpest one-year rise in modern crime record-keeping. In 2021, Philadelphia alone recorded a record 562 homicides, while Baltimore experienced a near-record 337 murders. Between 2019 and 2020, the average number of weekly emergency department visits for gunshots increased by 37 percent, and largely stayed high through the following year.

By the 2024 election, for the first time in awhile, violent crime was a major political issue in the US. A Pew survey that year found that 58 percent of Americans believed crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress, up from 47 percent in 2021.

And yet even as the presidential campaign was unfolding, the violent crime spike of the pandemic had already subsided — and crime rates have kept dropping. The FBI’s 2023 crime report found that murder was down nearly 12 percent year over year, and in 2024 it kept falling to roughly 16,700 murders, on par with pre-pandemic levels. The early numbers for 2025 are so promising that Jeff Asher, one of the best independent analysts on crime, recently asked in a piece whether this year could have the lowest murder rate in US history.

All of which raises two questions: What’s driving a decrease in crime every bit as sharp as the pandemic-era increase? And why do so many of us find it so hard to believe?   vox.com


Chicago violence down over Memorial Day weekend, according to police data

Chicago homicides in 2025: 148 people slain. How that compares with previous years.