There has been no shortage of attention paid to the rise in shoplifting globally. Integrators serving the retail industry, however, must pay attention to two emergent aspects of the story that have begun to reshape the overall narrative:
- One, not only is the shoplifting problem growing larger in many areas, it also has grown significantly more nuanced and complicated. For example, inflation has driven a climb in casual shoplifting. Retailers anecdotally report that they have seen a surge in customers — shocked by rising costs — indulging in petty crime for the first time in their lives by simply walking out of stores with whole shopping carts of items for which they have not paid. A set of consumers who historically were not part of creating retailer loss is suddenly a growing source of shrink.
- Two, retailers have better tools than ever for countering shoplifting. As the underlying processing power and technologies have matured, video analytics is being used by more retailers to proactively counter shoplifting and reduce shrink. It is a very different landscape in terms of the capabilities that were available a decade ago. A higher level of accuracy in video analytics is bringing unprecedented results amid the ongoing shoplifting epidemic.
What this means for system integrators serving the retail space is a moment of business opportunity.
Real-time, Proactive Security at Last
Retailers have long relied on video surveillance to address shoplifting, but, for some years, their experience with analytics has been patchy. Often, the poor accuracy of an analytics solution created so many false positives that it became unusable and burdensome. The practical result of so many alarms and alerts was that stores simply shut down the systems.
Key technological improvements have played out on multiple fronts — the processing power of semiconductors, the ability to seamlessly pull metadata from cameras and recorders, cloud capabilities for processing huge amounts of data from any source, etc. Today, video analytics can be firmly relied upon as a key business asset for enabling real-time notifications and proactive action against shoplifting.
For example, in some cases, retailers are deploying cameras with license-plate recognition to compare images with databases in real time to flag the arrival of known thieves at individual stores. Notifications are created to help the stores quickly identify and monitor known bad actors — or even block entry to individuals who have been disallowed from entering locations in their chains. Facial recognition can be used in the same way, as a tool for interrupting the plans of the more consistent, professional thieves — although state regulations make it challenging to deploy it broadly across the United States.
To combat the emergent problem of first-time, casual shoplifting, retailers are sometimes deploying public-view monitors in all aisles and increasing camera coverage across all of their properties. The increase in processing capabilities enables so much more image data from so many more sources to be processed in real time to enable proactive action.
And for retailers who have invested heavily in self-checkout technologies to address staffing shortages and/or curb personnel costs, advanced video scanning analytics are now available to help better understand misreads at point of sale (POS) and reduce shrink — whether the misreads are the result of intentional shoplifting, simple technology failure or innocent misuse.
Understanding Retailers’ Technology Needs
Integrators must be aware of retailers’ common requirements in video analytics for real-time, proactive security against shoplifting.
The ability to correlate POS and radio frequency identification (RFID) systems to video is becoming common in the space. A system can be configured to automatically take action if, say, a particular analytic triggers at the same time as a POS transaction over a certain dollar amount, or if a transaction happens when no customer is present. This is a breakthrough capability for retailers, transforming video into a dramatically more useful security tool beyond just being able to go back and review footage once it is established that shoplifting has taken place.
Furthermore, a scalable business intelligence and video system with sophisticated reporting and dashboards can enable different groups across a retail organization to better analyze business operations across multiple locations. Data on which stores are recording suspicious transactions more frequently than others can reveal valuable insights into a shoplifting problem. Such capabilities can also aid in streamlining investigations and enabling secure evidence sharing, in which the retailer is able to maintain the chain of custody of video.
Enabling such functions with cloud-based processing is key. But the reality is that there remains a great deal of variety in the market landscape. Analog technology is still commonly used in the field, especially in the cases of the biggest chain retailers with hundreds or thousands of stores. These companies typically are not interested in paying to replace, for example, all of their video cameras across all of their stores at once. Hybrid approaches are necessary to enable retailers to continue to leverage their existing legacy investments along with newer technology and processing video in the cloud. Larger retailers, in particular, require such flexibility, as opposed to being forced into an all-at-once migration; such companies need multi-step and phased plans into cloud suites of innovative analytics and tools.
Similarly, open platforms are a must. The rate of technology improvements and innovation in video analytics is very rapid and increasing. Retailers need the flexibility to integrate best-of-breed analytics as they become available, regardless of the technology provider. They need solutions that they can build on strategically and practically, as opposed to being locked into any given provider’s product-development plans and ability to deliver.
Understanding Retailers’ Internal Realities
There is one final piece of the story that integrators are more frequently encountering when it comes to helping secure retail companies against shoplifting: The push and pull tension between the retailer’s security and asset protection teams and many other functional groups has increased significantly. Security and loss-prevention professionals are tasked with trying to prevent or mitigate against shoplifting by possibly stopping certain people from walking into stores; whereas marketing, merchandising, operations and others are doing everything they can to pull in customers, to make stores more appealing and feel less threatening or confined.
Every retail company has its own landscape, but, broadly speaking, information technology (IT) departments are playing a bigger and bigger role in managing video, and IT teams typically have significantly more budget than security and loss-prevention teams. It’s important to work collectively across those groups. Aligning security, loss-prevention and IT teams is crucial to advancing the large-scale implementations of video analytics which are necessary to provide retailers with the dynamic security capabilities that they need to address the increasingly complicated and constantly evolving shoplifting threat.
