November - December 2017

V16.5

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017 | V16.6 LOSSPREVENTIONMEDIA.COM

LOSS PREVENTION MAGAZINE

LOSS PREVENTION MAGAZINE THE AUTHORITY ON ALL THINGS ASSET PROTECTION

STORIES FROM THE STORMS LP HELPS STEER COMPANIES AND COMMUNITIES THROUGH HURRICANE CRISIS

STORIES FROM THE STORMS LP HELPS STEER COMPANIES AND COMMUNITIES THROUGH HURRICANE CRISIS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 6

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Ten Things You Can Do to Make 2018 a Great Year

By Jack Trlica

10 12

Stories from the Storms LP helps steer companies

RETAIL SPONSORS INTERVIEWING

Random Lessons from the Room: Part Three

By David E. Zulawski, CFI, CFE and Shane G. Sturman, CFI, CPP

and communities through hurricane crisis

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By Garett Seivold, Contributing Writer

LPM EXCELLENCE

LPM “Magpie” Award Featuring Steve Hyle and Curt Crum

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27

Collecting Shrinkage Goals and Sports Memorabilia A conversation with

EVIDENCE-BASED LP

Training Makes a Difference

By Read Hayes, PhD, CPP

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CERTIFICATION

Certification Benefits All LP Leaders

Interview with Chris Scheutzow, LPC, Big Lots

40

Scott Myers of Hibbitt Sports

By James Lee, LPC, Executive Editor

FUTURE OF LP

Three Types of Social Engineering That Keep Coming after Retailers

By Tom Meehan, CFI

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MY TURN

Trips, Slips & Falls: New National Standards Certain to Be a Game Changer

By Russell J. Kendzior

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Searching for Reality in Retail Hype, Hysteria, or Happening?

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LPM DIGITAL

Safety and Security in LP

By Jacque Brittain, LPC, and Kelsey Seidler

By Walter E. Palmer CFI, CPP, CFE, PSG Solutions

77 78 79 80 80 81 82

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2018 Product Showcase and Resource Guide Products and services from leading

SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE

- Checkpoint - Crime Accountability Partnership - Protos Security

2018

Product Showcase and Resource Guide

CALENDAR PEOPLE ON THE MOVE ANNUAL INDEX ADVERTISERS SUBSCRIPTION FORM VENDOR SPONSORS PARTING WORDS

Make Smart Choices for a Truly Moving Experience

By Jim Lee, LPC

LP industry solutions providers

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Ten Things You Can Do to Make 2018 a Great Year A s the calendar year winds down, planning for the next year gets into gear. Reflecting on the results of the current year—both positive and negative—provides some context for things we need to do either similarly or differently to achieve our 2018 goals. Following are some things you might consider in your personal and professional life to help you achieve your goals and make next year a great year.

Take a deep breath. Modern life seems to move faster and faster each year. There is no way any of us can succeed without taking a deep breath every now and then to calm down and regroup. Get up from your desk and walk outside. Fresh air and sunshine are healing.

Make time for yourself. Sometimes, you need to take more than a deep breath. It’s not unusual to find yourself running full time between business and family without regard to your own needs. Whether it’s a round of golf, a weekend in the mountains, or simply a day with a good book, we all need time to ourselves to relax and recharge. It’s not selfish; it’s necessary.

Spend quality time with friends and family. Some people find themselves totally focused on work, even when they’re home at night or on the weekend. It’s okay to answer emails and do necessary work off hours, but not to the detriment of your loved ones. When you are with family, be 100 percent with them, not juggling work at the same time.

Volunteer in your community.

Another way to regroup and make time for yourself is to volunteer.

Giving of your time and abilities to a worthy charity or personal cause will not only give your mind a break from work pressures but also reward your self-esteem.

Raise your hand at work. Adding value to your company beyond your core responsibilities will go a long way to advancing your career. Look for ways you can participate by asking to be on a team project or corporate committee.

Get out of your comfort zone.

Don’t volunteer to work on just LP tasks. Get involved in supply-chain, operations, IT, or other projects that you may not have specific expertise in. You’ll find that the experience you do have will provide a different point of view that will not only add value to the team but also give you the chance to widen your expertise.

Talk to a stranger. I once had a manager who suggested I should be less reserved. I started doing simple things like talking to people in elevators. It’s easy to find something to comment on that starts a conversation that changes the mood of both parties.

Listen with your eyes. It’s important when conversing, especially in work situations and with teenagers, to be an active listener. One way to do that is to look the person directly in the eyes with empathy. Doing so communicates that you believe that the person talking has something important to say.

Talk with a smile. Topics at work are often serious, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have discussions in pleasant terms. Even constructive criticism is received better when provided in a positive way. A negative expression or tone can put the listener on the defensive and make them much less receptive.

Revisit your goals. After developing your personal and business plans for the coming year, make a point to pull out the plans periodically to refresh yourself on what you want to accomplish.

Make an honest assessment of how you are doing in reaching your goals and, perhaps, what changes must be made to ensure you reach your goals.

Here at the magazine, we talk a lot about the importance of continuing education. So here is a bonus suggestion—learn something new. Take advantage of the various conferences and industry events to learn from peers in both formal and informal settings.

Consider certifications and formal academic courses as ways to continue to grow your knowledge and your career.

More than likely, each of you already have strategies that work for you to ensure you achieve success in your personal and professional life. Whatever you do, I wish the very best for you and yours in the coming New Year.

E

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Jack Trlica Managing Editor

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LISTEN • DESIGN • BUILD • SUPPORT

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EDITORIAL BOARD Erik Buttlar Senior Director, Asset Protection, Best Buy

David Lund, LPC Vice President of Loss Prevention, DICK’S Sporting Goods

Jim Carr, CFI Senior Director, Global Asset Protection, Rent-A-Center

John Matas Vice President, Asset Protection, Investigations & ORC, Macy’s

Ray Cloud Senior Vice President, Loss Prevention, Ross Stores

Chris McDonald Senior Vice President, Loss Prevention, Compass Group NA

Francis D’Addario, CPP, CFE Emeritus Faculty Member, Strategic Influence and Innovation, Security Executive Council

Randy Meadows Senior Vice President, Loss Prevention, Kohl’s

Charles Delgado, LPC Regional Vice President, Store Operations, Academy Sports Scott Draher, LPC Vice President, Loss Prevention, Safety, and Operations, Lowe’s Scott Glenn, LPC Chief Security Officer, Sears Holdings

LOSS PREVENTION MAGAZINE

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EXECUTIVE EDITOR James Lee, LPC JimL@LPportal.com

MANAGING EDITOR, DIGITAL Kelsey Seidler KelseyS@LPportal.com

Melissa Mitchell, CFI Director of Asset Protection and Retail Supply Chain, LifeWay Christian Stores Dan Provost, LPC Vice President, Global Loss Prevention, Staples

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Adrian Beck Read Hayes, PhD, CPP Tom Meehan, CFI Walter Palmer, CFI, CPP, CFE Colin Peacock Maurizio P. Scrofani, CCSP, LPC Garett Seivold Shane G. Sturman, CFI, CPP Bill Turner, LPC David E. Zulawski, CFI, CFE CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Kevin McMenimen, LPC KevinM@LPportal.com DIRECTOR OF CLIENT RELATIONS Lisa Carroll LisaC@LPportal.com

Joe Schrauder Vice President, Asset Protection, Walmart Stores

DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL OPERATIONS John Selevitch JohnS@LPportal.com

Barry Grant Chief Operating Officer, Photos Unlimited

Tina Sellers, LPC Director of Loss Prevention, Retail Business Services LLC, an Ahold-Delhaize Company

Bill Heine Senior Director, Global Security, Brinker International

Mark Stinde, LPC Vice President, Asset Protection, 7-Eleven

Frank Johns, LPC Chairman, The Loss Prevention Foundation

Robert Vranek Vice President, Loss Prevention, Belk

Mike Lamb, LPC Vice President, Asset Protection, The Kroger Co.

Keith White, LPC Senior Vice President, Loss Prevention and Corporate Administration, Gap Inc.

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017

MANAGING EDITOR Jack Trlica JackT@LPportal.com

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, DIGITAL Jacque Brittain, LPC JacB@LPportal.com

SPECIAL PROJECTS MANAGERS Justin Kemp, LPQ Karen Rondeau

m m

DESIGN & PRODUCTION SPARK Publications info@SPARKpublications.com CREATIVE DIRECTOR Larry Preslar ADVERTISING MANAGER Ben Skidmore 972-587-9064 office, 972-692-8138 fax BenS@LPportal.com SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES

Loss Prevention, LP Magazine, LP Magazine Europe, and LPM are service marks owned by the publishers and their use is restricted.

All editorial content is copyrighted. No article may be reproduced by any means without expressed, written permission from the publisher. Reprints or PDF versions of articles are available by contacting the publisher. Statements of fact or opinion are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the publishers. Advertising in the publication does not imply endorsement by the publishers. The editor reserves the right to accept or reject any article or advertisement.

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by Loss Prevention Magazine, Inc., 700 Matthews Mint Hill Rd, Ste C, Matthews, NC 28105. Print subscriptions are available free to qualified loss prevention and associated professionals in the U.S. and Canada at LPMsubscription.com.

The publisher reserves the right to determine qualification standards.

International print subscriptions are available for $99 per year payable in U.S. funds at circulation@LPportal.com. For questions about subscriptions, contact circulation@LPportal.com or call 888-881-5861. Periodicals postage paid at Matthews, NC, and additional mailing offices.

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INTERVIEWING

Random Lessons from the Room: Part Three T

by David E. Zulawski, CFI, CFE and Shane G. Sturman, CFI, CPP

© 2017 Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, Inc.

We first began developing a computerized interactive training video, The Art of Interviewing, with Carter Haley Hale department stores in the early 1990s to supplement our interview training class. It used laser disks to train and test the new interviewer’s skills. It worked well and received a Silver Cindy Award for innovation in interactive training, but it wasn’t easily portable with temperamental technology. We now have a new interactive training program, THE LINK, with advanced technology that is usable from almost any device from desktop to phone.

THE LINK is an interactive computerized interview simulation that does several things to help monitor and measure an interviewer’s performance. First, they are practicing their skills in a safe environment that provides consistent feedback of their performance against the benchmarked process. Plus they can start immediately after being trained. Second, the manager can see exactly where the individual needs help to provide relevant critiques. Third, the manager can evaluate the individual’s improvement over time and has a record of the interviewer’s efforts. Fourth, the monitoring and measuring is consistent across the entire organization and shows its commitment to minimizing potential interviewing mistakes.

Finally, THE LINK also allows an interviewer who hasn’t done an interview in some time to freshen their skills prior to sitting with the suspected employee.

If there are consistent undesired outcomes after interviews, the problem must lie with the interviewer since they are the common denominator among the events. To identify the mistake, the interviewer’s process and word choice must be evaluated to determine why they are unable to achieve the desired performance.

his is the third in a series of articles where we will discuss lessons that we have learned over the years while interviewing tens of thousands of individuals.

Mistakes

We all make mistakes. It’s inevitable, especially when we are learning something new or trying to do something that we haven’t done in a while. Sometimes it’s difficult to know we have even made a mistake since everything seemed to have worked out the way we anticipated.

In one interview, the subject confirmed what was known from the investigation and even added other information of which we were unaware. So everything must have been just fine since the outcome was what we wanted. If we are only evaluating the outcome of the interview, we may be missing mistakes. If the evaluation of two interviewers is only done by looking at the end result of the confession and statement, we can’t honestly critique the process and structure of the interview; things might not be what they seem. One statement may have been obtained using threats and promises, while the other was a carefully crafted, ethically done conversation that resulted in the confession.

When individuals are trained in an interview process, it is important for them to be mentored and benchmarked against the information presented in the training program. Any training program has a drop off in understanding and usefulness if it isn’t reinforced correctly. This requires a commitment by management to provide monitoring and measuring to assure that the interview training is being used as intended. The monitoring and measuring of interviewers needs to be consistent and provide appropriate critiques and reinforcement for it to be effective. All that is necessary to sabotage the monitoring and measuring effort is to have a manager who is off message in delivering critiques.

Some organizations require a new interviewer to conduct a number of interviews under supervision before they are permitted to conduct one on their own. The difficulty with this is that the opportunity to conduct actual interviews may be separated by months from the original training. A related issue is having the new interviewer practice their skills in an actual investigation, rather than in a safer environment.

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Zulawski and Sturman are executives in the investigative and training firm of Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates (w-z.com). Zulawski is a senior partner, and Sturman is president. Sturman is also a member of ASIS International’s Retail Loss Prevention Council.

They can be reached at 800-222-7789 or via email at dzulawski@w-z.com and ssturman@w-z.com.

Recordings

The computerized interview simulation mentioned above can also provide a recording for evaluation and mentoring during mock interviews. Some organizations record the actual interviews with associates as evidence of their admissions and treatment.

These recordings can also provide a wealth of information to continued on page 14

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interaction during traffic stops to know this occurs often.

Any cell phone can have a recording function that can be surreptitiously used by another.

continued from page 12

assist in the mentoring of the interviewer and benchmarking their performance against training.

For organizations that choose to record or are mandated to record, there are a number of issues that need to be considered.

A recorded interview is much like an unwatched surveillance tape in terms of its value. If the only time surveillance tape is watched is if there was a problem, it is not being used in a preventive fashion. If an organization is recording its interviews, then there should also be periodic reviews of performance against a benchmark to mentor the interviewer and assure they are performing within department guidelines.

In addition to evaluating performance, recorded interviews can be powerful evidence to help the organization establish the interview was done within departmental guidelines and no

Interview Preparation

Preparation for the interview is often an overlooked component for a successful case resolution. As cases become more complex with interwoven events, meetings, and people, the interviewer needs a simplified approach to help remember and understand the case. As the investigation expands and details are revealed, it is often useful to build a timeline of events to help understand and remember the different interlocking events making up the case.

If you remember from your history books, timelines were often used to simply illustrate different historical events and their relationship to one another. An investigative timeline is essentially the same thing, allowing the interviewer to remember at a glance when people entered the conspiracy, the timing of the specific meeting, or even when relevant documents were prepared. Especially during development of the admission where a subject is making partial admissions while attempting to conceal other information, the timeline may be useful in contradicting or expanding the individual’s admissions. The timeline also can help the interviewer pose relevant questions because they have a chronological set of events that are easily referred to during the conversation.

In a simple case, the timeline might contain the times of arrivals of each employee, deliveries that occurred, or when lunches were taken. As interviews are conducted, additional information can be added that may ultimately point to a likely suspect.

In a recent case, we investigated a theft of money from the safe in the manager’s office at a restaurant. We began by charting on the timeline the arrival of each employee, noting their names and job titles. During the interview with the restaurant manager, we were able to ascertain the time during which the safe was unlocked and the employees who were present during that time.

These employees were then noted on the timeline as to their arrival and departure from the office. During our interview with the manager, he said that he had to leave for a short period of time leaving a kitchen helper and the cashier alone in the office while the safe was unlocked. Two key pieces of evidence emerged from our interview with the kitchen helper. First, he said he stepped out momentarily to get some coffee, leaving the cashier alone in the manager’s office. Second, he said upon his return the cashier was sitting in a different chair, indicating she had moved while he was gone. When the manager returned to the office, the kitchen helper and cashier were still present, and he locked the safe and went about his day’s business. The simple visual of the timeline made the selection of a primary suspect quite simple.

While one could grasp this information quite simply without using a timeline, one can imagine the complexities when investigating a large-scale kickback or fraud case. Money transfers, home or vacation purchase, contract awards, and any of myriad other relevant facts can be captured on the timeline, making the information’s retrieval a simple matter.

In our next column will continue with more random lessons from the room.

If there are consistent undesired outcomes after interviews, the problem must lie with the interviewer since they are the common denominator among the events. To identify the mistake, the interviewer’s process and word choice must be evaluated to determine why they are unable to achieve the desired performance. mistreatment of the individual took place. The recording also establishes clearly the tone of the conversation and the context of any admissions or confession made by the subject. Former US attorney Tom Sullivan, a partner at the law firm of Jenner and Block, has conducted a study of police departments recording interviews and interrogations. The officers using recordings have overwhelmingly found them to be helpful in capturing admissions and confessions, plus providing additional leads for follow-up inquiries.

When using a recording device, the interviewer should be aware of applicable state law relating to recordings of another.

Some states require both parties to consent to the recording, while other states require only one person’s consent. In general, we recommend obtaining the subject’s permission to record regardless of applicable state law.

Regardless of whether or not an organization requires recordings of interviews, interviewers should always anticipate their interview is being recorded. One has only to look at the multitude of videos appearing on social media of police officer

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FEATURE

STORIES FROM THE STORMS LP HELPS STEER COMPANIES AND COMMUNITIES THROUGH HURRICANE CRISIS

By Garett Seivold, Contributing Writer

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STORIES FROM THE STORMS

K

roger Store 950 sits slightly raised in small-town Texas “thirty miles northeast of Beaumont as the crow flies,” according to Eric Bumbaugh, Houston division asset protection manager.

As Harvey blew through—dropping rain in amounts unlike Bumbaugh has ever seen during his thirty-two years in South Texas—950 turned into an island. Inside was a lone assistant store manager who had evacuated to the store after flooding cut her off from her home. She hunkered down inside until help from LP arrived in the form of specialized contract security arriving by boat. “With two of my asset protection specialists and two armed guards, they all stayed in that store,” Bumbaugh recounted. “And they opened and operated it.”

Eric Bumbaugh Although limited until very high trucks and eighteen-wheelers could get to it, the store safely served the surrounding area, which was hit hard by the storm and in desperate need. “It was the only grocery store that could check people out in a forty-mile radius,” said Bumbaugh.

“And we were able to sell all product except refrigerated items.”

Store 950 operated without significant incident, as did Kroger stores throughout the region, despite some opening with as few as four employees, limited help available from law enforcement, and plenty of anxious customers. “In some locations we had a line 800-deep outside the store,” Bumbaugh said.

To manage those crowds, the stores used a three-in, three-out procedure and relied on supplemental contract security that corporate LP had scrambled to dispatch. “The ability to over-staff the division with outside security help was a huge thing—within forty-eight hours we had every store covered, including armed guards in the most critical stores,” explained Bumbaugh.

But getting its Houston division the help it needed was no simple thing.

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When Harvey intensified and Kroger was forced to temporarily close 108 stores in the region, Bumbaugh called the general office in Cincinnati for assistance. Property was at risk, and getting stores open was going to be a challenge.

“They had no security guard coverage because the local contract guards couldn’t get to the stores. It was going to require navigating a way in from outside to make it to the locations,” explained Christopher Ochs, LPC, who acted as the corporate liaison to the division AP team. “So the issue for us at corporate was how do we coordinate the resources we need, and how can we get them to Eric to assist him with Christopher Ochs managing the crisis on the ground?”

With personnel from its local security contractor U.S. Security Associates also impacted by the storm, and some of them unavailable, the corporate team reached out to other security contractors—Securitas, Central Defense Security, and Phoenix Protective Corporation—with which Kroger had some form of existing arrangement. “We went to each of them and asked, ‘What do you guys have?

What can you contribute?’”

Making several inquiries proved vital as only Phoenix could provide the immediate, high-security assistance that Kroger was after. “They responded in five hours with armed and armored guard certified personnel, which we deployed across the stores as we needed them and could distribute them,” said Ochs.

Back in the storm zone, the assistance proved crucial. “We had a couple of incidents in which people outside threatened to break in, but we were able to manage that very well,” said Bumbaugh. “Our ability to control the grocery store box was a huge thing—to maintain order, eliminate shoplifters, and to calm arguments that could have potentially led to very

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serious incidents. In a situation like that, there is the real possibility of quickly losing control of your building.”

During the crisis period, Kroger experienced only four serious incidents in the entire Houston area—and even in those no one was injured, according to Bumbaugh. “Since we had the security, the bad guys were elsewhere,” he said.

It was, not surprisingly, “an absolutely astronomical expense,” according to Ochs. “But it was necessary, and we offset our potential losses by doing so.” And it took almost no convincing of management, he added. “They were on board immediately and saw that it was a time for decisive and heroic action—and that can cost money.”

The teamwork, resilience, and commitment displayed by the Kroger AP team were replicated at retailers throughout Texas and Florida as Harvey and Irma tested preparedness in rapid succession. LP helped retailers succeed in many areas besides security.

They assisted in the pre-storm phase, physically securing properties, assisting with closing procedures, cash handling, and door control. They helped affected employees afterwards, at their homes with after-storm clean up and home repair. They supported field operators during the crisis, keeping store shelves stocked. And they administered disaster displacement assistance to store associates and the community throughout, coordinating housing and bringing in and distributing water, groceries, diapers, school supplies, and other essentials.

Some of the victories and lessons learned are detailed below thanks to the generosity of the many LP leaders who openly shared their storm experiences in order to help their peers prepare for next time. Because even though Harvey and Irma were both described as “one-in-a-lifetime” events, next time—as Hurricane Maria proved when it devastated Puerto Rico two weeks later—could be right around the corner.

Spreading the Word

LP practitioners universally cited the importance of crisis communications

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STORIES FROM THE STORMS in their responses to Harvey and Irma, including the value of starting them early. Crisis team leaders at LifeWay Christian Stores began communicating ten days before landfall and held a conference call with field leaders seventy-two hours prior to plan, for example.

Bill Heine, chief security officer at Brinker International, which owns the Chili’s restaurant chain among others, said it was mindful to communicate Bill Heine pre-storm with employees. “We started talking early on to employees—setting expectations, giving them some advanced notice of when we might close, how they can communicate with us, and how we would communicate with them.”

That included establishing a toll-free number that employees could call to get information, creating internal online communication tools, and communicating with workers over social media, according to Heine.

The massive personal toll exacted by recent storms was reflected in the number of retail employees that took advantage of those avenues of communication. Walmart’s Associate Support Call Center fielded nearly 10,000 calls from impacted associates, for example.

Several other retailers mentioned the importance of talking early on to vendors, insurance carriers, alarm monitoring centers, and general contractors. “It’s important to secure relationships so that help is just a phone call away,” advised Byron J. Smith, CFI, LPC, corporate asset protection manager Byron Smith at 7-Eleven.

In order to support communities and stores, early communications with franchisees and merchandising was a top priority for 7-Eleven’s business continuity team, which falls under the asset protection department that Smith

runs. “It’s important to us because we like to be the last business to close and first to open,” said Smith. “We engage the franchisees in our corporate communications early on. We have two to three conference calls a day, and the franchisees are invited to join in one of them, so they can tell us what they need, share their concerns, and provide us with information on how we can support them.”

Kroger Store 950 operated without significant incident, as did Kroger stores throughout the region, despite some opening with as few as four employees, limited help available from law enforcement, and plenty of anxious customers.

Because of mandatory evacuations, 7-Eleven closed 750 stores as Irma approached. “For those franchisees, we take care of them. We board it up; we sandbag it; we make sure the store is well protected.”

In addition to starting talks when storms first appear on the radar, many LP leaders stressed the value of frequency in crisis communications.

During the active event phase, retail crisis response teams typically held twice-a-day meetings, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

Some retailers’ emergency teams had calls three times a day.

At Kroger, a frequent focus of calls during Harvey was logistics—getting the right stores staffed with the right number of people. “There was a lot of shifting things around as the LP MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017

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impact of the weather system spread and new needs arose,” said Ochs. He added that the frequent meetings are valuable for another reason—because mistakes and speculation tend to fill a communication void. “You need a consistent communication cadence to ensure you minimize rumors,” he said.

Ochs said he also learned the importance of a communication plan that establishes and maintains control

of messaging. While open lines of communication are critical, clear lines of authority must accompany communication, he advised. “You need a narrowing of the field to limit decision-making and to centralize into a command center or a decision tree,” he said. “It’s simply too easy for wires to get crossed, which can end up reallocating to stores that don’t need it.

You also need to ensure that messages aren’t mixed, which can happen when you don’t have a single line of communication.”

Joe Matthews, vice president of loss prevention at Academy Sports + Outdoors, also cited the importance Joe Matthews

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STORIES FROM THE STORMS of clarity when asked which aspect of disaster planning proved most valuable during Harvey and Irma. “I would have to say it’s having defined roles and responsibilities for the team so that there is no confusion and, on top of that, the collaboration and coordination between the players because there were so many things happening.” In addition to “early” and “often,” communication and crisis calls need to involve the right people, according to Cynthia Grizzle, Macy’s AP regional vice president for the South Region. “Our emergency operating committee process is a huge benefit—having representation from logistics and HR and media relations—where everyone is represented and brainstorming together,” she said. “It made addressing challenges easier because we could easily access whatever we needed from an expert in that area for any aspect of the crisis.”

Getting In

Although LP’s role in crisis management varied greatly by retailer, quickly getting into storm zones to assess damage was a common responsibility. For example, post-Irma, Walmart asset protection and operations managers conducted over 330 detailed damage assessments that included reviews of building structure, utility services, HVAC/refrigeration, plumbing, roofing, landscaping, and parking lots.

Brinker’s Bill Heine said their timely response was aided by advanced positioning of business continuity teams—comprised of security, facilities, HR, risk management, and operations—to the periphery of the anticipated impact zones. “You’ve got to physically get in there to see what the damage there is, where there is and isn’t power, and whether or not you can get the doors open,” said Heine.

Getting outside teams in is critical because disasters turn local employees into victims, he noted. “We’ve got a business to run, and our employees are about to be victims. So we want to get people into the market ahead of the

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storm so that we can worry about the business, and they can worry about keeping themselves safe and dealing with the impact of the storm on a personal level,” Heine said.

7-Eleven approached response in a similar fashion. The company had crisis response teams in southern Texas and, as Irma approached, loaded them up in RVs and sent them over to Florida to be in a position to quickly help franchisees there. Once they were allowed in, each team inspected roughly fifteen stores per day. “We were ready with boots on the ground,” said Smith. “We helped them clean up, prepare for customers, get merchandise on the shelves, and get ready to open.”

Needs that arose at some 7-Eleven stores provide an illustration of the value of staging personnel nearby. With fuel supplies low, anxiety high, and pump designs that allowed customers to pull in from either direction, the potential for havoc was high, according to Smith. But with AP teams already in the field, they were able to provide stores with the traffic control support they needed. “AP was engaged with that to make sure that everyone waited in line for their turn at the pump and made things proceed orderly and without incident.”

It’s also helpful to plan for response to not go as planned, suggested Macy’s Grizzle. In preparing for Harvey, her team was most focused on identifying who from its team would respond to which stores to do the initial damage assessment alongside a facilities expert.

“We saw the importance of having a lot of backup plans because so many areas had major highways cut off by flooding,” she said. “In many cases, the person we had originally planned to do a damage assessment at a particular store was not going to be able to get there.”

To facilitate property inspections, it can help to have a remote view into the storm zone as it happens, according to Smith. 7-Eleven partners with Click-It for live remote viewing of stores’ exterior cameras, and where that capability is not in place, the

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Retail to the Rescue “It was like a scene out of [TV’s] MASH,” said Joe Matthews, vice president of loss prevention at Academy Sports + Outdoors.

For ten days following Harvey’s deluge, the retailer’s corporate campus in Katy, Texas, served as a staging ground for rescue and relief efforts. One hundred high-water vehicles came and went. Hundreds of trucks and trailers were loaded up with federal relief supplies. Transport helicopters took off and landed. Fifty ambulances served a mobile surgical unit. And hundreds of active-duty troops worked alongside dozens of federal and state first responders, law enforcement, and fire department personnel. So on the nose was the description of the scene that “MASH” was adopted as the nickname for the retailer’s daily emergency briefings.

When Harvey threw the response community a curveball, transforming the Houston area into the impact zone, “We saw the areas that law enforcement was setting up to stage rescue efforts, and we realized that we could help,” said Matthews.

“We invited them here to our corporate office to support and help take care of them, so they could perform their rescue missions.”

Academy’s West Houston campus was dry but also in the thick of it.

Five miles in any direction were areas severely impacted by the storm, making it an ideal spot for responders to bed down, eat, and plan to embark on lifesaving missions. The location and layout were tailor-made to offer support, said Matthews. “We had the concrete ground that was needed for relief trucks, our parking garage could act as a helicopter pad, and the fourth floor of our corporate office was partially empty,” adding to the office space and housing it could offer. In all, the retailer’s headquarters served as the temporary home for more than 1,100 rescue-team members and active Army personnel.

And its assistance wasn’t limited to sharing space with emergency responders. The

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sporting goods retailer also provided rescuers access to closed stores throughout the affected area, so they could grab boats, life preservers, sleeping bags, backpacks, and other critical rescue supplies.

Academy’s helping hand is a good example of the expanded role that retail played in facilitating crisis response to Harvey and Irma, but it’s hardly the only one. In the immediate aftermath of Harvey, Walmart mobilized truckloads of water, groceries, consumable goods, and pharmacy supplies to various communities, including to the mega shelter at Academy Sports + Outdoors’ headquarters. Employees at LifeWay Christian Stores helped with sandbagging, serving in shelters, and collecting supplies to help victims as the water receded.

Retailers of all stripes played an active role in mitigating the human misery caused by the recent storms.

Brinker International, which owns the Chili’s restaurant chain among others, gladly accepted the role it could play as a food provider. “In every event, we accept an obligation to employees, the community, and first responders,” said Bill Heine, chief security officer. His team, which is responsible for all business continuity and crisis management, had pre-storm conversations with vendors in order to stock restaurants with groceries.

“We wanted to be there to feed employees and families. Prior to reopening, if we had groceries, we were there to feed employees and first responders in both Florida and Texas.”

A New Role for Retail?

It perhaps started with Hurricane

Katrina. The dramatic failure in government’s response to that crisis demonstrated—in the way that only tragedy can—that organizations can’t rely on community emergency response to protect their people, property, or interests. That storm also put retailers’ unique logisitics expertise on full display and seemed to raise the bar of expectation for the role that they could play in disaster relief efforts.

So fast-forward to Harvey and Irma, and it’s perhaps no surprise to find retailers at the heart of community relief efforts. While organizations like the Red Cross faced sharp criticism for their response—one Houston councilman called the charity “inept, unorganized”—retailers garnered praise for providing unprecedented direct assistance to the recent relief efforts.

And then, of course, there’s the money. Retailers were quick to pledge millions to recovery efforts in the wake of Harvey and Irma in direct donations, by matching or doubling customer donations, and in directly distributed supplies or via other relief organizations. Shortly after Harvey hit, when initial estimates were that the retail sector would lose $1 billion in short-term sales from the storm, retailers had already pledged more than $150 million to hurricane relief. Walmart alone committed more than $37 million for the 2017 hurricane relief efforts.

While no amount of business continuity planning can offset losses from natural disasters on the scale of recent hurricanes, some retailers clearly experienced a public relations silver lining from their emergency response activities.

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These retailers were recipients of positive brand reinforcement that will likely persist long after affected areas return to normal. Although it’s not possible to put a price tag on goodwill, there is clearly a bottom line benefit to headlines such as “The Home Depot Helps Texans Affected by Hurricane Harvey“ and “Gallery Furniture Turns Stores into Shelters for Harvey Victims.”

In evaluating the costs versus benefits of emergency preparedness spending, most retailers will consider factors such as sales lost due to store closure. However, media coverage shows how retailers’ quick response and helpful community involvement can be an invaluable source of positive—and free—advertising. Surveys have shown that 88 percent of the public holds a more favorable impression of companies that provide aid during and after a major natural disaster.

Still, it’s clear that the real motivation of retailers comes from a profound sense of responsibility to assist the communities they serve—that and a realization of exactly how much they can help.

As store emergency and logistics programs have matured, retailers are now more capable of supplying assistance than ever before, allowing action to match the desire to get communities back on their feet.

Although Harvey was an incalculable disaster by all measures, it was also a “rewarding experience” for Academy’s Joe Matthews. “It was amazing to watch and be a part of,” he said. “Especially when our team came back to work and to watch them work cohesively alongside the first-responder community.”

As has become commonplace among retailers when disasters hit, Academy Sports + Outdoors willingly accepted a role in the response and relief effort that went well beyond merely getting store doors open. “As a company we saw a real and immediate need, and our leadership was fully committed to doing whatever needed to be done to take care of people,” said Matthews. “We’re just grateful to have been in the right place at the right time to help.”

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corporate crisis team can at least ping the store to see if it still has power.

Connectivity was surprisingly robust, according to Smith. Even as stores in Florida had the eye of the storm pass directly overhead, the crisis team was able to watch the scene unfold on monitors in its crisis room. “It’s beneficial. As an example, we were

Lessons Learned

Bolster supplier relationships and investigate alternative providers.

For Kroger, it was the need to find alternative security personnel. For 7-Eleven, following Harvey, it was ice.

“Some stores had trouble getting ice because there was no refrigeration. We had to find a vendor in San Antonio where we could buy ice and then truck

“We engage the franchisees in our corporate communications early on. We have two to three conference calls a day, and the franchisees are invited to join in one of them, so they can tell us what they need, share their concerns, and provide us with information on how we can support them.”

– Byron J. Smith, CFI, LPC, 7-Eleven monitoring some stores that we couldn’t board up because of the sheer volume of stores, and a few were hit by vandals—and we were able to quickly notify local police.” More generally, remote viewing capabilities allows its operation teams to know what’s going on, what to expect when they go back in, and to make preparations for getting stores back up and running,” said Smith.

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it in,” explained Smith. Identifying alternate sources is important in the event stores need to quickly source product, he said, adding that Harvey reiterated for 7-Eleven the importance of including merchandising partners and outside vendors in its crisis communications and on crisis calls, as well as relationship building when the sun is shining. “It’s a reminder of the importance of those visits throughout

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the week when they’re dropping off soda and chips, and for making sure they’re engaged and that their business continuity plan is robust enough that they will be able to support you when the time comes,” said Smith. “I have spent time looking at their plans to make sure they have viable plans in place.”

Good relationships with authorities can pay off. As noted, 7-Eleven asset protection staff helped to control crowds at store gas pumps, but they also got an assist from law enforcement.

“In many cases, we solicited and got the support of police departments to help,” said Smith. Other retailers noted that a good foundation with law enforcement helped them to skirt curfews and closures, so they could move goods around hard-hit areas. To the same end, Macy’s Grizzle said they leveraged help from exterior partners such as the Florida Retail Federation, which was able to support retailers via a direct liaison to the governor’s office.

Consider if your systems can provide value beyond the day to day. If there is a power-supply issue on a normal day at a Kroger store, employees are there to notice and address it. So there is no need for its central alarm control company to take immediate action if a fire panel were to send a trouble signal for no power. But with stores closed and empty during Harvey, that intelligence was suddenly vital to have.

Its emergency procedures called for the notification of select crisis personnel in such an event, which allowed it to divert generators to stores that had lost power and notify utility providers of the outage to get back online. Changing that procedure allowed for notification of power loss it wouldn’t have otherwise had, enabling more stores to open more quickly and preventing product from being lost—by trucking in dry ice to affected stores and moving product into freezers. “It worked fantastically well,” said Bumbaugh. “We estimate we saved more than $100,000 because of it,” Fully leverage your personnel resources. At Kroger, division asset protection managers handle crisis

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STORIES FROM THE STORMS events with assistance from the corporate AP team. Chris Ochs served as the corporate team’s point of contact during Harvey, but the duties technically fell outside of his new position as a corporate reclamation manager, which deals more on the merchandising side of the retail equation. However, because Ochs, a former division AP manager, has significant experience in crisis management, the corporate AP team took advantage of it. “I used to be in Seattle where we have riots every May,” Ochs joked. “So I have the right skill set and a lot of practice managing crisis events.”

Exploit personal connections to yield quicker response.

When Kroger called on security contractors to dispatch personnel to help them in Houston, the fastest response came from Phoenix Protective Corporation out of Washington state, with which Ochs had worked closely during his time in Seattle.

That the fastest response came from a company so far away suggests how critical personal relationships can be. It’s easy to think that the close relationship that Ochs had with Phoenix back in Seattle was part of the reason, with so many security demands being placed across the region, that Phoenix was quick to respond.

Command centers are helpful to facilitate corporate assistance. 7-Eleven goes live with a crisis command center, which it dubs its “situation room,” when a storm is seven days from landfall near operating locations, explained Smith. The room, at its corporate headquarters in Irving, Texas, physically brings together crisis team members, which is made up of representative members from all departments, such as fuel, logistics, facilities, and so on. “It’s a situation room designed and set up for that purpose—to provide as much support to our stores as possible,” said Smith. Among the features are large monitors that allow them to follow coverage of unfolding events and share storm-tracking data among the crisis team.

Software tools provide a useful advanced alerting to assets at risk. 7-Eleven’s business continuity team tracks storms using RiskPulse, which allows it to graphically see store assets and the potential impact of an event on those assets. “It has been very useful. It layers our assets on top of all the different storm prediction models and provides a status of green, yellow, and red to indicate the possible risk to those assets,” explained Smith. Brinker’s Bill Heine feels similarly toward his team’s capability of pinpointing every restaurant in a map view to identify which stores are in the path of the storm and to couple that with specific forecasts for each restaurant location.

More extensive alarming of stores could help mitigate loss from looting. Kroger experienced looting at a few stores during Harvey, and looters hit a couple of stores a few times before the AP team could access the sites. But in a bit of luck, the grocery chain was testing new alarm system schematics at several stores that went well beyond the normal alarming that the grocery store employs. “At those stores, we deterred several looting attempts as they triggered the new alarms and then went away,” said Ochs.

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Draw a big enough circle around the “impact zone.” Although flooding during Harvey was limited to Houston and surrounding coastal areas, Heine said they felt the ramifications in Dallas. “We had issues that impacted our restaurants in Dallas from the sheer volume of evacuees fleeing the coast and coming to Dallas.” In Florida, too, its restaurants throughout the state felt side effects from Irma. It’s important to consider the cascading effects from crisis events, Heine advised.

Do you have procedures and plans in case the very worst happens?

Two Kroger stores were physically damaged beyond repair. “Complete write-offs,” said Bumbaugh. That required significant work for which they had no security protocols and, because no one had been through such a thing, no institutional memory.

Challenges included what to do with wet money that armored carriers and banks wouldn’t take and disposing of

prescription drugs in accordance with strict federal regulations, which required them to stash and protect drugs under armed guard for several weeks. “It’s something that we had never thought of, but we now have developed [standard operating procedures] for cash remediation and on managing pharmacy drugs.”

Next Time

After-action or lessons-learned debrief sessions are a critical part of disaster response to ensure that corrective actions are taken and deficiencies are identified. Retailers and LP shined during Harvey and Irma, and they also identified some possibilities for improvement.

As noted, 7-Eleven experienced a mad rush for gas as a nervous public was constantly topping off gas tanks.

It’s now looking to expand its reserves during hurricane season. “So we have a little larger capacity,” said Smith.

“That’s an investment we’re willing to make.”

“We’ve got a business to run, and our employees are about to be victims. So we want to get people into the market ahead of the storm so that we can worry about the business, and they can worry about keeping themselves safe and dealing with the impact of the storm on a personal level.”

The company will also be investigating power solutions as a few stores remained closed due to power issues several weeks after Irma.

“You look at Puerto Rico, where the entire infrastructure remained down, and we need to prepare ourselves for something like that, be it containerized power generators or something else—to support store operations and to have a capacity to run the registers.”

Kroger successfully met its security challenge during Harvey, but Ochs thinks that with a storm predicted to be of a similar magnitude the company would likely want to dispatch extra guards to the area a few days in advance. They will also be seeing what improvement they can make to its logistics plan, he said. “At one point, the number of trucks at the distribution center created a backup.” The fallout from Harvey also made clear the importance of being able to effectively guide trucks around a city—“one of the many things we would assume we could rely on law enforcement for, but which we had to step in and provide for ourselves since law enforcement was rightfully concentrating on search and rescue efforts,” Ochs said.

Macy’s Grizzle said that Irma—and then Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico—exposed their reliance on cell phones during emergencies. “I think for hurricane-prone areas or regions prone to that sort of disruption, it showed the importance of having a stock of working satellite phones to use in an emergency,” she said. “It may be something that you don’t need for a decade, but in that tenth year you’d want it.”

The Big Takeaway

Most importantly, a good business continuity and emergency response plan needs the ability to flex, according to leaders LP Magazine interviewed. Harvey and Irma themselves exemplified the need for flexibility. “They were two entirely different disasters,” said Heine.

“From an employee impact event,

– Bill Heine, Brinker International 22

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Harvey was much bigger, and from a business interruption perspective, because of the power loss, Irma was much bigger.” Hurricanes both but with very different consequences—in one, retailers had power and no employees; the other, employees and no power.

The lesson? “You can’t just have a disaster plan because you won’t be able to administer to all disasters in an orderly way,” advised Ochs. “You

actual impact on the business—and to use that information to tell you how you should respond.”

Academy’s Joe Matthews cited leadership as a foundation for flexibility. “I’ve had the pleasure of being at Academy Sports for twenty-three years, and in that time, I have seen a lot of different types of disasters, and no two are the same.

So you have to have a team that can be fluid in its response, to expect the unexpected, and to clearly identify the key stakeholders who will be

Experts in business continuity suggest that flexibility is easier when preparedness activities flow from a company’s strategic goals, as opposed to a bottom-up approach in which an inventory of assets serves as the foundation for business recovery. also need to have a reaction menu that you can accelerate to as things start to go out of control.”

Heine echoed the point. “There are 100 little things in every event that you learn because no two of these events are ever the same,” he said. “There is not a cookie cutter plan you can use for response. You have to let the way the disaster unfolds dictate your response.”

For Heine, quick deployment of staff to impact zones is central to an effective, flexible crisis response.

“Watching the event unfold on television is one thing, but nothing replaces getting boots on the ground so that you can understand the

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able to make the decisions about protection and assets.”

Experts in business continuity suggest that flexibility is easier when preparedness activities flow from a company’s strategic goals, as opposed to a bottom-up approach in which an inventory of assets serves as the foundation for business recovery.

Instead of looking inward, look outward during planning—at your customers and the market—and then look back at how you service them, suggests John Stagl, director of business continuity at Belfor USA, a provider of property recovery services.

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Hurricane Harvey was a good example of why business continuity plans must focus on flexibility. While “getting up and running” is typically the goal of disaster recovery, getting up and running immediately after Harvey was a moot point for some because there were no customers around to service. In this case, returning to operation didn’t equal a return of revenue and instead could hurt a company’s ability to mitigate its losses through insurance payments.

True business continuity is about achieving corporate goals, which may change given market factors and the nature of the disaster. In this way, “the planning is actually more important than the plan itself,” said Stagl. “It’s about getting people thinking about what is truly important and creating a framework for servicing it.”

Finally, while all disasters are different—which makes flexibility key to managing them—there does seem to be one constant, one thing that retailers can truly rely on: the reaction of its people to a major crisis. “The most memorable thing to me is the way that all of our teams and the AP team came together to help each other out, whether it was to help impacted associates or associates volunteering to work in donation centers,” said Macy’s Grizzle, expressing a sentiment common among LP leaders. “In all three storms, as soon as we said we needed help, people immediately raised their hands to do whatever it takes. To see their willingness and eagerness to help their communities and company and coworkers—it was pretty awesome.”

GARETT SEIVOLD is a journalist who has covered corporate security for nearly twenty years. He has been recognized for outstanding writing, investigative reporting, and instructional journalism. He has authored dozens of survey-based research reports and best-practice manuals on security-related topics. Seivold can be reached at GarettS@LPportal.com.

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LPM EXCELLENCE

LPM “Magpie” Awards: Applauding Excellence

The LPM “Magpie” Awards offer a means to celebrate industry accomplishments on an ongoing basis, recognizing the loss prevention professionals, teams, solution providers, law enforcement partners, and others that demonstrate a stellar contribution to the profession.

The ability to influence change is a product of drive, creativity, and determination, but

it also requires a unique ability to create a shared vision that others will understand, respect, support, and pursue. Each of the following recipients reflects that standard of excellence, representing the quality and spirit of leadership that makes a difference in our lives, our people, and our programs. Please join us in celebrating the accomplishments of our latest honorees.

Excellence in Partnerships

Excellence in Partnerships

“It was during my tenure in retail loss prevention that I discovered my passion for finding solutions to promote sales and better protect assets and people,” said Hyle. “During my retail career, I was truly fortunate to work with a number of highly respected solution providers that were instrumental in providing the knowledge and support to help me succeed. Through these relationships, I discovered the tools, techniques, and skills to make a positive difference in my company and my career.

“I’ve always considered sincerity to be an important virtue in business and in life. Sincerity provides the foundation for establishing trust and honesty in any relationship. A true solution provider is also a genuine business partner, striving to build relationships and dedicated to both achieving success in business as well as the growth and development of those involved. They’re unselfish and eager to share their knowledge for the benefit of others. They want to make a positive difference.

“Successful partnerships require mutual commitment and accountability. Like any relationship, the growth and longevity of a partnership is measured by the extent to which both parties are committed to support each other and deliver on the promises made along the way. Be thoughtful and sincere when making promises to others and always follow through on your commitments regardless of their importance.”

“I’ve had the great fortune to work in proactive, problem-solving positions most of my career,” said Crum, who also serves as board president for the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail (CLEAR). “After being selected as the Crime Prevention Unit supervisor in 1990, I started work on the development of our ORC Interdiction Team. Like anything new, it was an uphill battle getting all the necessary stakeholders to buy into the scope of this issue and how people committing ORC crimes relate to every other crime we deal with, from homicide to car theft. After numerous noteworthy cases that led to significant arrests, my commanders gave full support to this program and have continued to support these efforts with resources and manpower.

“I’ve been able to train law enforcement and loss prevention officers all over the country on how our LP/law enforcement partnership was developed and how it currently operates.

When building these partnerships, it’s critical to have trust, respect, commitment, and a common goal. Each stakeholder needs to respect the ‘rule book’ that the other must follow. Law enforcement and loss prevention have different mandates, but these partnerships can be mutually beneficial if we respect each other and work together. This was a long, slow process. But like any relationship, building a solid foundation has proven itself time and again.”

Steve Hyle, Vice President, Director of National Accounts, AFA Protective Systems

Curt Crum, CID, Special Services Manager: Evidence, Forensics, and Victim Services; Organized Retail Crime, Boise (ID) Police Department

Nominations Are Encouraged at Excellence@LPportal.com We want this to be your program. Those of you working as LP practitioners witness these exceptional performances on a regular and ongoing basis, and we strongly encourage you to provide us with nominees for each of the award categories. We encourage creative nominations and want the program to cast a positive light on the many tremendous contributions of the loss prevention community.

Nominations can be submitted via email to excellence@LPportal.com.

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EVIDENCE-BASED LP

Training Makes a Difference T

he loss prevention/asset protection industry is full of hard-chargers—individuals striving to get better, to excel at what they do, to make a difference. But increasing loss, crime, and intense retail competition mean we need to continue to get even better.

And the LP industry has really responded over the last years to support our career field with a top-flight LP magazine, the LP Foundation and its LPQ and LPC certifications, CFI training and credentials, ASIS CPP and other certifications, daily and weekly e-newsletters, great industry associations and their excellent conferences, the Loss Prevention Research Council (LPRC) with over 300 completed LP/AP research projects and counting, and even more good, specific LP/AP training and credentials up and running or on the way, to name just a few.

Education can be a disruptive innovation, especially online learning. Job performance training injects critical and evolving knowledge and skills into practitioners. We all really do need to know and be good at what and how to accomplish our missions. Observation or ride-along training helps, but most of what happens in our business may not actually occur in our presence so that we can learn how to deal with it. In-person training is good too, but outcomes depend on the trainer’s skills.

Online and computer-based training programs often provide more content and delivery consistency.

New Online Course and Certificate

To this end, the University of Florida has now fielded the first course of what may become three online LP/AP problem-solving courses. The idea is to support the retail associations, the LP Foundation, and its certifications, as well as individuals and retail chains with a certificate program.

The course title is “Introduction to Evidence-Based Loss Prevention” (EBLP). As the first of three courses, this online course is designed to help participants better understand how to use a theory-driven, evidence-based, systematic, crime-prevention process to make people, places, and assets safer and more secure. The course contains six modules: 1. Crime/Loss and Loss Prevention: Defining Impact and Process 2. Basics of Evidence-Based Practice 3. Environment and Behavior: Using Theory to Understand and Solve Problems 4. The Problem-Solving Process: SARA and Beyond 5. EBLP Case Study Examples 6. Use the EBLP Process and Worksheets to Solve a Problem

by Read Hayes, PhD, CPP Dr. Hayes is director of the Loss Prevention Research Council and coordinator of the Loss Prevention Research Team at the University of Florida. He can be reached at 321-303-6193 or via email at rhayes@lpresearch.org. © 2017 Loss Prevention Research Council

I would encourage individuals and organizations looking to develop or enhance evidence-based, problem-solving skills for new or even experienced LP/AP practitioners to check this program out at ufl.edu. Enter the course name in the search bar.

The University of Florida’s Eric Ryan would also be happy to discuss providing course demos, group rates, and program objectives and process at any time with you. Contact him at eric@dce.ufl.edu.

Featured Research

In this column, we’ve often discussed precision problem-solving.

Precision means better outcomes with fewer negative side effects.

And greater precision comes from a better problem diagnosis, meaning a more complete description of the very specific problem and its likely causes and where and when it’s clustered.

Recognizing one size does not fit all, retailers increasingly assign risk and vulnerability scores to their locations.

Risk estimates how much relative exposure a given store has to nearby clusters of surrounding offenders (the more likely offenders, the higher the risk) and how accessible the location is to these offenders. Store risk obviously varies widely, even within markets.

Retailers subscribe to services that estimate area risk using reported crime and estimated social disorganization as examples.

Relative vulnerability is how well a store, distribution center, or office is capable of handling crime attempts. Every store’s ability to prevent and handle problems also varies. A place manager’s loss control knowledge and commitment varies. So does their AP toolkit. Historic loss, shrinkage, manager performance, reported incidents, and other metrics help retailers prioritize support.

The currently described research was an earlier attempt to gauge whether and how retail chains segregate stores into risk and vulnerability bands for more precise protective support. The LPRC team is currently preparing to collect even more store risk and vulnerability process data in a new project.

Study Method: Loss prevention executives from twenty-one companies in six categories (mass merchants, department stores, drug stores, apparel stores, specialty stores, and grocery and dollar stores) completed surveys.

Results: Almost all the retailers we talked to use some process and data to evaluate each store’s relative risk and vulnerability.

Following are some study highlights.

By far, the type of risk data most likely to be collected by the participating companies is actual loss/shrink, collected by almost all (95.2%) of the participants. More than two-thirds (71.4%) of the loss prevention executives indicate they collect data on the

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loss/shrink rate (as a percentage of sales) for stores in their highest risk category is between 1.0 percent and 2.1 percent.

Almost one-quarter (23.5%) of these respondents indicate that the average loss-shrink rate for stores in their highest risk category is 3.0 percent. Nearly one-half (47.1%) of the participants who assign stores to categories based on risk data indicate that they conduct risk assessments and reclassify stores once a year.

As mentioned above, the LPRC is working to generate more risk and vulnerability rating data and process ideas.

Please let us know your willingness to participate in understanding even better ways to measure and predict store and department loss and crime levels.

number of incidents by crime, and a similar percentage (66.7%) collects data on the number of accidents at the store level.

Approximately four-fifths (81.0%) of the LP executives surveyed indicate they use the risk data they collect at the store level to make a risk profile for each store or to classify stores into categories. Nearly three-fifths (58.8%) of the companies who report using store-level risk data to classify their stores have three classification levels based on this data. Nearly one-quarter (23.5%) of these respondents have five classification levels based on store-level risk data. The most typical classification schemes are ordered number or letter categories such as “1, 2, 3, 4, 5” or “A, B, C” or categorical ranking schemes such as “low, medium, high.”

More than two-fifths (41.2%) of the participants that classify their stores based on store-level risk data determine which stores belong in each category based on a combination score of actual loss/shrink, number of incidents, and other data collected. About 30 percent of the companies that classify their stores based on risk data do so based on a combination of actual loss/shrink and LP measures present in a store, such as EAS, CCTV, and so forth.

Nearly one-half (47.1%) of the participants who assign stores to categories based on risk data have classified between 2 percent and 5 percent of their stores in their highest risk category.

About one-quarter (23.6%) of these respondents have classified between 7 percent and 10 percent of their stores in their highest risk category. About 30 percent of these executives report 15 percent or more of their stores have been classified in their highest risk category.

About 30 percent of the participants who assign stores to categories based on risk data report that the average

Recommended reading

Evaluating Crime Prevention Strategies edited by Johannes Knutsson and Nick Tilley and distributed by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., Boulder, Colorado (2010). This resource describes the differing reasons for assessing current and proposed crime and loss control programs and methods, as well as different evaluation methods. It’s never enough to employ technologies or tactics without evaluating how well an effort was actually executed, its impact on the issue, estimated ROI, and any good, neutral, or negative side effects.

As a committed experimental criminologist, I recognize randomized controlled trials usually provide the strongest evidence and usable ROI metrics, but are often not feasible due to budgets, expertise, small sample sizes, and sparse event or outcome data. This book provides evaluation options.

Introducing LPM Online An All-Digital Magazine with All-New Content

LPM Online is an all-new magazine experience.

LPM Online publishes every other month on even-numbered months in between our print editions. The inaugural edition went live in August.

You can view it and our current edition on the LPM Online tab on our website, LossPreventionMedia.com, or by entering LPM-online.com in your browser.

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INTERVIEW

COLLECTING SHRINKAGE GOALS AND SPORT MEMORABILIA

WITH SCOTT MYERS OF HIBBETT SPORTS

By James Lee, LPC, Executive Editor

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INTERVIEW EDITOR’S NOTE: Scott Myers is vice president of asset protection for Hibbett Sports. For much of his twenty-two years with the company, he held the dual role of vice president of human resources and asset protection. Prior to Hibbett, Myers held multiple LP positions with Parisian.

EDITOR: How did you get started in loss prevention?

MYERS: I got into it by accident.

I was in college at the University of North Alabama, which is located in Florence, Alabama. I had two roommates who worked at Sears, and they came home one day and said, “They’ve got a position open in the security department. You should apply.” And I said, “But I don’t know anything about security.” I applied anyway, got the job, and stayed there for three months until Parisian department store, which was located in the same mall, hired me away. I stayed with Parisian for nine years. I worked in nine of their stores before going to their corporate office. So that’s how my LP career got started.

EDITOR: What did you do in their corporate office?

MYERS: Joe Hardman, who is my mentor, was their director of loss prevention at the time. I was working in the Mobile, Alabama, store, and Joe was looking to create a regional loss prevention manager position in the corporate office and brought me in with him. I stayed with him for a couple of years until I was promoted to the director of operations, which was where I ended my stay with Parisian. The company had gone through some downsizing, and I had the opportunity to go back into the loss prevention department. But to do that, I would have had to move, and I had relocated six times in nine years. I just didn’t want to move again.

EDITOR: You got into the industry by accident, but you’re still here after all these years.

What was it that caused you to like what you were doing

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Mickey Newsome (left) with Scott Myers in the Hibbett Store Support Center.

enough to maintain a lifetime career in LP?

MYERS: I liked that there was a different challenge every day. It was never boring. I liked knowing you could have a positive or negative impact on the company’s financial success by the way you did your job. There was always something happening, and I like seeing things change and evolve. I like watching processes and technologies grow. I enjoyed the interaction with people, which is still true today. It’s always interesting to be around people, good or bad.

EDITOR: How did you finally make it to Hibbett?

MYERS: After Parisian, I made a brief stop at a company called Simply Fashion Stores. I was there for a year and a half. Then, in early 1995, a vendor let me know that Hibbett was considering starting a loss prevention department and encouraged me to interview. So I sent them a resume.

The person who ended up hiring me is someone who has really meant a lot

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to me here, a gentleman by the name of Mickey Newsome (shown above). Mr. Newsome is our chairman of the board to this day, and at the time in 1995, he was our president and CEO. I remember one of the first things he said to Hibbett employees was, “Your first job with the company is to protect the assets of the company.” I’ve always thought that was a strong statement. People will say, “Well, shouldn’t your first responsibility be to sell?” Absolutely it should be, but if you don’t have the product, you can’t sell it.

I give him a lot of credit for the success that we’ve had not only in the company but also as an asset protection department because controlling shrink was very important to him, and that importance resonated throughout the organization. So I began working at Hibbett on August 7th of 1995 and started the loss prevention department here some twenty-two years ago now.

EDITOR: Can you give us some background about the history of Hibbett Sports?

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INTERVIEW MYERS: Well, it’s kind of ironic. As I mentioned, I started my LP career in Florence, Alabama. Ironically, Hibbett Sports started in Florence some seventy-two years ago as Dixie Supply Company. The company sold all kinds of things back then, not just sporting goods. They actually sold airplanes at one time because somebody thought that folks coming back from the war would want to have their own planes.

That didn’t exactly work out how they thought. But they made the rest of it work. Then the Anderson family, which also started Books-a-Million, bought us in 1980 and took us public in 1996. And that’s where we’ve been ever since.

EDITOR: You’re headquartered in Birmingham, correct?

high, and we needed that to change quickly as we were preparing to go public in 1996.

EDITOR: Over those twenty-two years that you’ve been at Hibbett, have you had any responsibilities other than loss prevention?

MYERS: Yes, I was given the human resources department in 2000 because I was heavily involved in the hiring process. Controlling shrink starts with the hiring process. Actually, we didn’t really have an HR department; what we had was a benefits department that we needed to turn it into a true HR department. The first person that I promoted as director of HR was one of our regional loss prevention

managers Harvey Knighten. I went to him and said, “You may think I’m crazy, but now that I’ve got HR, I’m going to need a director of HR. Would you be interested?” At that point in time, neither one of us were what I would call experts in HR, but we held each other’s hand and learned it together, and he is still with us today as our vice president of HR. So after I was given that responsibility in 2000, I held onto it for the next seventeen years until very recently when we split the HR department off. I really enjoyed the HR world. There are a lot of similarities to me between it and LP. They’re departments of ethics and integrity.

They’re departments that operate off of structure, whether it be regulations,

MYERS: Yes, in Birmingham, Alabama. When I started we had sixty stores. We have almost 1,100 now.

EDITOR: What is the typical size of a store? What merchandise do you carry?

MYERS: I’d say the average is about 5,000 square feet. The merchandise selection depends a lot on where the store’s located. We have some fashion stores that cater more to fashion footwear and fashion apparel. We have athletic and sports stores that are focused on athletic apparel, athletic footwear, and team sports. We don’t carry individual sport merchandise. For example, we don’t carry golf, tennis, hunting, or fishing items. We’re baseball, football, basketball, softball, and soccer.

Those are the team sports that we traditionally carry.

EDITOR: When you went over there to start the loss prevention department, were you building on anything or was it just you?

MYERS: It was just me and one other person, whose job was to process return checks. This was a very antiquated process. There weren’t any real proactive shrinkage control processes in place. Shrink was very

A long, long time ago I got into collecting sports memorabilia. And certainly since I joined the company, it has been a little bit easier to collect stuff along the way. I probably have 1,500 autographed items, including magazines, footballs, baseballs, and bats—anything that you can think of.

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INTERVIEW laws, or company policies. They are departments that can make tough decisions on fact versus emotions. I really enjoyed those seventeen years. I found working on the HR side of the business very rewarding.

EDITOR: Having human resources responsibilities alongside LP is very uncommon.

Do you know of anybody else in the industry who has ever had both of those responsibilities?

MYERS: We talked a lot about that early on. People would say to me, “That’s kind of unusual, isn’t it?” And it was unusual, but not to the degree that it is today. At one time there were twelve or so people in retail that I was aware of that had both of those areas of responsibility. Whether they still have them or not, I’m not sure. A lot of

companies decided that it was time to split those teams up as they grew.

EDITOR: In years past, LP was more involved in performing background checks and other pre-employment processes. Are you also responsible for that?

MYERS: That’s actually how I ended up with HR to begin with. LP had been really heavily involved in the pre-employment process. I remember early on we were doing credit checks, criminal checks, store mutual association checks, pencil-and-paper honesty tests, and drug testing.

Regulations have changed over the years that have limited what you can and can’t do during the onboarding process, so it’s different now. But there was some significant overlap back then.

EDITOR: As you look at your asset protection organization today, how is it divided up? How many direct reports do you have?

MYER: I have five direct reports. We are broken up into two AP regions—a west and an east. We have twenty-three regional asset protection managers out in the field covering forty to forty-five stores each. Each time we add another forty stores, the company allows me to hire another regional asset protection manager.

One thing I’m as proud of as anything is that out of those twenty-three, we only have three people on our team that grew up in the loss prevention world. Everybody else was a former store manager for us or, as we call them, a head coach.

EDITOR: What caused you to build the organization like that?

I really enjoyed the HR world. There are a lot of similarities to me between it and LP. They’re departments of ethics and integrity. They’re departments that operate off of structure, whether it be regulations, laws, or company policies.

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MYERS: In the beginning, I think we just didn’t know what we didn’t know from the organization standpoint. I had a good feeling of what we needed, but I think the company was asking, “Do we really need to go out and get experienced people? Can we do it from within?”

And I said, “I don’t know. Let’s give it a shot.”

And what we found out was that they were already Hibbett-ized, meaning they already understood the company culture. They could really help the head coach from day one because they had been an experienced head coach themselves. They were someone who had produced good shrink results, who had operated a store very efficiently.

So from day one they could help them be the best head coach they could be.

That was really what the game plan was all along.

We found out that we could teach them the loss prevention part along the way, and that’s what we’ve done.

We’re looking for somebody who has had a great track record of running a successful store. And we’ve been able to teach them how to do the LP stuff, and it’s worked out great for us. We have very little turnover on our team, and hopefully that will continue to be the case for years to come.

EDITOR: What are the job objectives of those regional asset protection managers?

MYERS: Training, supporting stores, investigating, auditing, and supervising inventories. Those are just some of the things that we ask our regional asset protection managers to do. I really do think we have a pretty good structure. I compare it to a really good football team. To be a great football team you have to have a good offense, a good defense, and good special teams. Here, we look at it the same way. We have to be good internally, externally, and we also have to be good from the administrative side.

I get that there’s negatives attached to the job because of what we do. I get that. But that’s one reason I like our

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INTERVIEW that we really need to have a positive effect on the company’s bottom line, and that shows in the results we as a company have achieved. We’ve missed our shrink goal once in twenty-two years. That shows the company and other departments like accounting, store operations, human resources, real estate, merchandise, and others care about shrink. Even though I can’t provide our actual results, I’ll tell you its well below the national retail average and has been for many years.

EDITOR: Hibbett is a big seller of shoes. I understand that you are one of the founding members of a collaborative industry group that has for a decade or two fought shoe shrinkage. How did that begin?

Regional vice presidents of asset protection Carmen DuBose (left) and Jeremy Bailey (right) with Scott Myers.

setup with the forty to forty-five stores per regional manager. They’re able to get into their stores and really be seen as an ally and not an enemy. They could be there on a store visit, they could be there doing an audit, they could be stopping in because they’re traveling through town going to their next town to make sure, “Hey, is everything okay? Is there anything I can help you with? Are you having any issues?” It’s not necessarily that there’s something wrong.

EDITOR: Other than shrink, which is obviously a numerical measurement, how else does the company measure the success of you and the asset protection team?

MYERS: We have several goals that the company wants us to achieve.

Some of it obviously is shrink related, but a lot of it is more related to profit

and margin than it is to shrink. We have a lot of conversations about total retail loss. We look at making sure that the coupon policy is followed, but you’re not going to see that on any shrink line. We look at price overrides, returned checks, credit card chargebacks, and cash loss.

There are a lot of things that we look at that are not just shrink related.

EDITOR: What technologies do you use in the store to help meet your AP goals?

MYERS: We have EAS and CCTV, of course. Our register system itself has a refund verification process in place.

We’ve used exception-based reporting for a long time. We implemented Agilence this year to replace our previous vendor partner.

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MYERS: It started seventeen or eighteen years ago. I remember Johnny Turner from Rack Room Shoes, Mike Smith at Finish Line, John Grander at Brown Shoe, and I got together in Atlanta for a meeting. I remember sitting in a hotel conference room, and we just went around the room and talked about the various problems and issues we were experiencing. We weren’t talking about confidential company matters or anything like that; it was just things we were all dealing with every day in the LP world. We got so much valuable information out that day because we found out that we were all experiencing similar things.

Then those meetings continued to grow. We’d add people year by year.

And we still get together. In fact, we got together this year at the NRF Protect conference in Washington, DC, in June. We had just about every sporting goods retailer there, just about every athletic footwear or family footwear retailer there—maybe fifteen to twenty companies were represented. We met for an entire day talking about issues that we’re encountering and learning from each other.

It’s been such a blessing and something that I’ve been so pleased to be a part of over all these years.

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INTERVIEW And I’ve made some great friendships as well.

EDITOR: Could you give an example of some of the unique shoe-related issues that you face?

MYER: Everybody’s a little bit different based on their retail setup and merchandise mix. But I’ll give you an example for us. All of our footwear, other than clearance footwear, is located in the back room. We’re full service; we want our team members to talk about the features and benefits of a shoe. We want to make sure the customer is

taken care of. Because of where our footwear is located, we know most of our footwear shrink is related to internal issues more so than external unless the store has experienced some external-related issues.

Other shoe retailers may have a different sales model—say self-serve, where you find your complete pair on the sales floor and try them on.

Their problems are a little bit different than ours.

At Hibbett, we carry very desirable footwear, especially some of the high-profile launch product. People will line up days in advance to be the first person to get a pair of the shoes.

It’s a blessing that people want them, but it also creates some challenges.

Everybody’s a little different when it comes to the challenges present depending on what your layout and your company structure and philosophy are.

EDITOR: In your years at Hibbett, what are you and your team’s proudest accomplishments?

MYERS: The first things that come to mind are our two regional vice presidents of asset protection that report to me—Jeremy Bailey and Carmen DuBose. Jeremy came to Hibbett from a recommendation. Joe Hardman, who I mentioned earlier as being my mentor and a great friend, was still at Parisian. They were going through some tough times, and Joe called me and said, “I’ve got a young man that would do a really great job for you. I’d like for you to talk to him.” I thought,

The company sold all kinds of things back then, not just sporting goods. They actually sold airplanes at one time because somebody thought that folks coming back from the war would want to have their own planes. That didn’t exactly work out how they thought.

But they made the rest of it work.

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“If Joe’s recommending him, then I certainly will talk to him.” Jeremy was twenty years old at the time. He was working full time and going to school full time. I had an opening in our distribution center for an LP person. I put Jeremy in that role, and he did a great job and was promoted out of that role into a corporate investigator role. He then was promoted to a regional loss prevention manager role and is now a regional vice president of asset protection and has been with me for twenty years.

Carmen was a store manager for us. She did a very nice job of running a store, so when we had a regional asset protection manager position become available, I interviewed her, and she was promoted into that position. She did an outstanding job.

So when a regional vice president position opened up, she was my first choice. I didn’t even have to look outside the company because I knew I had somebody that was ready to go and would do an outstanding job. Carmen has been with Hibbett for seventeen years and fifteen years in asset protection. I’ve enjoyed watching both of them grow in their roles, and I’m so proud to have them on the team.

We are all very pleased about the success and the consistency that we’ve had over these past twenty-two years, and Jeremy and Carmen have played a major role in our success.

EDITOR: Enough about LP; let’s get to the good stuff. I happen to know that you have a magnificent collection of sports memorabilia. Tell us about a little about that.

MYERS: A long, long time ago I got into collecting sports memorabilia.

And certainly since I joined the company, it has been a little bit easier to collect stuff along the way.

I probably have 1,500 autographed items, including magazines, footballs, baseballs, and bats—anything that you can think of.

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INTERVIEW

Hibbitt Sports asset protection team sporting their favorite team colors.

I have certain sports and even teams sectioned off in my man cave.

You have to be a hall of famer in the NFL to be in one section. There’s an Olympic section. There’s the Heisman trophy section. Obviously, I

have a huge Alabama section. I even allow my wife to have a really, really small Auburn section in the man cave.

It’s in the very back of the room. You really can’t see it that well, but it’s back there.

EDITOR: If you had to choose two or three of your favorite items, what would they be?

MYERS: That would be really, really hard to do. I’ve got so many great things, and it’s like choosing your

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INTERVIEW

I like watching processes and technologies grow. I enjoyed the interaction with people, which is still true today. It’s always interesting to be around people, good or bad.

favorite child. I’ll tell you a couple that come to mind.

I have an autographed football from Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. It sits there with all the other Alabama stuff.

I have an autographed football from every head coach at Alabama who has won a national championship since I’ve been living.

I have a golf ball signed by Arnold Palmer. That’s a great one to have. I also have a signed Muhammed Ali book.

And one that sticks out in my mind is a Julius Erving basketball. He was in town speaking at our managers’ meeting, and after his speech, our president and CEO at the time said to me, “Hey, he wants to play golf tomorrow. Will you take him to play golf?” So I played eighteen holes with Dr. J. He was a fantastic person to be around and actually beat me out of eight dollars that day.

EDITOR: Scott you’ve had a great career, and it sounds like you have a great collection. I’d like to see it one day. Keep up the good work.

HOW WILL YOU BE

MEASURED? Get certified through the Loss Prevention Foundation. Set yourself apart with credentials that are the standard for the loss prevention profession.

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POWERED BY THE LOSS PREVENTION FOUNDATION

Educating an Industry, One Leader at a Time 36

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An Unmatched Depth of Perspective

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CERTIFICATION

Certification Benefits All AP Leaders

Interview with Chris Scheutzow, LPC Chris Scheutzow, LPC, is the area assets protection leader for Big Lots. He oversees daily asset protection functions for thirty-eight stores in Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Previously, he has held loss prevention leadership positions with Bed Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, and Target. He graduated from Ashland University (Ohio) with a bachelor’s in criminal justice and received his LPC certification in 2013.

Why did you decide to pursue certification? Was there something specific that influenced your decision?

If you could offer one key takeaway to someone currently considering getting certified, what would it be?

Most employers are looking for individuals who are doing more than just the job. I had known Gene Smith for twelve years at the time I went through certification, and he really sold me on the need to further educate myself.

Continue learning. Every major job class has some type of certification. The important thing about being certified means one must commit to continue their education to recertify yearly.

This can be in any area you choose.

Was the course what you expected? Why or why not?

How has going through the certification process influenced the way that you approach your job?

The course was not at all what I expected. I had heard from some people that many certification courses are just put out there for companies to make money. That’s not the case with the Loss Prevention Foundation, which is a not-for-profit organization.

I assumed that the coursework would be basic things I already knew. I was quite surprised to find the curriculum was quite diverse and educational.

I now continue to look for answers and educate myself to learn more about the business. Back in the day, one was doing their job if they caught shoplifters. That’s not true anymore.

Loss prevention has evolved to more than catching thieves. To be successful in our business today, LP professionals need to be operators and good business partners, adding value to the organization well beyond traditional loss prevention.

Tell us more about the process of going through the course and taking the exam.

How would you compare certification to other educational courses that you’ve taken?

One needs to be disciplined to do this course. Being out of any type of schooling for more than twenty years, it was an adjustment to learn how to study. Also having a family requires a specific way to get this accomplished. Taking this course helped me line up a way to study as one needs to continue education to obtain continuing education units (CEUs) year to year. Also, twenty years ago I learned to study in paper books. Moving to online learning was an adjustment. Going through the courses was very easy. Practice tests helped me prepare. Taking the exam was easy, and I got the results immediately after completion. Plus, Gene called me shortly afterward to congratulate me.

This certification is very well-rounded. Many other courses focus only on one aspect or piece of the business. This certification looks at everything an existing or starting-out LP professional needs to be successful and advance their career.

Do you think getting certified will help make someone a better LP professional?

It will absolutely help both someone new to LP as well as someone like me who had a number of years’ experience in LP. If you are new to the profession, it will give you a great base knowledge in this field. If you are tenured in the business, it will allow you to continue growing by providing knowledge of areas of the business you may not have a complete understanding of.

Plus, just because one is certified, additional learning is required each year. Anytime one becomes more educated, it enhances the professional life of that individual. This will make that person a much better, well-rounded candidate for advancing their career.

What information within the course helped you the most or was most eye-opening?

The leadership section really helps anyone with personal development. The most eye-opening section for me personally was the shipping and receiving section. This was one area I really did not understand; terms like “deadheading” and “free astray” were foreign to me. This was just one of the many areas of knowledge that helped me understand the entire business.

What benefits have you seen from taking the course?

Has certification changed your expectations of loss prevention as a career?

I truly believe that employers are looking for individuals who have done something more to enhance their careers. Currently, my supervisor is really invested in his people’s continuing education. I believe this is a growing trend. Those who do not want to invest in their futures will be left behind.

Because yearly CEUs are required to maintain my certification, this requirement has brought me into other organizations, attending other conferences and training seminars. Continuing learning is very important today. The LPC certification enhances one’s knowledge base allowing them to

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succeed. I would highly recommend that all loss prevention professionals seek some type of certification to enhance their career.

Newly Certified

Following are individuals who recently earned their certifications.

Recent LPC Recipients David Abraham, LPC, Sears Holdings Joseph Bingeman, LPC, Amazon.com Relana Brokmann, LPC, PayPal Michael Bruce, Sr., LPC, PETCO Animal Supplies Joseph Carter, LPC, Amazon.com David Coffey, LPC, Walgreens Jason Coren, LPC, Amazon.com Michael DeGrenier, Jr., LPC, Sears Holdings Kennard Dilworth, LPC, Publix Super Markets William Everett, LPC, CFI, Lowe’s Nathan Hamblin, LPC, PetSmart Douglas Harwood, LPC, Walmart Stores Brian Horn, LPC, Amazon.com Pablo Lafitte Iglesias, LPC, Sears Holdings Keith Langley, LPC, Amazon.com

Aaron Leger, LPC, Amazon.com Brian Marcial, LPC, Amazon.com Christian McCarty, LPC, Walmart Stores Charles Moubray, II, LPC, Amazon.com Gregory Nottingham, LPC, Amazon.com Steven Pace, LPC, Bloomingdale’s Agnieszka Pienio-Ganthier, LPC, Amazon.com John Pollard, LPC, PETCO Animal Supplies Derick Rich, LPC, Sears Holdings Tyson Robertson, LPC, Amazon.com Aaron Schiffelbein, LPC, Walmart Stores Frank Seo, LPC, Walmart Stores Robert Stark, LPC, Walmart Stores Leonard Talbert, LPC, Sears Holdings Anthony Tomassi, LPC, DICK’S Sporting Goods Fess Whitaker, LPC, Goodwill Industries of Kentucky John White, LPC, Amazon.com

Recent LPQ Recipients Brad Abelt, LPQ, Johnson Controls Albert Bedard, LPQ, Federated Co-operatives Ltd. Jeremy Canova, LPQ, 7-Eleven

Ian Cherry, LPQ, Marine Corps Community Services Denise Coghiel, LPQ, Marsh Canada Brian Fantom, LPQ, K&G Fashion Superstore Wayne Frutchey, LPQ, Gordon Food Service Edgardo Gonzalez, LPQ, AT&T Troy Hayley, LPQ, Sobeys Bruce Herritt, LPQ, Walmart Stores Justin Hockman, LPQ Steven Jensen, LPQ, Weis Markets Anthony Johnson, LPQ, Navy Exchange Service Command (NEXCOM) Thomas Martinez, LPQ, Navy Exchange Service Command (NEXCOM) Keith Mitchell, LPQ Eric Mizner, LPQ, Vector Security Services Michael Pedersen, LPQ, Goodwill Industries of Seattle Lewis Pyburn, LPQ, Inner Parish Security Corporation Jamie Richardson, LPQ, Walmart Stores Debra Stanley, LPQ, 7-Eleven, Inc. Danielle Taseris, LPQ, Goodwill Industries of Northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan Michael Wolfrom, LPQ, TJX Companies

Optimizing the Customer Experience...

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FUTURE OF LPVIEWPOINT ACADEMIC

Three Types of Social Engineering That Keep Coming after Retailers

By Tom Meehan, CFI Meehan is the chief strategy officer and chief information security officer for CONTROLTEK. Previously he was director of technology and investigations with Bloomingdale’s, where he was responsible for physical security, investigations, systems, and data analytics. He currently serves as the chair of the Loss Prevention Research Council’s innovations working group. Prior to his 13-year tenure at Bloomingdale’s, he worked for Home Depot in loss prevention, and has had various technology, loss prevention, and operational roles at several other companies. He can be reached at tom.meehan@controltekusa.com.

W

hen you think of hacking, breaches, or cyber security, what do you think of? Probably software or technology.

We often forget the human side. But humans continue to play a big role. In fact, more than half of breaches and cyber-security events start with a human error or social engineering. Many are a combination of both.

So what exactly is social engineering? It is the manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. It is a confidence (con, for short) trick for information gathering, fraud, or system access. And while it is like a con, it differs from a traditional con in that it is often one of many steps in a more complex fraud scheme. Wikipedia says, “While the term social engineering is not directly related to computers, information security, or traditional security professionals, most recently it has become a major part of our industry.” In this article I will review some of the most common types of social engineering and how they occur in retail.

what’s on it. That’s when the malware installs itself. A lot of times the USB drive or disk will be labeled “important” or “private.”

Once the malware is installed, the social engineer may have access to the computer or whole networks.

One example of baiting in a retail environment is when a social engineer applies for a job, schedules an interview, and meets with HR. After the meeting, he leaves a USB drive on the HR person’s desk. Because of his long commute, he uses the restroom and leaves a second USB drive on the bathroom sink. Then, for good measure, he places one more on a random desk while exiting.

What would you do if you found a USB on your desk that was marked “private?” The answer to that question could make the difference between your company finding itself on the front page of the newspaper for all the wrong reasons in a few months or not.

Phishing

Phishing occurs when a social engineer creates fraudulent communications with a target, appearing legitimate and often claiming to be from a trusted or known source. Phishing is one of the more well-known tricks of social engineers and still one of the most successful.

The most common phishing attempts are unexpected urgent emails, usually involving banking, shipment, bill payment, or online accounts. Another common attempt is an email that appears to come from a person of importance, like your boss, your CEO, or a law enforcement official. The intent of phishing is to gain access to accounts, install malicious software, or steal money.

Here is one example of phishing in a retail environment. You receive an email from Jack, your good buddy in IT, and the email says, “Hey bud, can you reset your password? Just click the link below.” You have known Jack for years and often work on projects together. You click the link and reset your password. But the email wasn’t from Jack; it was someone trying to steal your login credentials, and that person has now accessed your HR profile in order to redirect your paycheck to his account. Don’t click on any links. Call the person. Or go directly to the source and reset the password.

Baiting occurs when the social engineer leaves a malware-infected device, such as a USB flash drive or CD, in a common area where it is most likely to be found.

Several devices can be left at one time to increase the likelihood of success.

Baiting

Baiting occurs when the social engineer leaves a malware-infected device, such as a USB flash drive or CD, in a common area where it is most likely to be found. Several devices can be left at one time to increase the likelihood of success. Bathrooms, hallways, and mail drops are easy targets for baiting. Humans are curious creatures, especially loss prevention professionals. The intent of the social engineer is that someone will pick up the infected device and plug it into their computer to see

Vishing

I have personally seen a lot of vishing in my past retail loss prevention assignments. Vishing is when the social engineer (a continued on page 42

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criminal, let’s be clear) calls an employee within a company posing as a trusted individual or a representative of a bank, credit card company, IT, or loss prevention. Then the social engineer tries to get information from the person in the business. In more complex examples the social engineer will call several people using the information obtained from each to further the scam. The main purpose of vishing is to get information or to cause someone to act.

Let’s review two real-life examples I have seen in the past. A call comes to a cashier at a register. The caller (a visher) acts as if he works for IT. He asks the cashier if the register is working correctly and claims to see an outage. He then asks the cashier to ring a test transaction to a gift card for $250. Once the test is complete, he asks for the gift card information from the cashier. Once he hangs up, he immediately places a fraudulent online order using that gift card number.

Another example of vishing is when a caller contacts someone in the shoe department and asks for the department manager’s name (say, Mike), the previous department manager (say, Bob), and the store manager’s name (say, Jack) because he wants to write a thank-you note to them. The visher then calls the CEO’s office and says, “I bought two pairs of shoes, and both were damaged. I have spoken to Bob, Mike, and Jack, and no one can help me. All I want is my money back. I left the shoes with Bob several months ago. I paid for them in cash and want a check mailed to me, or have it returned to my debit card today. I am a lawyer/doctor/federal agent/ judge.” I have personally heard all of the above. He continues, “If you don’t refund me today, I want to meet with the CEO. I can’t believe I am getting the run-around for $290!” This scam happened

What exactly is social engineering? It is the manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. It is a confidence (con, for short) trick for information gathering, fraud, or system access. And while it is like a con, it differs from a traditional con in that it is often one of many steps in a more complex fraud scheme. to every retailer I have ever worked for. Imagine what happens when the visher calls ten retailers a day, and two give a refund!

These are only three types of social engineering. There are more, but these are the most relevant to retail. You will notice in all of the above scams the risk of being caught is low, and the potential reward is high. The most important ways to prevent falling prey to social engineering are training, awareness, and policy. The more you talk and train, the less likely you are to become a victim.

Introducing LPM Online An All-Digital Magazine with All-New Content

LPM Online is an all-new magazine experience.

LPM Online publishes every other month on even-numbered months in between our print editions. The inaugural edition went live in August.

You can view it and our current edition on the LPM Online tab on our website, LossPreventionMedia.com, or by entering LPM-online.com in your browser.

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FEATURE

SEARCHING FOR REALITY IN RETAIL HYPE, HYSTERIA, OR HAPPENING?

By Walter E. Palmer, CFI, CPP, CFE

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SEARCHING FOR REALITY IN RETAIL

R

ead any retail trade publication or mainstream news-media article about our industry, and chances are that you will walk away feeling bearish on the future of this business. Go to a retail trade show, and you are likely to hear speaker after speaker emphasizing change, business disruption, moving to e-commerce, and the need to completely reengineer your business to court the new, tech-savvy generation of shoppers.

In fact, the more retail e-newsletters and alerts you receive, the worse you may feel with the constant drumbeat of store closings, retailers filing bankruptcy, and elimination of jobs in our sector. Is this reality, or is it Chicken Little syndrome?

You will also read and hear about how the future is bright for those companies that embrace omni-channel retail—groceries delivered into your refrigerator, a ready-to-cook gourmet meal pack on your doorstep, free shipping and free returns, and price guarantees to make sure you never pay more than the cheapest price you can find on the Internet.

With the twin poles of hype and hysteria in mind, this article will reflect on the reality of what is actually happening and try to find some sense of balance in a world that magnifies the extremes. We will look at the current state of the retail industry and compare it to the narrative that traditional retail is dying with three principles in mind: ■ Keep a historical perspective.

■ Frame the debate correctly.

■ Pay attention to actual data.

Keep a Historical Perspective Is the retail scene changing? Of course. Have there been a number of established retail companies that have gone out of business or are struggling?

Without a doubt. So what’s new?

Retail has always been a hypercompetitive business with thin margins and obsessive pursuit of market share and customer loyalty. We don’t have to go back too far to see the same answers to the above questions.

For instance, let’s look at what we’ve seen in retail over the past thirty-five years or so. During that time, we’ve seen the rise and fall of almost the entire consumer electronics retail segment. I bought my first VCR at Montgomery Wards’ “Electric Avenue” shop a couple of years into my retail career. But I also shopped some great stores including The

The biggest reason, however, to take a breath and reconsider what is going on in the retail industry is because the actual data and research do not support the headlines and hysteria.

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Wiz, Circuit City, and Lechmere. When it came to computers, I spent a lot of time in CompUSA and Computer City. What do they all have in common? They are all gone, of course, and not a single one of them went out of business because of Amazon.

When I was in the northeast part of the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ame’s, Bradlee’s, and Caldors dominated the mass-merchant segment.

None of them survive today, and Kmart is famously on the ropes.

Should we talk about the home improvement category? Rickel? Builders Square? Channel Home Centers? HQ? What about toy stores? KB Toys? Circus World? Thornberry’s?

FAO Schwartz?

We have not even gotten to the fickle fashion sector. Do you remember when specialty retail was dominated by conglomerates like Melville (Wilsons, Chess King, Foxmoor, and Thom McAn) and Petrie Stores (Stuarts, Jean Nicole, Mariannes’, G&G, and Petrie stores)?

Even those fashion retailers that have survived would hardly be recognizable to a time traveler. How many of you remember when American Eagle Outfitters was all about flannel and the lumberjack look? Do you remember when Banana Republic had a Jeep in its storefront and the tagline “Travel and Safari Clothing Co.”?

This review is not intended to be a trip down memory lane or wistful nostalgia. It is simply a reminder that pretty extreme disruption happens in our business all the time. It doesn’t feel good for the “losers,” and it certainly creates disruption to retail workers. But we are all subject to the tendency to believe the moment we are currently in is vastly different than what anyone else has ever experienced in the history of mankind. Psychologists call this “declinism” and define it as the belief that a society or institution is tending

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SEARCHING FOR REALITY IN RETAIL toward decline. Today, it seems to be a widespread phenomenon across society that is hard to shake even when the facts are clearly in opposition.

Frame the Debate Correctly

One of the real problems in the perception of what is happening in retail is how the issue is framed. Is retail in decline, or is it brick-and-mortar retail that is in decline? We’ll look at more data on that in a minute, but we need to start with accurate baseline definitions.

If one were to go back just ten years ago, most industry insiders would not even consider Amazon as a “retailer.”

They were the enemy. They were not welcome at retail industry trade shows.

Retail groups were lobbying against Amazon on the issue of sales tax.

In a similar fashion, it is easy to remember when eBay was a pariah to the retail loss prevention community. They weren’t a “retailer.” They were an online flea market that existed solely to sell counterfeits, out-of-date product, and worst of all, the illicit gains of organized retail crime gangs. This was the perception despite the fact that eBay is used by many large retailers as a way to job out clearance merchandise.

Fast-forward to today, and one is forced to view the issue a bit differently.

How does one separate an online retailer from a “regular” retailer when Amazon is buying brick-and-mortar retail, and brick-and-mortar retailers are focusing so much time and attention on growing their online businesses? How does one exclude Amazon from being a retailer when such global brands as Nike are opening dedicated Amazon shops?

It is not just Amazon we are talking about here. Warby Parker, Bonobos, and Casper Mattress have all made the move from pure-play e-commerce to a blended model with a brick-and-mortar presence.

Untuckit recently announced plans for up to 100 brick-and-mortar stores over the next five years with fifty opening by the end of 2018.

We are all subject to the tendency to believe the moment we are currently in is vastly different than what anyone else has ever experienced in the history of mankind. Psychologists call this “declinism” and define it as the belief that a society or institution is tending toward decline. Today, it seems to be a widespread phenomenon across society that is hard to shake even when the facts are clearly in opposition. the success of the independent, family business?

It is probably not necessary to spend much time discussing how traditional retailers are expanding into online e-commerce. All one must do is read retail company press releases, and it is easy to discern the scramble to capture a percentage of the online market share.

Let it suffice to say that the way we think about retail has changed, and e-commerce will inevitably be part of the picture for the vast majority of retail organizations. Therefore, growth in retail has to be evaluated in holistic terms.

Going back to the issue of eBay, they alone generate about $9 billion in retail sales in the online brokerage space.

In fact, one could make an argument that eBay is the new manifestation of the mom-and-pop retail segment in today’s society. Who doesn’t celebrate LP MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017

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Pay Attention to Actual Data

The biggest reason, however, to take a breath and reconsider what is going on in the retail industry is because the actual data and research do not support the headlines and hysteria. Yes, you read this right. The headline “Retail Industry Is Dying” or “Brick-and-Mortar Retailers

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SEARCHING FOR REALITY IN RETAIL Going the Way of Dinosaurs” just isn’t factually correct.

First, the total share of retail attributed to e-commerce is still relatively small. Last year, Walmart got a big jump in its stock price because it announced that its online sales had grown at a faster rate than Amazon’s.

Now, one should consider the fact that Walmart was growing from a much smaller e-commerce base than Amazon, but the markets still responded very enthusiastically. But keep in mind one

increase in store openings in 2017 of over 4,000 stores.

While the headlines focus on the struggles of the department store sector or the bankruptcies of iconic chains such as Toys“R”Us, these do not reflect the overall market. For every RadioShack, there is a Dollar General. For every The Limited, there is a Five Below. For every Wet Seal, there is a TJ Maxx.

Broken down by brand, 751 brands are increasing their store counts versus 278 that are reducing their store counts.

One of the real problems in the perception of what is happening in retail is how the issue is framed.

Is retail in decline, or is it brick-and-mortar retail that is in decline? fact—despite that big growth, online sales accounted for less than 3 percent of total sales for Walmart.

The numbers are constantly changing, but e-commerce market share as a percentage of total retail sales in the US was about 7 percent in 2016. Even with the enthusiasm for the growth of this segment, recent projections speculate it will still be under 10 percent of total market share at the end of 2019.

This does not mean that e-commerce is not important. It does not mean that it is not growing. It does not mean that retailers can ignore it. But it should be kept in perspective, especially as we move through some of the other data below.

Second, let’s look at the question as to whether brick-and-mortar retail is dying.

It’s not. A recent report from the IHL Group, Debunking the Retail Apocalypse: Retail’s Real Story, was promoted by the National Retail Federation as a nice anecdote to the current narrative being played out in the media. The IHL report concludes that there will be a net

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Perhaps this is an indication of the normal life cycle of this business that we are in.

Even where some companies have struggled, they are finding ways to stay in business and “right size” their businesses.

Rue 21 and Gymboree have both emerged from bankruptcy as ongoing concerns

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with less debt and a tighter store base.

Ascena Group is working to find a new organizational and expense structure that is sustainable. And while some specialty segment retailers like Staples and Office Depot have not been in growth mode, they are still significant retail chains that operate over 1,000 stores each.

Third, is there data to support the idea that no one will ever go to a retail store again to make a purchase? Of course not.

In fact, the recent projection from PwC for the holiday shopping season is for a 6 percent increase in sales with about 90 percent spending that money in a physical store. The previously mentioned IHL report says that 80 percent of shoppers are visiting stores as frequently or more frequently than last year. And that number goes up by about 5 percent when you survey younger shoppers.

This leads to the next question—are younger people going to do all of their shopping online? The answer, according to a recent Accenture report, is no. In fact, one of the report’s key call-outs is that many members of the digital generation actually prefer visiting stores to shopping online.

This is echoed by the recent study from OpinionLab that shows millennials are actually the only generation that prefers shopping malls over online shopping.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, is the fact that many of the experiments being tried in retail right now may not be sustainable. In other words, most companies can’t make money at e-commerce today. Data has been published or is starting to emerge about the profitability, or lack thereof, of many of the major initiatives retailers are chasing en masse.

For instance, grocery delivery in the United Kingdom has been a big push for the past several years in this very competitive market place. As one drives through Northwest England and sees a Tesco truck delivering groceries to a tiny hamlet of fifteen homes, they can’t help but wonder, “How in the world can they make any money on that?” The answer is simple—they can’t. The consulting firm Kurt Salmon and Associates conducts a

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SEARCHING FOR REALITY IN RETAIL study each year of the costs of this service and concludes the leading grocers in the UK that offer this service lose £5 to £7 on each delivery.

The most obvious problem for traditional retailers comes from trying to compete with online giant Amazon.

When one looks at the macro level numbers for Amazon, it becomes pretty apparent that it currently loses money on online sales that it fulfills itself. Its profit from recent years comes from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) business, taking a commission on sales fulfilled by third-party sellers, and the income it receives from the various other value streams such as digital content. Now, we don’t know how much of that is due to infrastructure build-out and pursuit of growth, but we do know that many retailers are chasing the one aspect of Amazon’s business that is almost sure to lose them money.

Perhaps this explains why so many e-commerce companies are opening brick-and-mortar stores. A report from

business intelligence firm L2, The Death of Pureplay Retail, suggests there is no such thing as pure-play e-commerce as there is no clear indication it will be successful for the vast majority of companies that pursue it.

We could look at even more examples of data that suggests we are chasing profits in all the wrong places due to fear of being behind the trend line and losing market share. But time will prove these things out as retailers start to unpick the true costs associated with these various experiments to see if they are sustainable or not.

Keeping Perspective

None of the above is intended to suggest that the retail business is

not changing or that technology and e-commerce will not have a profound effect on our industry. Neither does it intend to minimize the negative impact that bankruptcies and layoffs in retail jobs have on those affected by them. Rather, it is to try and keep some perspective when reading the doomsday articles and headlines.

It is always interesting to me when I’m at a conference and speakers talk about companies that are disrupting their business space as—more times than not—they cite companies that don’t make money, such as Uber, Spotify, Zillow, and Blue Apron, to name a few.

At some point, investors are going to want to make money, not lose money.

Give that some thought.

WALTER E. PALMER, CFI, CPP, CFE, is CEO and president of PCG solutions, a loss prevention consulting, training, and education firm. He has thirty years’ experience in retail LP and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and as a guest lecturer for Eastern Kentucky University’s executive lecture series. He is active in professional development and training as a member of the American Society for Training and Development, the International Society for Performance Improvement, and the American Management Association.

He can be reached at 859-271-3140 or at wpalmer@PCGsolutions.com.

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MY TURN

Trips, Slips & Falls New National

By Russell J. Kendzior Kendzior, president and CEO of Traction Experts, Inc. and founder of the National Floor Safety Institute (NFSI), is recognized as the leading expert in slip-and-fall accident prevention. Kendzior has served as an expert witness in over 800 slip-trip related lawsuits. He is the author of three bestselling books en titled Slip and Fall Prevention Made Easy, Falls Aren’t Funny, and the recently released book entitled Floored! Real-Life Stories from a Slip and Fall Expert Witness. Kendzior is committee secretary of the NFSI B101 committee and is a member of eight American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) committees. For more information, call 817-749-1705 or visit tractionexperts.com.

Standards Certain to Be a Game Changer

W

e have all slipped and fallen at some point in our lives and know the horrifying feeling of an uncontrolled fall.

Each year more than 8 million Americans will seek emergency room treatment for an accidental fall, 33,000 of which will die. Slips, trips, and falls are the leading cause of both guest and employee injuries in the retail industry and are estimated to cost the industry more than $20 billion a year. However, many property owners don’t realize just how slippery their floors are until someone slips and falls.

In 2006, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited the National Floor Safety Institute (NFSI) as an ANSI standards developer, and since 2009 they have published five new walkway safety standards. The ANSI/NFSI B101.1 and B101.3 wet coefficient of friction (COF) test methods along with the ANSI/NFSI B101.6 entranceway floor mat standard can serve as important tools for retailers to measure the slip-and-trip-related risks of their stores. The B101.1 and B101.3 standards categorize COF in three traction or risk ranges: low, moderate, or high traction. Retailers can measure the slip risk of their floors and take preventative action before a slip-and-fall event occurs. The results have already proven to be successful.

In 2015, the CNA Insurance Company released a study correlating same-store floor slip resistance to recorded claims. The study was performed in a 362-unit retail franchise whereby 112 of their floors were tested over a multiyear time period per the ANSI/ NFSI B101.1 wet static COF standard. What they found was that 87 percent of all slip-and-fall claims took place on low to moderate traction surfaces, while only 13 percent of claims occurred on high-traction floors. This research bolstered past clinical studies that revealed maintaining your floors in the high-traction range can prevent up to 90 percent of slip-related claims.

Since their publication, the new ANSI/NFSI B101 walkway safety standards are being used by a growing number of insurers

The Elderly Are Most Vulnerable

According to the National Safety Council, falls are the leading cause of accidental injury and death for the elderly, and with 10,000 baby boomers retiring each day, the slip, trip, and fall “problem” will soon become an epidemic—one that retailers will have to immediately begin to address.

Help Has Arrived

According to the National Floor Safety Institute (NFSI), 55 percent of slips, trips, and falls are caused by a hazardous walkway; however, up until the development of recent walkway safety standards, property owners had no way to measure the safety of their floors. In 2009, a series of new walkway safety standards emerged that can now help retailers turn the tide.

ALL INJURIES

Unintentional-Injury-Related Death rates by Age, 2014

Unintentionl-injury-related deaths per 100,000 population by age and event, United States, 2014

Deaths per 100,000 population

600 500 400 300 200 100

10 X Poisoning

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60

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Fires, flames, smoke

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90

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and retailers as a risk management tool and are now serving as a basis by which they construct their walkway safety policies and procedures.

How Will These New Standards Affect You?

With the publication of these nationally recognized industry consensus standards, retailers can now be held liable for the safety (slip resistance) of their walkways, and with the recent development of a new class of robotic walkway slip resistance testers (tribometers), measuring the slip risk of your floors is now simple, fast, and affordable.

Don’t be fooled by the voluntary use of these standards. A property owner’s choice to comply or not to comply will certainly play a bigger role in the outcome of a slip-and-fall lawsuit.

Companies that are seen by the court as being in compliance will find their legal defenses bolstered. Those who don’t may be seen as negligent and are at greater risk of losing their cases.

Don’t be fooled by the voluntary use of these standards. A property owner’s choice to comply or not to comply will certainly play a bigger role in the outcome of a slip-and-fall lawsuit.

It has been my experience that many property owners consciously choose not to test their walkways, fearing negative results. They believe that once such information is known, they will have to take corrective action and spend unbudgeted money.

Also, the ever-present fear that their slip resistance test results could be discoverable acts is a further disincentive. In the end, many simply accept the cost of slips, trips, and falls as a cost of doing business, whereby a conscious choice is made to pay the ever-growing number of claims and pass the cost along to the consumer.

Some property owners often chose a strategy of “intentional ignorance,” whereby they claim no prior knowledge of their walkways being slippery. And even if they are slippery, they post wet floor signs all day believing this fulfills their duty and protects them from liability in the event of a slip and fall. Needless to say, this approach has been a proven failure and may have contributed to more slip-and-trip-related claims.

The retail slip-and-fall problem is serious and getting worse.

Baby boomers make up a large and growing part of retail customer traffic, and with that comes an increased rate of slips, trips, and falls. The safety genie is out of the bottle. With the recent introduction of the ANSI/NFSI B101 walkway safety standards coupled with portable measuring devices, retailers will now be expected to act to ensure that their floors are safe. Are you prepared?

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Product Showcase and Resource Guide

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Table Of Contents Category Access Control Alarm Monitoring Auditing Awareness/Training Case Management Cash Handling/Safes Civil Recovery Consulting Crime Risk Forecasting Data Analytics EAS Education/Certification Employment/Recruiters Exception Reporting Fire & Life Safety Systems Guards/Protection Services Organized Retail Crime Personnel Outsourcing Physical Security Product Protection Retail Crime Prevention RFID Security Systems Supply-Chain Security Video Surveillance

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Access Control

Advantex line of exit devices & electrical functions Super heavy duty low energy ADA operator Automatically operated door easykits Weatherized delayed egress easykits Tailgate detection D E T E X .C O M/A C C E S S

Alarm Monitoring

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Alarm Monitoring

Alarm Monitoring

Awareness/Training

A STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP BUILT ON ENGAGEMENT.

WATCHING OVER YOU SINCE 1873 • Underwriters Laboratories Listed •

Factory Mutual Approved

•

SIA Certified Operators

At AFA, we deliver superior levels of customer service.

If you don’t believe us, ask our customers!

8 6 6.232.628 5

From basic intrusion and fire alarm monitoring to enterprise-wide system integration, advanced video and analytics, to network design and implementation, Protection 1 offers a breadth and depth of experience to help mitigate risks, reduce your losses and add value as your security services provider.

APU AND THE LOSS PREVENTION FOUNDATION To learn about the educational benefits American Public University offers Loss Prevention Foundation members, visit: StudyatAPU.com/LPF

Let’s talk.

SM

877.PRO1.911 Protection1.com/business

www.afap.com

Auditing

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Awareness/Training

Connect With Your Crew Let your audience choose their preferred platform to increase awareness and participation. At LPM Media Group, our mobile and digital solutions move meaningful connections from possibility to reality.

#connectwithyourcrew www.LPMmediagroup.com

Auditing

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Case Management

Case Management

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Cash Handling/Safes

Consulting

Crime Risk Forecasting

Let CAP Have Your Back “Your Premier Loss Prevention/ Asset Protection Consultants” The Shipman Group LLC is a group of certified professional practitioners specializing in but not limited to;

RIGHT ON THE

MONEY.

Secures your cash. And your future.

Call (800) 342-3033 ext. 3001 today, or email info@fireking.com.

CAPData™ can empower you to optimize resource allocation, reduce shrink, and prioritize critical decisions.

• Loss Prevention/Asset Protection • Shrink Reduction/Profit Enhancement • Workplace Violence/Active Shooter Plans • Disaster Recovery/Crisis Management • Emergency Preparedness/Management • Premise Liability • Corporate Reputation Risk issues.

• Pharmacy Compliance/Diversion Issues • Selecting The Right Vendor Partners

For additional information on our services offered, visit our website at www.theshipmangroupllc.com or call 919-756-8033.

OUTSMART CRIME

capindex.com 800.227.7475

Cash Handling/Safes

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Civil Recovery

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EAS

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Employment/Recruiters

Data Analytics

Exception Reporting

39 of the top

Retail Data is a Science . . .

We Wear the Lab Coats

100 retailers use Appriss Retail to improve their shrink.

Learn how you can mitigate fraud, generate targeted alerts, analyze multiple data sources and integrate key LP systems veriskretail.com 888-777-0585 The Analytics Ecosystem

apprissretail.com © Verisk Analytics, Inc. 2016 Verisk Retail is a Verisk Analytics Business

Education/Certification

HOW WILL YOU BE

MEASURED? Get certified through the Loss Prevention Foundation. Set yourself apart with credentials that are the standard for the loss prevention profession.

For more information visit losspreventionfoundation.org or call (866) 433-5545

POWERED BY THE LOSS PREVENTION FOUNDATION SM

POWERED BY THE LOSS PREVENTION FOUNDATION

Educating an Industry, One Leader at a Time 8

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Exception Reporting

Exception Reporting

Fire & Life Safety Systems

WATCHING OVER YOU SINCE 1873 • Fire Alarm Systems •

Design & Installation

•

UL Listed & FM Approved Central Station Monitoring

•

Test & Inspection Services

At AFA, we deliver superior levels of customer service.

If you don’t believe us, ask our customers!

8 6 6.232.628 5 www.afap.com

Employment/Recruiters

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Guards/Protection Services

Personnel Outsourcing

Physical Security

A SECURITY PARTNER YOU CAN TRUST

Don’t you deserve a customized EAS solution?

Emergency Response Security Please visit our website for details

Permanent Security Guards So you can focus on your business

Temporary Security Guards Flexible programs when you need them

Providing Security Solutions throughout the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico Call us now to help plan out your 2018 maintenance, construction, and special projects.

Proudly supporting loss prevention departments for over 15 years •National Team •Regional Coverage •Target Store Assistance •Investigative Support •Remote EBR Analysis •Audit Resources •Awareness Programs •Complete LP Programs •GPS Tracking Solutions

How can we support you? lpinnovations.com solutions@lpinnovations.com 877-574-6682

Give us a call today

877.477.9638 securityresources.net

Door-Mounted Systems.

ANY COLOR. Visit our website www.industrialsecuritysolutions.com

Guards/Protection Services

If you can’t manage your entire guard program with one finger . . .

You have the wrong guard company!

Nationwide Guard Management • • • • •

America’s largest guard network One stop shop 24/7/365 dispatch Delivering Value to LP Managers One point of contact • Mobile client web app One invoice • Real-time data • Cost savings • Annual budget review • Fast incident reporting • Data trends • Request a guard online

866.403.9630 • 10

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Physical Security

Product Protection

Trust Sensormatic Tags. ®

Don’t trust knock-off tags.

You think you’re getting a great deal on knock-off tags, but then you learn that you might be missing shoplifters due to low pick rates. Trust Genuine Sensormatic® for solutions that deliver higher performance and the best customer experience with your Sensormatic EAS equipment.

Choose from thousands of Genuine Sensormatic Dual-mode, AM, RFID and RF models.

Visit SynergyForRetail.com or call 1-866-712-9655 for volume pricing.

Tyco is now Johnson Controls.

THE GLOBAL LEADER IN RFID BASED EAS www.nedap-retail.com

© 2017 Johnson Controls. All Rights Reserved.

JOHNSON CONTROLS, THE JOHNSON CONTROLS LOGO and the other trademarks listed above are registered in the US and/or other countries. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

Organized Retail Crime

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Product Protection

Retail Crime Prevention

LP SOLUTIONS THAT MAXIMIZE YOUR PROFITABILITY Improve On-Shelf Availability with Open Sell Solutions and Real-Time Analytics

ALTO Alliance℠ An innovative new approach to reducing retail crime using a technology platform built on comprehensive analytics, intelligent prosecution, and deterrent marketing that bridges the gap between retail and law enforcement.

ALTO.US/SOLUTIONS/ALLIANCE

Retail Crime Prevention

Explore our full line of solutions on our website or call 800-257-5540.

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Product Protection

Product Protection

INTELLIGENT LOSS PREVENTION Increase Sales and Stop Theft!

Southern Imperial’s SONR™ System provides multiple notifications of product activity, which occurs at both the product level and up to 25 feet away at the echo box. These alerts let both shopper and staff know of product interaction.

Learn more about SONR™ at www.intelligentlossprevention.com.

800.747.4665 or 815.877.7454 visit us online at www.southernimperial.com

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RFID

Security Systems

Security Systems

ARE YOU A CEILING FAN? We are! Installing RFID systems on the ceiling is a perfect solution where floor-mounted pedestals are impractical or not permitted. why we are big fans of Which is w ceilings, and why we install more !D Top RFID systems than anyone else in the country.

To learn more, visit our website today: www.controltekusa.com

Security Systems

WATCHING OVER YOU SINCE 1873 • Burglar Alarm Systems

Protect Your Most Valuable Assets GPS Tracking For...

•

Design & Installation

•

UL Listed & FM Approved Central Station Monitoring

Cash Electronics Jewelry Pharmaceu cals Tobacco

At AFA, we deliver superior levels of customer service.

If you don’t believe us, ask our customers!

#SaferWorld | 3sisecurity.com/gps

www.afap.com

Security Systems

8 6 6.232.628 5 Supply-Chain Security

SAVE TIME & MONEY WITH MODERN KEY MANAGEMENT Manage keys, cores, doors, spending & maintain compliance on each with cloud-based key management software - with or without InstaKey hardware.

SecureStat

®

ALTO Assurance℠ An innovative manufacturerto-store verification, tracking, and auditing technology platform that manages the risk of loss or delays due to cargo theft, weather, work stoppage, and even paperwork errors.

powered by

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www.instakey.com/key-control-software 1-800-316-5397

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ALTO.US/SOLUTIONS/ASSURANCE

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Security Systems

Video Surveillance

Innovating for a

smarter, safer world.

Axis offers a wide portfolio of intelligent security solutions:

WATCHING OVER YOU SINCE 1873 • Video Surveillance Systems - IP & Analog

Video management software and AXIS Store Optimization Suite

Video encoders Network cameras

- Intelligent Analytics •

Network video recorders Physical access control

Audio and accessories

Design & Installation

At AFA, we deliver superior levels of customer service.

If you don’t believe us, ask our customers!

8 6 6.232.628 5

Visit www.axis.com

www.afap.com

Supply-Chain Security

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Video Surveillance

Advertiser index

Video Surveillance

7Psolutions, 15 3SI Security, 14 AFA, 3, 9, 14, 15 ALTO, 12, 14 American Public University, 3 American Security Products, 6 APPRISS Retail, 8 Axis Communications, 15 Bold Technologies, 2 CAP Index, 6 Crime Accountability Partnership, 12 Checkpoint, 12 ClickIt, 16 CONTROLTEK, 14 Detek, 2 FireKing, 6 Indyme, 13 InstaKey, 14 Industrial Security Solutions, 10 Johnson Controls, 11 Loss Prevention Foundation, 8 Loss Prevention Recruiters, 8 LP Innovations, 10 LP Software, 4, 5 LPjobs.com, 9 LPM Media Group, 4 Nedap, 11 Protection 1, 3 Protos Security, 10 Securitas ES, 14 Security Resources, 10 The Shipman Group, 6 Southern Imperial, 13 StopLift, 9, 16 ThinkLP, 3, 5, 9 USS, 7 Verisk Retail, 8 The Zellman Group, 7, 11

Get the most out of your video

For information regarding our complete line of digital video solutions, call 631-686-2949 or email info@clickitinc.com

www.clickitinc.com

Introducing LPM Online An All-Digital Magazine with All-New Content

LPM Online is an all-new magazine experience.

LPM Online publishes every other month on even-numbered months in between our print editions. The inaugural edition went live in August.

You can view it and our current edition on the LPM Online tab on our website, LossPreventionMedia.com, or by entering LPM-online.com in your browser.

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As a member of The Loss Prevention Foundation, you join an association founded by and for loss prevention professionals. With access to an elite network of fellow industry professionals, development tools tailored specifically to our industry to help you advance your career and other great member benefits such as exclusive access to elite savings and discounts on thousands of products and services nationwide. Your membership is not only a demonstration of industry leadership; it’s a commitment to the profession and to your own professional development. Elevating the Industry, One Leader at a Time.

For more information, visit losspreventionfoundation.org or call (866)433-5545

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SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE CHECKPOINT

How to Protect Retail Inventory This Holiday Season

T

A potential thief attempting to remove a seal placed over a microperf will create a large tear that’s easily noticeable.

Microperfing is also very effective when used with a wafer seal over the bar code of a product as the UPC can be scanned as normal.

Source Tagging with EAS Labels. EAS labels are placed either on or in a package coded with a signal that alerts personnel when a product crosses a certain barrier if the item is not first sold and deactivated at the point of sale (POS). For optimal cost and performance, these labels are applied “at source” to the package automatically during the folding and gluing production stage, eliminating the need for an extra step in the process at a distribution center or store. A complete source-to-shopper EAS solution serves to improve on-shelf availability, enhance customer shopping experiences, and increase sales.

Overt Approach. In the past, CPGs gravitated toward covert security tagging as a measure to ensure brand messaging and imagery are not compromised; however, research demonstrates that overt solutions that are visible to consumers are more effective in the fight against theft. These solutions also streamline the security process for retailers by avoiding employees confronting theft at checkout. Examples include brand authentication codes or retailer-specific messaging printed on EAS labels.

New technology is continuously being developed at QuadPackaging and Checkpoint to assist in loss prevention.

Ongoing education and the ability to combine loss prevention solutions in interesting and creative ways will help brands and retailers stay ahead as organized crime gets even cleverer.

his year’s holiday shopping season is expected to be strong, according to data released by the National Retail Federation (NRF). Retail sales during November and December are forecasted to be as high as $682 billion, a 4 percent increase from last year.

The picture isn’t entirely rosy, however. The NRF’s 2017 National Retail Security Survey shows that two-thirds of LP budgets are flat or declining, and the average inventory shrink rate has increased to 1.44 percent, with 36.5 percent resulting from shoplifting and organized crime and 30 percent from employee theft. In order for retailers to make the most of the booming holiday season, they will need to find new solutions to prevent loss in stores.

With items such as baby formula, razors, and pharmaceuticals high on the list for theft and counterfeiting, retailers, consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs), and brands are beginning to collaborate to develop solutions that turn packaging into a deterrent for would-be criminals.

For example, QuadPackaging and Checkpoint Systems have joined forces to make packaging more effective as a loss prevention tool. In fact, QuadPackaging has presented the latest packaging protection for retailers trying to thwart organized retail crime and loss in-stores at recent Checkpoint-sponsored Annual National Source Tagging events.

Reliable Physical Security

What Can Brands and Retailers Do?

For applications requiring reliable means of physical and tamper-evident security measures, consider two primary solutions—microperforations (or “microperfs”) and EAS tags.

Microperfs aid in making any package tampering very evident to the retailer and the consumer, while EAS tags alert shop owners when packages leave the store without being cleared.

Microperforations. QuadPackaging understands that by adding small perforations in the carton along the carton flaps, accompanied by a simple wafer seal, consumers can be immediately alerted to any tampering with the packaging. Microperfs can be placed on the carton without disrupting the messaging or appearance of graphics, elements that are critical to brand positioning and consistency. Microperfs are built into the carton die, eliminating the need for extra steps in the production process.

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QuadPackging understands that your packaging represents a critical decision point in a consumer’s experience with your brand.

Providing collaborative solutions and deep expertise—and backed by one of the largest printers in the world—QuadPackaging is committed to delivering your brand in its finest form.

Checkpoint Systems provides a full range of source-to-shopper solutions that address shrink. Its intelligent retail solutions deliver a unique offering of connected hardware, applications, cloud-based software, and EAS and RFID for high-theft consumables.

“At Checkpoint, we value our strategic partnership with QuadPackaging for integrated, visible EAS source tagging. We understand the importance of reducing high-theft shrink for our retailers, including improving on-shelf availability and reducing loss,” said Keith McUmber, director of source tagging at Checkpoint Systems.

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SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE CRIME ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNERSHIP

The Disposition of Shoplifting Cases Confronting the Challenges and Balancing the Benefits

O

nce you catch a shoplifter, what do you do with them? Do you prosecute and risk the wrath of the local police department and media for creating an undue burden on the system or, in some communities, even risk monetary fines for “unfair and disproportionate use” of police resources? Do you warn and release them knowing it will not only do little to prevent a repeat offense but also likely empower them to steal again? Do you use civil demand, which also holds little promise in changing behavior? Or do you try and do what is best for all parties and offer them—with the blessing of the local police and prosecutors—an alternative, education-centric program?

In a good-faith effort to address complaints surrounding the overuse of police resources, many retailers are embracing alternative programs that offer education as a means to hold offenders accountable and reduce repeat offenses without overburdening law enforcement and other criminal-justice resources. Unfortunately, they are now facing political and legal challenges to these nontraditional but valuable options. Seemingly lost in the political and legal wrangling is the fact that such alternatives will not only relieve the “overuse of police resources” pain point but also begin to close the long-standing gaps in the current system that have led to the ongoing proliferation of retail theft.

The Gaps

In the current construct, the gaps left between apprehension, arrest, prosecution, and sentencing allow the offenders to get away with it and end up empowering them to offend again—having “learned” that the reward was worth the risk. With shrinking resources and competing priorities on the rise, those gaps continue to widen, and while the various entities bicker and blame, retail theft in all its many forms continues to thrive. In order to close those gaps—gaps that only serve to promote the growth of both shoplifting and professional or organized retail crime (ORC)—it is imperative that retailers and communities unite to battle the common enemy. It is not just the offenders we must confront but also the community complacence that leads to the acceptance and growth of retail theft.

The Game Changer

The Crime Accountability Partnership (C.A. Partnership) program is designed to marshal the forces and provide them collectively with a means to close the gaps in the system without undue time or expense for any one entity. With a keen eye to curbing the inevitable challenges that result from disrupting the status quo, the policies and procedures of the C.A. Partnership are ever evolving to meet each new challenge, mitigate any risk, and build partnerships that will indeed close

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SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE CRIME ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNERSHIP first line of defense in the fight to keep young people—for whom shoplifting is often their first foray into criminal behavior—from entering the criminal justice system. The C.A. Partnership uses the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention’s (NASP) Y.E.S. Program for Youth, which is proven not only to reduce shoplifting among youth but also to reduce their involvement in juvenile crime in general—a clear benefit to any community and its youth.

the gaps between stakeholders. Of paramount importance is the guarantee that the alternative education-based program meets the needs of all parties involved—from retailers to law enforcement to criminal justice and community—and even those of the offenders. While state law and local regulations are foremost, the C.A. Partnership ensures that law enforcement authorities in each jurisdiction have the opportunity to provide input and oversight in the execution of the program in their jurisdictions.

Stopping the Revolving Door

Even with all the benefits to the various stakeholders, such a program cannot become a revolving door for offenders. The C.A. Partnership is a one-time chance for everyone to choose to take civil responsibility for their actions. To ensure this, Turning Point Justice’s (TPJ) technology provides a means to begin to track repeat offenders across retailers and jurisdictions providing an invaluable intelligence and investigative tool for ORC and police investigators alike.

Supporting Retailers

Faced with competing priorities for police resources coupled with the constant barrage of offenders in their stores, retailers need a better way to handle these petty offenders. Providing an educational option for offenders who qualify and choose to participate allows them not only to examine their own behavior but also to build their competency to make better choices for themselves in the future. With juvenile offenders, the C.A. Partnership allows LP agents to turn a negative interaction with a parent—who is likely a customer—into a positive learning experience for their child.

Stemming the Tide

A collaboration between NASP and TPJ, the Crime Accountability Partnership is an innovative yet collaborative solution to address the age-old shoplifting problem that, even with the most sophisticated measures in place, continues to grow and evolve. While there will always be ebb and flow of shoplifting in our nation, education and accountability offer the best promise to stem the tide of retail-theft offenders. Reducing repeat offenses provides everyone with the opportunity to focus more resources on identifying and tracking those who are indeed professional offenders yet, in the current system, are falling through the gaps and flying under the ORC radar.

Offered free of charge to retailers and their law enforcement partners, the Crime Accountability Partnership program is truly a partnership and a collaboration in which no single entity’s priorities trump another’s and one in which all entities contribute effort and reap benefit in equal measure. This is the future of truly effective shoplifting prevention.

Serving Law Enforcement and Saving Criminal-Justice Resources

Police resources, like so many publicly funded resources, are limited. Of late, there has been a focus on retailers’ overuse of these resources, which is ironic and unfair but nonetheless a pain point. Retailers who participate in the C.A. Partnership have successfully reduced their calls to local law enforcement by 40 to 60 percent or more and by extension have saved more than $100 million in offender-processing costs of criminal-justice resources.

Reducing Incarceration

Yes, you read that right. With a nationwide priority on reducing incarceration for low-level offenses, there is a corresponding effort to decriminalize petty crime including shoplifting. Allowing, supporting, and even legislating retailers’ use of the C.A. Partnership program to offer education to first-time offenders, especially youthful and young adult offenders, is a far better option to address shoplifting than decriminalization—either outright or de facto. Education is a

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SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE PROTOS SECURITY

Industry Innovation Continues

Protos Security Unveils New Technology to Incentivize Better Guard Vendor Performance

I

n this day and age, it takes real change and thoughtful disruptive innovation to lead an industry forward. We’ve seen it with Apple and Tesla, and in the loss prevention industry, we’ve seen it with Protos Security.

Over the last eleven years, Protos Security has revolutionized security guard management, saving retail companies of all sizes from the traditional headache of manual processes, continuous audits, and lots of last-minute scrambling. Its end-to-end security guard management ecosystem drives measurable direct and indirect cost savings for clients all across North America.

“The Protos team lives and breathes innovation. We understand how technology can empower companies and benefit their bottom lines,” said Kris Vece, LPQ, director of client relations for Protos. “Even before I joined Protos in 2015, I watched what they were doing and decided I wanted to be a part of it. The last two years have easily been some of the most exciting in my career. The Protos team has created a cutting-edge, cloud-based management platform, increased transparency, and enforced a ‘no punch, no pay’ policy to ensure accounting accuracy for LP professionals tired of

finding overpayments and having to manage the invoice reconciliation process.”

Owner and cofounder Patrick Henderson said, “Our system uses a variety of techniques that have been successfully deployed in supply chain, logistics, and other service industries. We reworked the tools and operating models to fit a loss prevention scenario. We help connect the dots and benchmark performance, so everyone knows what they are getting and can quickly and easily change behavior as needed to get the results they seek.”

“After all, you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Vece added.

How Do You Manage Guards That Aren’t on Your Payroll?

“Despite the technology’s reputation for success, when we meet with prospective new clients, we still get asked, ‘How do you manage guards that aren’t on your payroll?’”

Chris Copenhaver, Protos owner and cofounder said. “And people are always so surprised when we explain our tools, technology, and methods. They’re always like, ‘Wow, why didn’t someone think of this sooner?’”

Using technology to operate a series of clear, easy-to-read user interfaces that can be accessed from desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone, Protos Security helps clients, vendors, and their own quality-assurance specialists to communicate and manage security guard performance.

The Protos team built their system from the ground up and, in the process, created a methodology and culture that supports consistent and measurable program success. From introducing instantaneous and fully customizable alert notifications to vendor KPI dashboards, Protos has rewritten the rules on what it takes to run a modern LP shop.

Unlike its competitors, Protos does not sell technology as an add-on The Protos Vendor Portal service or up-sell solution. Its The newest addition to the high-tech tools are “baked in.”

Protos management ecosystem

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SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE PROTOS SECURITY At its core, Protos is a technology company that is working to solve loss prevention industry challenges, the same way Apple taught the world to “think different.” Many of Protos’s offerings are revolutionary, saving clients countless hours and measurable budget percentages immediately upon rollout, but many of its advancements are just the obvious next steps in a world dominated by automation, big data, and higher management expectations.

“To us, it didn’t seem revolutionary for clients to be notified when an officer was late or to relay important incident details near real time,” Copenhaver said. “In today’s day and age, it was a question of simple automation, and it seemed inevitable. So that’s what we set out to do. We just wanted to make program transparency a reality. It was already an expectation in other industries, and we wanted to see the loss prevention world catch up.”

What More Can Be Done?

get each individual guard vendor management team more involved and more active in addressing any quality issues.”

Protos has led the industry in technology innovation, guard vendor engagement, and client service since it pounced on the scene in 2006. The company claims to save clients’ money and pay their vendors much faster than industry average. Their stunning growth continues to prove they are doing something right.

The Bottom Line

Protos has earned an exceptional reputation for having security officers successfully engage with a common timekeeping and integrated invoicing system. Its reporting procedures have cleaned up LP budgets industry-wide and increased situational awareness from coast to coast.

“I no longer must call stores to ask if an officer is on-site. I can check in to see if a guard is on-site from my cell phone.

I also get real-time incident reports from Protos,” customer Eric Williams, loss prevention manager at the City Gear store support center said. “When it comes to billing, Protos gave me at least two days a month back.”

“There was a lot of concern around how to seamlessly transition to another guard company. We were expecting bumps in the road during the first couple of months of the transition and were pleasantly surprised that we received nothing but positive feedback,” said Andrea Quinn, Staples senior manager of global loss prevention. “Protos has made every aspect of managing guard service so much easier, and we could not be happier with our decision to transition to Protos six months ago.”

So from coast to coast, customers are already happy, but if the leadership team at Protos Security has their way, this is really just the beginning. “Stay tuned; there is no way we are done innovating,” Vece said. “I am personally excited for what comes next. Hold on tight; the ride’s not over yet.”

For more information on Protos Security, visit their website at protossecurity.com.

The Protos team lives and breathes innovation. We understand how technology can empower companies and benefit their bottom lines.

While Protos has been offering performance-benchmarking tools to clients for many years, first for internal monitoring and then for client transparency and reporting, it hasn’t stopped moving things forward. For example, by the end of the year, it will release a vendor portal that allows independent Kris Vece, LPQ guard vendors to see the Protos Security performance trends on each of their Director of Protos assignments.

Client Relations This access will allow guard vendors to compare their delivery to industry standards and benchmarks and manage to customer expectations in real time. This access empowers them to deliver quick and necessary course-correcting actions before it hurts their companies’ reputations.

Protos, of course, is always monitoring these performance trends and filling client assignments with vendors who are engaged and responsive and provide consistently high-quality service.

“There is real incentive for guard vendors to be a part of the Protos Approved Guard Network,” Copenhaver said.

“We’ve proven that a good vendor can grow their business faster with us than they could on their own.”

No Punch, No Pay

“We’ve always had a ‘no punch, no pay’ policy, and that has served us well, but now we’re focused on what’s next.

What else can we do?” Henderson said. “The hope is to

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LPM DIGITAL

Safety and Security in LP

By Jacque Brittain, LPC, and Kelsey Seidler Brittain is editorial director, digital, and Seidler is managing editor, digital. The two manage the magazine’s digital channels that includes multiple daily e-newsletters featuring original content and breaking news as well as vibrant social media conversations. Brittain can be reached at JacB@LPportal.com and Seidler at KelseyS@LPportal.com.

F

ollowing are a few article summaries that can provide you with a small taste of the original content available to you every day through our daily digital offerings, which are offered free through LossPreventionMedia.com. In addition to our daily newsletter, a comprehensive library of original content is available to our digital subscribers at no cost to you. Visit our website to gain access to all of our content. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter (@LPMag), and LinkedIn.

for law enforcement and allowed time for SWAT to arrive. But these reasonable tactics assumed perpetrators were rational and would negotiate and release hostages.

A lot has changed since then. Today, law enforcement often faces suicidal attackers whose desire is to inflict maximum casualties, including themselves. Establishing a perimeter and negotiating with the shooter is no longer effective in all situations.

This was made clear in the Columbine, Colorado, school shooting of 1999. Police established a perimeter and waited a long time to enter the building and to attempt to confront the shooters. Because of this delay, many more students were killed.

After Columbine, law enforcement began to develop more aggressive active-shooter response protocols. First officers on scene were taught to immediately enter and attempt to engage shooters, using whatever equipment they carried with them. This tactic assumed most attackers were relatively incompetent and could be silenced by a well-trained responder.

After Las Vegas: The Evolution of Active-Shooter Protocol

By Bill Turner, LPC

It has been several weeks since gunman Stephen Paddock shot and killed fifty-eight people and wounded almost 500 others in Las Vegas. Initially, there was some criticism that it took law enforcement up to seventy-five minutes to get to the shooter’s room in the Mandalay Bay Hotel.

The latest information shows that, in fact, the first officers arrived on the hotel’s thirty-second floor at approximately the same time that the shooting stopped. In the midst of total chaos, officers first had to determine where the shooting was coming from, and once determined, they had to then find the exact location of the shooter within the hotel.

Anyone who looked at the exterior pictures of the broken windows in the Mandalay Bay Hotel realizes that was no easy task.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: After this article was written, MGM Resorts, the owner of Mandalay Bay, raised questions as to the accuracy of the timeline of the shooting as it was originally reported. No conclusions have been reached at this point.]

Regarding active-shooter response, there is no silver bullet that guarantees 100 percent positive results for law enforcement and individuals. The situation in Las Vegas made incident response even more difficult. Methods are still evolving and being debated. But one trend is common: a more aggressive response.

One thing unique about the Las Vegas incident is that the shooting came from above. This marked only the second time that a major active-shooter incident was carried out from a highly elevated location. The first was the University of Texas tower shooting on August 1, 1966. On that day, Charles Whitman climbed to the observation deck of the main building, from where he shot and killed fifteen people in an hour and a half.

At the time, standard active-shooter response from law enforcement was to have the first officer on scene establish a perimeter to contain the suspect and victims within that perimeter.

This approach maximized officer safety and protected the public outside the scene. It also minimized equipment and training costs

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The Active-Shooter Response Evolution Attackers have changed. As a result, modern active shooter response training has changed. Nearly all law enforcement officers are now highly trained and often have active-shooter kits in their patrol cars. Today, many officers will immediately enter an area to confront shooters. The theory is that, when confronted with law enforcement, shooters will turn their attention to them and away from victims. These tactics have proven reasonably successful, although the emergence of highly motivated terrorists, whose weapons go way beyond guns, has necessitated continual evolvement of active-shooter response tactics.

Although not universal, recent guidelines include: ■ Assess the situation and report immediately.

■ Move the public away from the danger zone if possible.

■ Take cover from gunfire but not cover from view (concealment).

■ Adjust response based on the situation—await heavily armed forces, negotiate, or immediately confront perpetrators.

In addition, many law enforcement agencies are adopting MACTAC training—multi-assault counter-terrorism action capabilities. The concept behind MACTAC is that every officer from every agency in a given region is trained in the same way regarding response to an attack.

In an interview after the Las Vegas incident, Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo emphasized the cooperation and joint training of all Las Vegas first responders, including the fire department. While he didn’t directly reference MACTAC, the fact is that law enforcement continued on page 76 |

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LPM-online.com

Introducing LPM Online An All-Digital Magazine with All-New Content

LPM Online is an all-new magazine experience.

LPM Online publishes every other month on even-numbered months in between our print editions. The inaugural edition went live in August.

You can view it and our current edition on the LPM Online tab on our website, LossPreventionMedia. com, or by entering LPM-online.com in your browser.

The exciting feature of LPM Online is how we can use dynamic elements in both the articles and advertising—things like embedded videos, podcasts, and animations that will bring the information alive. Plus, it is optimized to view on smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers.

To receive notice of all editions of LPM Online, you need to be a digital subscriber of LPM. It’s free and gives you access to all our digital content, including our extensive website, print magazine archives, special reports, and much more. If you are not a subscriber, use the SUBSCRIBE NOW link on our website.

If you are a solution provider and want to reach the loss prevention audience with a medium that allows you to demo your technology, show a corporate video, or otherwise showcase your products and services, contact our advertising manager Ben Skidmore at BenS@LPportal.com.

LPM Online—A Dynamic Magazine for LP Professionals

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continued from page 74

in Las Vegas began training together around MACTAC protocols in 2009.

“OK,” you say, “that is active-shooter response for law enforcement, but what about me?” While only the GET OUT and maybe the HIDE OUT responses were applicable in the Las Vegas incident, overall guidelines for citizen active-shooter response remain fairly constant, as follows: ■ GET OUT—evacuate immediately, moving away from gunfire.

■ HIDE OUT—if you can’t evacuate, take immediate cover, hopefully in a locked room. In addition, barricade the door if possible.

■ TAKE OUT—attack the shooter (with anything you have) if you have no other choice.

Obviously, no one ever wants to be caught in an active-shooter situation. Fortunately, the odds are against it. But understanding active-shooter response tactics and methods, both for law enforcement and individuals, will go a long way to keep you safer, just in case.

The Complete Guide to Ensuring Staff Compliance with Your Company Security Policy

By Garett Seivold

All workplace security behaviors have either a positive or negative outcome. Positive security behaviors help safeguard assets; negative behaviors put them at risk.

Loss prevention policies are the starting point for encouraging positive security behavior. And security practices—such as monitoring, training, and enforcement—drives employees’ capacity and motivation to adhere to a given company security policy and support a retailer’s asset protection effort. In short, at the source of asset protection are a retail organization’s LP policies and practices.

Retailers Conducting Employee Perception Survey on Security Policies* vs. General Industry

Retail Sales

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29.4%

Overall

39.6% 0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

* Organization has surveyed or interviewed employees in the last 12 months to learn their perception of security policies, such as how policies, may support or conflict with work practices

In addition to providing LP executives with key data, surveying employees about a company security policy may, by itself, improve compliance with them. Psychology studies show that when people have a chance to express contradictory views, it helps to bring attitudes in line with their beliefs. So, for example, an employee survey on office supply policies not only helps a security team to understand the attitude of workers toward this issue, but also might help remove inconsistencies and steer the corporate culture in the right direction. In short, merely asking a question such as, “Are you aware of the company’s policy on the removal of office supplies for personal use?” helps workers adhere to it.

Asset protection departments must also be careful that routine enforcement of security rules does not create antagonistic views toward security culture. Sometimes employees skirt security procedures—not because of deliberate indifference or antagonism toward security, but because of some external or temporary pressure.

In this case, a harsh rebuke of an employee may result, unnecessarily, in creating a bad attitude toward security. Instead, security leaders should sensitize their staff to the consequences of the mistakes they make with respect to violating security policies, according to Michel Kabay, PhD, of Norwich University. Rude treatment of employees for a violation of security procedure can cause employees to be less likely to comply with security policy in

How Can You Get Workers to Follow Your Company Security Policy?

Clarity helps. A company security policy should plainly define acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Doing so helps to improve compliance and removes ethical dilemmas that lead to worker stress and negative behavior.

Compliance with security and LP policies also requires that they fit work practices and requirements. For example, research has shown that violations of company cyber-security policies often occur when security policies, such as restricting access to computers, conflict with workers’ perceived need for access. This type of conflict can often lead to problems, such as personnel circumventing security controls by propping open doors that require special key access.

When workers don’t “own” a security protocol, they often circumvent it. Company security policy guidelines and procedures are often judged by employees with respect to: ■ Their relevance (are they necessary?); ■ Their effectiveness (do they actually improve security?); and ■ Their user-friendliness (are they understandable and not overly cumbersome to implement?).

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When any company security policy requires extra effort, employees weigh the extra effort—consciously or subconsciously—against benefits for them, in the context of their production tasks.

LP executives may identify ways to encourage policy compliance by conducting organization-wide auditing on questions such as: 1. Is training on LP policies adequate?

2. Do security and asset protection policies and procedures make sense to line workers?

3. How can employee commitment to a company security policy be enhanced?

One key tool in this endeavor is an employee survey that specifically solicits employees’ opinions and attitudes regarding security policies, including how compatible they are—or aren’t—with their job duties and production tasks. By looking at security compliance through the eyes of employees, LP executives can start to manage compliance, something that is not possible if they simply write security rules and tell employees, “Follow this.”

Overall, according to a national security survey by Security Director’s Report and LP Magazine, 40 percent of organizations have surveyed or interviewed employees in the last twelve months to learn their perceptions of security policies, such as how policies may support or conflict with their work practices. It is most common among publicly traded firms, especially business and professional services companies. It is slightly less common among retail organizations at 29 percent.

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July 25, 2017

Organized Retail Crime in Idaho 3rd Annual Conference

CALENDAR

the future—and will certainly result in employees being less likely to encourage others to comply, says Kabay.

Equifax Security Breach Affected 143 Million. Why?

By Timothy Crosby

November 8, 2017 Cyber Security Summit The Westin Copley Place, Boston cybersummitusa.com

When reading the statements coming from Equifax, there seems to be a lot of information in what they fail to say. It is clear the organization simply does not understand certain cyber-security basics. It is also evident that leadership has not fostered, nor do they appear to currently be fostering, a corporate culture of cyber security. The recent breach poses a huge threat to consumers, corporations, and retailers alike, especially with the holiday season approaching; the personal data of the 143 million Americans could be used to access profiles that shoppers have created on retail sites. Action must be taken now.

FACT: Every patch management system fails from time to time. This can occur when systems are not added or are incorrectly removed from the patch management inventory or when connectivity was lost partway through the patching process.

Blaming any one person, function, or process shows a fundamental lack of understanding about cyber security. When it comes to patch management, there needs to be a positive and negative validation process in the form of emails and logs reviewed by someone not responsible for applying patches.

Once it is determined that the patches have been applied, a validation of the effectiveness of the patches needs to occur. Independent security scans need to be performed at the end of the patch cycle to verify the effectiveness. The security scan will answer some of the following questions: ■ Did the patches actually get applied?

■ Did the patches undo a previous workaround or code fix?

■ Did all systems get patched?

■ Are there any new critical or high-risk vulnerabilities that need to be addressed?

It is typical for patches to overwrite workarounds or “hot fixes,” making systems susceptible to older vulnerabilities. It is also common for a system to be missing from the inventory. The assessment needs to include network ranges, not just the host IP address listed in the patch management inventory.

Lastly, the assessment will catch the human-introduced issues, such as keeping the default credentials “admin” on an external facing or production web application, as demonstrated by the Equifax site in Argentina.

Finally, a properly configured scan engine or security assessment tool (updated daily) will catch and alert the team of new critical or high-risk vulnerabilities discovered since the start of the patch management cycle. The “bad guys” will be scanning for all systems vulnerable to any newly discovered attack vector.

The shorter your patch management cycle is, the smaller your vulnerability window. If it is longer than thirty days or based on a software development lifecycle (SDL) that can take months or a year for a production patch to be approved, you might want to reconsider.

It is better to break an application occasionally rather than compromise security. Pick a press release: “Equifax Application Unavailable for Two Hours” due to an applied patch or “Equifax Security Breach Affects 143 Million.”

The leadership at Equifax did not foster a corporate culture of cyber security. Everyone should be accountable for their actions. If someone failed to apply a patch, they should be held accountable, as should those responsible for checking the work, those running post-patch security scans, and those responsible for the patch management policies and procedures.

If the corporate culture is based on a shared responsibility for success and failure, then cyber-security programs will be effective. Conversely, if the corporate culture looks for scapegoats for failures and leadership feels they are above or exempt from the data security best practices, then there are gaping holes in network security.

There was probably a failure in risk assessment, change management, or business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) programs, but a poor patch management cycle, coupled with a corporate culture of blame shifting, was likely the most direct path to one of the worst published cyber-security breaches in history.

LP MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017

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Washington Group Plaza, Boise orcaid.org

November 15–16, 2017 ISC East Jacob Javits Convention Center New York City isceast.com

November 29, 2017 Cyber Security Summit The Beverly Hilton, Los Angeles cybersummitusa.com

January 14–16, 2018 National Retail Federation Big Show Convention & Expo Jacob Javits Convention Center New York City nrfbigshow.nrf.com

February 13, 2018 Cyber Security Summit Silicon Valley cybersummitusa.com

February 19–21, 2018 Innovision Pier Sixty-Six Hotel & Marina Ft. Lauderdale, FL innovisionconference.com

February 25–28, 2018 Retail Industry Leaders Association Retail Supply Chain Conference Phoenix (AZ) Convention Center rila.org

February 28, 2018 Cyber Security Summit Atlanta cybersummitusa.com

March 22, 2018 Cyber Security Summit Denver cybersummitusa.com

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PEOPLE ON THE MOVE Douglas Florence was named senior sales director for the western US and Asia Pacific at 3VR.

Tom Zimmerman, LPQ was promoted to lead, LP systems and investigations at DSW.

Pat Moran was promoted to senior manager of logistics LP AMZL, and Andrew Beckett was promoted to senior manager of logistics LP for transportation services at Amazon.

Ulises Diego is now an area investigator at Express.

Mike Silveira was named VP of AP, occupational health and well-being, and regulatory compliance at Banfield Pet Hospital.

Brendan Fitzgerald was promoted to VP of AP at BJ’s Wholesale Club.

Christopher Hoffman was promoted to divisional VP of LP at The Bon-Ton Stores.

George Betti is now a district LP manager at Burlington Stores.

Paul Smith Jr. is now a regional LP manager at Carter’s/OshKosh B’gosh.

Craig Gage was named director of safety and LP at Chewy.

Dennis Douress, CFI was named director of LP with CSC ServiceWorks.

Hollie Gilbert O’Brien was promoted to manager of LP, pharmacy support at CVS Health.

Ariel Deno was named director of AP at DFASS Group.

Peter Barker has been promoted to senior manager of digital LP at DICK’S Sporting Goods.

Victor Duval and James Elliott, CFI are now regional LP managers at Dollar General.

Nicole (Gibbs) Smith is now a district AP specialist at Dollar Tree.

Alan Swayne, CFI was promoted to associate VP at L Brands.

Crissy (Higgins) Sharpe, CFE was promoted to online fraud investigator at Lowe’s.

Kim Schmidt, CFI and Phelicia Showers are now regional LP managers at Family Dollar.

Raulston Tucker, LPQ is now a multi-unit AP manager at Macy’s Backstage.

Ricky Singleton was promoted to manager of zone security, southern region at FedEx Express.

Gary Parkes was named national profit protection manager at Matalan (UK).

Jeff Buskirk is now a district AP team leader at Ollie’s Bargain Outlet.

Anthony Aloisio, CFI was named director of LP at Floor & Décor.

Aashish Amin, LPQ was promoted to director of strategy and tech services at Office Depot.

Scott Sanford was named director of LP at Forman Mills.

Bryant Price was promoted to regional director of LP, and Christine Boles is now a regional investigator at Gabes.

Ehab Zahran was named director of LP and safety at Party City.

Danielle Gunville is now AP investigations supervisor at Price Chopper Supermarkets.

Andrew Barborak, CFI is now director of LP at Gander Outdoors.

Erika Wolf is now a senior market AP manager at REI.

Matt Brenner, MA, CFI was promoted to director of LP at Gap Inc/Gap Factory, and Theresa Greenlee and Davin Sonaggera were promoted to regional LP managers at Gap, Inc.

Rent-A-Center announced the following changes: Mark Conachen, LPC to director of AP, US field organization, Jesse Vera to director of AP, US operations, David Cohen to senior AP manager, digital initiatives and central investigations, Tim LePelley, CFI to senior zone AP manager, and Edwin Rodriguez, CFI to AP manager, audit and training.

Ian Dill has been named VP of AP at Global Brands Group.

Chris Lodge, CFI was promoted to director of risk management, and Jesse Young is now a regional LP manager at Gymboree.

Mack Harvey is now a district AP manager at The Home Depot.

Malo Taumua, Andre Harrell, and Burkely Bitaraf are now area LP managers at Ross Stores.

Jamie Marquez was promoted to district LP manager at HomeGoods.

Helen Clayton, BA was named corporate crime and security manager at Sainsbury’s (UK).

Nicole Matias was promoted to district LP manager at Kohl’s Department Stores.

Ben Schmidt was promoted to district AP manager at Saks Fifth Avenue.

Joel Gordon was promoted to format leader, specialty asset and profit protection, and Colleen Dillon was promoted to zone manager of AP at Sears Holdings.

Brian Peacock was promoted to director of business development and innovation, and Cameron Roberts, Meg Chervinko, and Alexandra Roberts were promoted to business development managers for Sennco Solutions.

Francois Martineau was promoted to director of LP for Canada, and Jeff Yeats was promoted to director of LP at Shoppers Drug Mart.

Garth Gasse, CFI was promoted to director of LP, US and Canada at SSP America.

Faye Gift, CPP, PCI, CFE is now director of risk management and safety at Supermercado El Rancho.

Oscar Arango was promoted to VP of AP at Target.

Aaron Litteral is now a regional LP manager at Tilly’s.

Jacqueline (Wolk) Schloss is now national task force investigator, and Andrew Boyle was promoted to district LP manager at TJX Companies.

Ed Fuentes was promoted to director of AP investigations at Toys“R”Us. Carlos Perez was named VP of marketing at U.S. Security Associates.

Steven Mieses was promoted to district AP manager at Victoria’s Secret.

Marco Alongi was named company LP manager at Waterstones (UK).

Christopher Boyer, LPC was promoted to district AP Manager at Weis Markets.

To stay up-to-date on the latest career moves as they happen, sign up for LP Insider, the magazine’s daily e-newsletter, or visit the Professional Development page on the magazine’s website, LossPreventionMedia.com. Information for People on the Move is provided by the Loss Prevention Foundation, Loss Prevention Recruiters, Jennings Executive Recruiting, and readers like you. To inform us of a promotion or new hire, email us at peopleonthemove@LPportal.com.

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ANNUAL INDEX January/February 2017 The Big Picture: Retail Video Surveillance Today and What’s Coming Tomorrow by Garett Seivold, Contributing Writer (p. 15) See You in Court: The New Essentials of Retail Crisis Management by Laurence Barton, PhD (p. 39) Fifteen Years of Loss Prevention: 2012 through 2016

by Bill Turner, LPC, Contributing Writer (p. 51) March/April 2017 Building an Unbreakable LP-IT Bond by Garett Seivold, Contributing Writer (p. 15) Making It Easier to Get It Right by Jacque Brittain, LPC, and Kevin McMenimen, LPC, LP Magazine (p. 41) Modern Data Analytics by Stan Welch, LPC, Agilence (p. 55) May/June 2017 Cashing in on Security by Garett Seivold, Contributing Writer (p. 15) The Great Generational Shift by Bruce Tulgan, Rainmaker Thinking (p. 41) An Update on Major Subjects Affecting Retail LP by Bill Turner, LPC, Contributing Writer (p. 55) July/August 2017 Product Protection: Benefit-Denial Solution Saves Rent-A-Center Millions by Garett Seivold, Contributing Writer (p. 15) LP Leaders of the Future? No Big Brain Required

by Francis D’Addario, Dean Correia, and Sean Dettloff, Security Executive Council (p. 37) Access Control and the Case of the Missing Camera

by Dave DiSilva, Contributing Writer (p. 47) September/October 2017 Security’s Security: Are Your Solutions Part of the Problem? by Garett Seivold, Contributing Writer (p. 15) A Mall within a Store? Brick-and-Mortar Retail Reimagined by Maurizio Scrofani, CCSP, LPC, Contributing Writer (p. 39) Conversion Rate Optimization: Turning Store Traffic Insights into Better Business Results by Mark Ryski, Headcount Corporation (p. 51) November/December 2017 Stories from the Storms: LP Helps Steer Companies and Communities through Hurricane Crisis by Garett Seivold, Contributing Writer (p. 15) Searching for Reality in Retail: Hype, Hysteria, or Happening? by Walter Palmer, PCG Solutions (p. 43) 2018 Product Showcase and Resource Guide (p. 51) Interviews by James Lee, LPC, Executive Editor From Supermarket Store Detective to Director with Scott Ziter, Price Chopper (Jan/Feb 2017, p. 27) Building an Organization around Data and Technology with Scott Glenn, Sears Holdings (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 27) Building a Supply-Chain AP Team from Tee to Green with Mike Combs, The Home Depot (May/Jun 2017 p. 29) From Retail LP to Solution Provider to Restaurant Brand Protection with David Johnston, Dunkin’ Brands (Jul/Aug 2017, p. 25) Smart People Say Smart Things excerpts from interviews worth repeating (Sep/Oct 2017 p. 27) Collecting Shrinkage Goals and Sports Memorabilia with Scott Myers, Hibbitt Sports (Nov/Dec 2017 p. 29) Ask the Expert Solving Access-Control Challenges by Engaging with Retailers with Ken Kuehler, Detex (Jul/Aug 2017 p. 42) The Win-Win of Retailer-Led Offender Rehabilitation with Caroline Kochman, NASP (Sep/Oct 2017 p. 58) Benchmarking by Adrian Beck, Walter Palmer, and Colin Peacock Comparing Policies and Practices on Managing Shoplifting (Jan/Feb 2017 p. 24) Setting the Research Agenda (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 38) Emerging Technologies (May/Jun 2017 p. 38) Adopting an Intervention Assessment Framework in LP (Jul/Aug 2017 p. 34) Understanding Data Analytics in LP (Sep/Oct 2017 p. 36) Certification Becoming a Big-Picture Thinker with Tamara Murray, LPC, Walmart (Jan/Feb 2017 p. 46) Certification Has Tremendous Benefits for Law Enforcement with Mitzi Perry, LPQ, St. Petersburg

(FL) Police Department (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 52) De-escalation Training Program Addresses Disruptive Behaviors by Gene Smith, LPC, LP Foundation (May/Jun 2017 p. 50) Professional Membership: What’s in It for You? By Christina Kendall, LP Foundation (Jul/Aug 2017 p. 56) Expand Your Knowledge with Eric Rode, LPC, CFI (Sep/Oct 2017 p. 56) Certification Benefits All LP Leaders with Chris Scheutzow, LPC, Big Lots (Nov/Dec 2017 p. 38) Editor’s Letter by Jack Trlica New Year, New Editorial (Jan/Feb 2017 p. 6) Perspectives from Practitioners (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 6) Great Customer Experience Is More than a Buzzword (May/Jun 2017 p. 6) Revisiting Timeless Topics, Exploring New Ones (Jul/Aug 2017 p. 6) Retailers’ Response to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma (Sep/Oct 2017 p. 6) Ten Things You Can Do to Make 2018 a Great Year (Nov/Dec 2017 p. 6) Evidence-Based LP by Read Hayes, PhD, CPP Leadership in Action (Jan/Feb 2017 p. 48) Getting the Dosage Right to Stop the Pain (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 54) Information Dominance (May/Jun 2017 p. 52) Winning Loss Prevention (Jul/Aug 2017 p. 44) Footprints and Flea Markets (Sep/Oct 2017 p. 46) Training Makes a Difference (Nov/Dec 2017 p. 68) Future of LP by Tom Meehan, CFI Social Media Monitoring: How Does It Work? (Jan/Feb 2017 p. 36) Read the Fine Print (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 36) When Ordinary Things Get Smart (May/Jun 2017 p. 36) Brick-and-Mortar Is Not Dead; Amazon Just Proved It (Jul/Aug 2017 p. 22) The Danger of Forced Innovation in Retail (Sep/Oct 2017 p. 24) Three Types of Social Engineering That Keep Coming after Retailers (Nov/Dec 2017 p. 40) Interviewing by David E. Zulawski, CFI, CFE and Shane G. Sturman, CFI, CPP The Case against Confrontation (Jan/Feb 2017 p. 12) Is It Worth the Risk? (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 12) Implicit or Explicit—Why Do It at All? (May/Jun 2017 p. 12) Random Records from the Room: Part One (Jul/Aug 2017 p. 12) Random Records from the Room: Part Two (Sep/Oct 2017 p. 12) Random Records from the Room: Part Three (Nov/Dec 2017 p. 12) LPM Digital by Jacque Brittain, LPC, and Kelsey Seidler Innovation Leading Us into the New

LPM Excellence Recognizing the Best in LP Mike Lamb, LPC, Walmart; Bob MacLea, TJX; William Gross, Boston PD (Jan/Feb 2017 p. 44) Johnny Turner, Rack Room Shoes; Melissa Mitchell, CFI, LifeWay Christian Stores; Mike Grady, LPC, Vector Security (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 40) Don Knox, IOBSE; Sara May, Barnes & Noble; Cita Doyle, LPQ, InstaKey (May/Jun 2017 p. 48) Gene Smith, LPC, LP Foundation; Kat Houston, LPQ, LPM Media Group; Nadine Lajeune, Sears Holdings (Jul/Aug 2017 p. 24) Hedgie Bartol, LPQ, Axis; Tom Arigi, Walmart (Sep/Oct 2017 p. 26) Steve Hyle, AFA; Curt Crum, CID, Boise (ID) PD (Nov/Dec 2017 p. 26) My Turn I Missed My Calling by Kevin Lynch, LPC, Tyco (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 74) Trips, Slips & Falls: New National Standards Certain to Be a Game Changer by Russell J. Kendzior, Traction Experts (Nov/Dec 2017 p. 48) Parting Words by Jim Lee, LPC Happy New Year (Jan/Feb 2017 p. 74) Hard Work, Talent, and Maybe a Little Luck (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 82) Change Isn’t Just Something You Carry in Your Pocket (May/Jun 2017 p. 82) You Are a Good Guy, Gene Smith (Jul/Aug 2017 p. 74) Not Having a Good Day (Sep/Oct 2017 p. 78) Make Smart Choices for a Truly Moving Experience (Nov/Dec 2017 p. 84) Perspectives The Year Ahead in LP by Merek Bigelow, LP Magazine (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 24) Strategies Grasping the Future and Today: A Balancing Act

by Steve Sell, USS (Mar/Apr 2017 p.62) Supply Chain by Maurizio P. Scrofani, CCSP, LPC RFID Technology and Asset Protection (Jan/Feb 2017 p. 60) Test, Do, Learn, and Share (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 66) Supply-Chain Focus Should Be “Left of Boom” (May/Jun 2017 p. 26)

Statement of Ownership Publication title: LossPrevention Filing date: 10/1/2017 Issue frequency: bi-monthly No. of issues annually: 6 Mailing address of office of publication: 700 Matthews Mint Hill Rd, Ste C, Matthews, NC 28105 Mailing address of headquarters: same Name and address of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Jack Trlica, same address as above Corporate owner: Loss Prevention Magazine, Inc., 10433 Pullengreen Dr., Charlotte, NC 28277 Stockholders: Jim Lee, 10433 Pullengreen Dr., Charlotte, NC 28277; Jack Trlica, 7436 Leharne Dr., Charlotte, NC 28270 Publication title: Loss Prevention Issue date of circulation data below: July-August 2017 Avg. No. Copies No. Copies of Single Each Issue During Issue Published Preceding 12 Months Nearest to Filing Date Total no. of copies 25,193 25,300 Outside county paid/requested subscriptions 12,134 10,921 In-county paid/requested subscriptions 0 0 Other paid/requested distribution outside USPS 4,782 4,427 Requested copies distributed by other mail classes through USPS 0 0 Total paid and/or requested circulation 16,916 15,348 Outside county nonrequested copies 6,911 8,070 In-county nonrequested copies 0 0 Nonrequested copies distributed by other mail classes through USPS 0 0 Nonrequested copies distributed outside the mail 589 1,295 Total nonrequested distribution 7,500 9,365 Total distribution 24,416 24,713 Copies not distributed 767 587 Total 25,183 25,300 Percent paid and/or requested circulation 69.3% 62.1% Electronic copies requested 14,671 14,389 Total print and electronic requested 31,587 29,737 Total distribution print and electronic 39,087 39,102 Percent paid and/or requested both print and electronic 80.8% 76.0% Name and title of publisher: Jack Trlica, Editor and Publisher Date: 10/1/2017

LP MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017

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Year (Jan/Feb 2017 p. 64) Navigating a Year in Transition (Mar/Apr 2017 p. 70) A New Chapter in Retail (May/Jun 2017 p. 70) Keeping Safety and Security Top of Mind (Jul/Aug 2017 p. 66) New Approaches to Retailing—Online and In-Store (Sep/Oct 2017 p. 70) Safety and Security in LP (Nov/Dec 2017 p. 76)

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PARTING WORDS

Make Smart Choices for a Truly Moving Experience W

A

Jim Lee, LPC Executive Editor

e live in a world, and an industry, that is built upon change. Everything around us is in a constant state of flux, moving forward—and in some cases, backward or sideways—at a pace that forces all of us to stay on our toes all the time. This is not by any means something that’s new or something that’s ever going to come to an end. Having been around awhile myself, I can tell you that the only difference is that the pace seems to speed up or slow down depending on what’s going on in your life, where you are in your career, what’s going on in the business, and how you face those changes as a person and as a professional.

Recently I was looking over our People on the Move column, and it made me think about all the wonderful and exciting opportunities that are happening all around us in loss prevention.

People moving up or moving on is almost always good news for those individuals, and we applaud their efforts and the prospects that come with new partners, new responsibilities, and new beginnings. Getting promoted or taking a different job can bring with it both personal and professional challenges, making us better at what we do and better contributors to the business and the profession.

But growth and change isn’t simply built on shifting our geography. We should also be applauding those who have seen the value in staying with one company for a long time.

They recognize the merits of stability and consistency in their companies and their careers. They find their potential by building on a solid foundation and in the appeal of sparking internal change to create a winning program and a successful career. I think of my good friend Bob MacLea, who spent forty-one years with TJX Companies and made countless contributions to the company and the loss prevention community.

But I can also point to one of our own here at LP Magazine in Amy Carpenter, who is on the move after seventeen years working behind the scenes with the LPM team. By bringing their own brand of excellence to what they do, professionals like Amy bring immeasurable value to their organizations. Thank you, Amy. You have both our gratitude and our congratulations as you move forward on your personal journey.

for the millennials out there) that’s fresh and attractive, full of promise and opportunity. We see the prospects of something new with the chance to learn, grow, and make a difference in creative and exciting ways. By learning, we remain relevant. By developing our skill sets, we build career security. By spreading our wings, we expand our possibilities.

On the other side of that same shiny coin are the prospects of staying with the same company and taking our careers to new and different levels—while staying put. Stability and familiarity aren’t necessarily a bad thing, and if we understand the need to continue our growth and development along the way, there are many potential ways to develop our skills and build career security right in our own back yard.

But making these decisions should never be as simple as flipping a coin. Changing companies will mean different cultures, colleagues, and strategies, along with other hurdles that can bring unexpected challenges. The decision to move should never be made on impulse or emotion and deserves careful consideration.

By the same respect and for many of the same reasons, we shouldn’t decide to stay with a company based on impulse or emotion or the anxiety that comes with facing change.

Opening new doors and new opportunities can enhance—and extend—our careers. Career security also comes with making ourselves as marketable as possible, gaining new perspectives and exposure to different company cultures. Change can be scary, but there are times when change can be necessary and highly beneficial.

Over the years many friends and colleagues have asked me for advice on making tough career decisions. Obviously, some choices are easier than others based on needs, opportunities, responsibilities, finances, job elimination, and many other factors that can come into play. My best counsel is that whatever decision that you make, those decisions should be based on rational thought, careful consideration, and informed decisions. Make the right choice for yourself, your family, and your organization, and you’ll end up with a truly moving experience.

Heads or Tails?

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NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017

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se

The benefits of a new role in a new organization are often easy to see and admire. It’s the shiny new penny (or quarter

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75283 • Johnson Controls — Loss Prevention Magazine • 4C • Trim: 8.25” x 10.875” (Live: 7” x 10”) • rlf • 8/18/17