WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY MEAN
When They Say Enterprise Risk and How to Get There INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
We’ve Confused Experience with Wisdom
Privacy is Dead
Where the Case Falls Apart
October 2026 | Issue 2 talklpnews.com
LEADERSHIP PROFILE
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Catherine Stasiowski - The advice she didn’t take
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WELCOME TO
Issue 1 went out in July and dang. Thank you for such an incredible response! We at TalkLPnews truly appreciate this industry’s support and we’ve never felt more sure about the difference we’re making! So, here’s Issue 2, built almost entirely out of unscripted conversation, feedback and journeys I’ve had this summer. NRF Protect in Dallas gave me a show floor full of people who agreed to sit in the hot seat between sessions. Everything in these pages came out of somebody’s mouth on the record. A few things surfaced that I wasn’t looking for. Two retailers in completely unrelated categories, footwear and alcohol, independently told me the same thing about where their theft has gone. Almost every executive I interviewed answered the “what should solution providers know” question the same way, which either means the industry has finally agreed on something or the providers aren’t (haven’t been) listening. And when I asked people about AI, the honest answers were a lot more interesting than the ones you hear on a keynote stage. There’s also a leadership profile with someone who was told early in her career not to disagree with her CEO, and decided that was terrible advice. If you disagree with anything in here, you know where to find me. I’d love to hear from you! Best, Amber Amber Bradley Editor-in-Chief, TalkLPnews
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TALKLPNEWS
APEX COUNCIL
MELINDA BLACK
Vice President, Loss Prevention at Ulta Beauty
ALISA DART
Vice President, Asset Protection at Family Dollar
CHRIS HARRIS
MATT BUNKER
Director of Asset Protection at Albertsons - Safeway
CARMEN DUBOSE
BEN DUGAN
Senior Director of Asset Protection, Hibbett Sports
Executive Director, Central Investigations, CVS Health
MITCHELL JACOBS
Vice President, Asset Protection, Safety & Shrink
Head of Corporate Safety & Security, Lennox
JAVIER LEAL
CATHERINE STASIOWSKI
Chief Security Officer, at Vallarta Supermarkets
RYAN CLEVENGER
Director of Asset Protection and Workplace Safety, Lowes Foods
PAUL JAECKLE
Vice President of Asset Protection, Meijer Stores
SCOTT ZITER
VP, Loss Prevention & Safety, Total Wine
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VP of Risk Management at Golub Corporation/Price Chopper Supermarkets
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JAMES COSSEBOOM
Director, Asset Protection, Retail Business Services (AHOLD)
BRIAN FRIEDMAN
Divisional VP, Asset Protection and Risk Management, REI
AMELIA KENNEDY
Vice President, Asset Protection Strategy and Analytics, Burlington Stores, Inc.
FEATURE ARTICLE
WHAT PEOPLE
ACTUALLY MEAN When They Say Enterprise Risk and How to Get There. Three executives, three very different companies, and one team doing an enormous amount of work.
By Amber Bradley, Editor-in-Chief, TalkLPnews
“We’re enterprise risk management, but we’re not 100 percent there yet.”
The phrase is — Tim Lapinski, getting popular fast, Divisional VP Enterprise Risk and it describes at Management, Helzberg Diamonds least two completely different jobs. Some people hear enterprise risk and think insurance. Others hear it and think everything from the parking lot to the back room. Tim Lapinski named the confusion out loud, and that gap is where most of this industry’s uncertainty about the term lives.
Helzberg: it started when a new CFO walked in Lapinski joined Helzberg Diamonds in 2014 into what he calls a traditional loss prevention program: field LP, internal and external cases, operations, and physical security at the corporate office and the distribution center. In 2017 a new CFO arrived who had
worked with an enterprise risk department before, and Lapinski used the opening. That year the function officially stopped being just loss prevention. What came in the door, in order: the sales audit team, which later became payments risk, putting his group inside the fee structures attached to different payment types and hunting for dollars there. Then fraud, both in-store and e-commerce. Then safety, which had always been adjacent and now became formal. Then the insurance portfolio, which is the one that changes the job. Policy placement. Claims management. Workers’ compensation, general liability, property, and the jeweler’s block policy that covers inventory. He recommends every LP leader go find out what their company is actually insured against, because he found it genuinely interesting. Water intrusion. Storm damage. And the ones that read like LP: robbery and burglary. One detail worth checking if you lease your locations, as Helzberg does: the landlord insures the building, you insure what is inside it, down to the fixtures and the carpet. The footprint has grown again since. Vendor and supplier due diligence including checking whether a partner carries adverse media or reputational exposure that
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could land on Helzberg. Business continuity and disaster recovery, including the IT side of how systems get restored, which he had never touched before. The destination is an organizational risk registry, scoring risks qualitatively or quantitatively. He is not there yet and says so without flinching. “We’re enterprise risk management, but we’re not 100 percent there yet,” he said. “We’ve got a little way to go before we fill into that role.” For scale: 156 Helzberg locations, plus roughly 30 more stores, another corporate office and another distribution center that came over in December when his team took on shared responsibility for Ben Bridge, a fellow jeweler under the Berkshire Hathaway umbrella. Same functions, two organizations, one small team.
American Eagle: everything that has to happen before the doors open Scott McBride is chief security officer at American Eagle and chairs the enterprise security risk management committee inside the NRF council, 18 members hand-selected because those leaders were already doing the work, whether or not they called it that. The concept is not new to the world, it is new to retail. He and David Johnston,
then at Dunkin’ Brands, compared notes on it for years before McBride went emeritus from the council chair and had the white space to build the committee. His way of framing the scale is the part that lands. Look at business continuity alone, he said, and you are counting well over a hundred separate functional areas, each one a thing that has to get done every single day for American Eagle to have “jeans, socks and underwear on sale for customers, whether it’s on the web or in a store.” Those areas sit under roughly 120 vice presidents and six or seven C-suite leaders. He was not reading off a slide, and the exact count is beside the point. The point is that no asset protection department has ever mapped that many moving parts, and enterprise risk asks you to try. He is clear that shrink is not going anywhere. “That’s a cost of admission right now. You have to have that ability, or you are not going to be long for this industry.” The argument is about what you add on top of it. Thirty years ago the goal was a seat at the operations table, and that got won. The next one is the C-suite, and after that the board, where McBride asks a question worth stealing: are we advising the board, or defending our case?
What you are not signing up for The trap here is obvious, and I put it to McBride directly: If you run a lean team and you start opening conversations across every functional area in the company, are you not just volunteering for a hundred requests you cannot staff ? “This is not designed for AP to own every other function,” he said. “This is really designed to be a member of the committee, the task force, or the decision team.” His example: marketing wants to load a trailer with merchandise, drive it to a college campus and open a pop-up shop. His job is to flag the added risk and the contingencies. His job is not to drive the trailer or work the shop, which makes most of the work a negotiation, and he is comfortable with that. “If we do it my way, we’re going to have very low loss of the product, but you’re prob-
ably going to have very low customer satisfaction with the long line it took to filter in five people at a time through this trailer. So, then we’re going to say, okay, what’s the upside if we let 100 people in the trailer?” Every retail company has loss, he said. There is no zero loss model, so the job is agreeing on the number in advance. But McBride is very clear on the one line he never negotiates: employee safety. “The one thing that always comes into play that’s not negotiable is the safety of our people. That’s non-negotiable.”
Internal influencers, and the rule that builds them McBride coined the term the morning we talked, on stage, and confirmed it with the enthusiasm of a man who knows he just named something that’s going to stick. Other people say business partners. He thinks internal influencer describes it better, because what you need is someone who will carry your position into rooms you are not in. “The whole organization, it’s like a battleship. You have to turn it slowly, and you
“The whole organization, it’s like a battleship. You have to turn it slowly, and you have to negotiate that turn the right way, or you’re going to slam into something.”
— Scott McBride, Chief Security Officer, American Eagle
have to negotiate that turn the right way, or you’re going to slam into something.” His practical version is a rule he has taught every other department at American Eagle. If the word shrink or loss comes up in a meeting and AP is not in the room, stop the meeting. “Nobody should be making any decisions or having any more discussion about it unless AP is represented.” What makes the idea work is that the internal influencers are
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the ones who stop the meeting, which gets McBride’s team into the discussion early.
How to pay for expanding responsibilities Most of the time it comes back to budget. How do executives pay for everything they need? McBride had a practical answer. When you pitch a change that carries an ROI, McBride pre-negotiates a reinvestment split before the savings land. If the project saves $1,000, $200 comes back to him to buy something or put into payroll for his department. Save $2,000 and it is $400. Save $5,000 and maybe it is $1,000. The company banks a $4,000 savings and his department (and initiatives) get funded – even if slightly. The timing is the whole trick. “Because then you’re not asking for it after the fact.” Once finance books the savings into the project plan, that money has a name on it and it is not yours. Get the split written in while the business case is still being built, with the executive sponsor’s agreement on the record.
Where to start when you have no background in it Lapinski describes it as jumping into the deep end and figuring it out. And he points out to enlist partners to educate you quickly on areas where you need it more, such as the company’s insurance brokerage. His starting point is a question, not a certification. Every retail organization already has somebody managing the risk portfolio, whether that is the controller, the CFO or someone else. Go find out who it is and ask what they do. That conversation costs nothing and tells you what is already covered and who you would be partnering with. After that there (actually) are certifications. He pointed to RIMS, and to designations like Certified Risk Manager and Associate in Risk Management. “There’s no shortage of training out there. It’s just a matter of how much time you’re willing to invest in it.” He is equally direct about whose job that is. “You have to develop yourself. You can’t wait for oth-
FEATURE ARTICLE ers to develop you.” If your leadership is not funding conferences or certifications, stay in front of them and keep asking. They can only say no so many times, and in the meantime they know you are interested.
Don’t spread your solutions like peanut butter McBride and Lapinski land on the same allocation problem from opposite ends, and McBride says the quiet part. You cannot work every functional area. Figure out your top three, work those, then find your top 10, then look at what changes seasonally. The same logic applies to stores. Classify them by risk level and allocate technology and payroll accordingly, factoring
“We have to be constant learners. We always have to be students of the business.”
— Dan Petrousek,
Senior VP of Asset Protection, Ulta Beauty
in the environment around the store and how well the store is actually being run. “If you try to spread it like peanut butter, then you’re not getting effective use of all that time, money, resources.” He argues this matters most for fast-growing retailers with lean teams, because when you are small and moving quickly you cannot afford a large mistake. No one has time to fix the mistake.
Who is actually qualified to take on enterprise risk Which raises a question neither of them asked directly: what kind of career produces someone who can hold this job? Dan Petrousek is a useful answer. He is senior vice president of asset protection at Ulta Beauty, the first person to hold that title there, and for roughly a decade of his 25 years with the company he was not in
asset protection at all. He spent two separate stints in HR, running associate relations and then working as a business partner to the field and to several of the executives who run Ulta today. Between those stints, he came back to AP as IP video hit the market and moved every camera system in the company onto the network, which put him in standing meetings with finance and IT. After the second HR stint, he took a turn through supply chain. That is the resume this conversation keeps describing without naming. Insurance, business continuity, payments, vendor due diligence and IT recovery are not LP disciplines. Somebody has to be literate in enough of the building to hold a credible conversation in each of them – but if your resume doesn’t measure up right now – chill. Start learning, start expanding your internal conversations and maybe it’s time to invest in yourself, even if your organization isn’t? Petrousek anchors on a line from John F. Kennedy, that leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. His applied version is plainer. “We have to be constant learners. We always have to be students of the business.”
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If you disagree or feel you have a better suggestion, feel free to Change My Mind!
Improve your strategy. www.marchnetworks.com
and start protecting the everyday.
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LEADERSHIP PROFILE
THE ADVICE SHE
DIDN’T TAKE She was told not to disagree with the CEO. She did it anyway.
By Amber Bradley, Editor-in-Chief, TalkLPnews
Catherine Stasiowski left home at 14 to study ballet at what was then the North Carolina School of the Arts. She studied biology in college. She is now vice president of loss prevention and safety at Total Wine & More, almost 20 years in, covering almost 300 stores in 29 states and more than 10,000 team members. Ballet is a discipline worth examining for a second, because of what training at that level involves. You stand in front of a mirror and a room full of people and you are corrected out loud, every day. The correction is the instruction. There is no version of that world where you get good by being told you are fine. Which brings me to the worst career advice she ever received.
Don’t go up against the CEO Somebody told her that early on. Do not disagree with the CEO, stay in your lane, let it go. She thought about it for a while, and then she threw it out. “They hired me to do this role. I have to be my authentic, true self. And if I have a difference of opinion, I need to share that.” Her team protects the stores day in and day out. If she sees something leadership does not, she said, leadership should hear it and then decide. She flipped it around to her own team:
who would want to lead a group that does not feel comfortable saying “Hey Catherine, we don’t agree, you’re going down a path and we see something you don’t”? That advice gets handed out in this industry constantly, dressed up as political savvy or as somebody looking out for you. It protects the comfort of the person giving it, and it costs the company the exact thing the LP function exists to do, which is put someone in the room willing to say the uncomfortable thing before it turns into a loss. If you have ever given a younger person on your team that advice, go take it back. She added the qualifier that matters. How you do it is everything, and she framed it as a difference of opinion rather than a confrontation.
What she is actually arguing about The disagreements are not academic, because the job is strange even by retail standards. Total Wine is big box and specialty at once. Alcohol runs on a three-tier system, and every state they operate in writes its own rules on what can be sold and what can be tasted.
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CATHERINE STASIOWSKI
Vice President of Loss Prevention & Safety, Total Wine
Then there is what sits on the shelf. Single items run up to $40,000 and $80,000, which surprises people who assume the risk in a wine store tops out at a nice cabernet. Most Total Wine stores have a humidor, and cigars walk out steadily, bought one or two at the register with a handful of the expensive ones in a pocket. Her team is also watching ORC migrate out of the stores and into the supply chain like many other retailers these days. She covers all of it with 19 people. Seven are in the field supporting 300 stores, and the company opens 10 to 15 more a year. Total
“They hired me to do this role. I have to be my authentic, true self. And if I have a difference of opinion, I need to share that.”
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Wine had 46 stores when she started. The 300th opens in Michigan this year. On AI she was direct in a way most executives are not on the record. Her team is testing it against claims management and project work, but from a security standpoint she said it has not helped much yet, and she is not confident camera integrations are where they need to be for her environment. She thinks it is close. Being privately owned lets her drop something into one store and find out.
The batting average
ery week. Six floors, one at a time, meeting people she hasn’t, having that impromptu hall meeting that was more valuable than the last 10 ‘scheduled’ meetings. It is what her company coaches store teams to do, applied to headquarters. She wishes she had started a decade sooner, back when networking sounded optional next to a project deadline.
The part she corrected in herself She described herself early on as a doer and a problem solver who did not always think about other people, and then called it what it was. Pretty selfish, she said. Becoming a mom shifted some of it as well as running a department where you accentuate what works with each person instead of grinding on what they lack. Same move as the mirror. Name the flaw out loud, then go fix it.
“If you’re not polite to my team, you’re not going to get very far.”
The best advice came from John Velke, her predecessor, who recruited her out of the stores and made her his first hire at Total Wine. When she moved from director to VP, he told her it was all about the batting average. You will not win every argument or every contract, and at the VP level the work turns strategic enough that some calls are going to be wrong. The hard part, she admitted, is applying that to herself. She does not get upset when her team makes a mistake. They fail fast and move on. Extending herself the same courtesy took longer. A dancer does not get a redo mid-performance either. You keep going and you fix it in the studio tomorrow.
What it built Refusing that early advice shows up in how she runs things now – with a strong belief in her team. She hires people she believes know more than she does, and vendors do not get to skip past them. She rarely takes a cold call. Email that catches her interest goes to the team, and they decide whether it is worth testing. “If you’re not polite to my team, you’re not going to get very far,” she said, because that reputation lands back on her desk anyway. Once her people convince her, she is ready to fight the good fight. Another management philosophy she came up and implemented is to walk a different floor of the corporate office ev-
The mirror The 14-year-old who left home for a ballet studio spent years being told, in front of everyone, exactly what was wrong with her work. Good preparation, it turns out, for a job whose entire value depends on someone being willing to tell an executive something he or she does not want to hear.
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CHANGE MY MIND
WE’VE CONFUSED EXPERIENCE WITH
WISDOM By David George, Executive Editor, TalkLPnews
Experience is one of the most respected currencies in Loss Prevention. Job postings ask for it. Promotions reward it. Conference panels celebrate it. We often introduce ourselves by saying how many years we’ve been in the business: Twenty years. Thirty years. Forty years. Experience matters. I’ve benefited from it throughout my career. But recently I’ve started wondering if we’ve begun giving experience credit for something it doesn’t always produce: Wisdom. Those aren’t the same thing. I’ve met AP/LP professionals with five years of experience who constantly question their own thinking, study new ideas, and adapt when the business changes. I’ve also met people with thirty years of experience who really have one year of experience repeated
thirty times. Time doesn’t automatically teach. Sometimes it just reinforces habits. Retail has changed more in the last decade than many of us expected. Organized retail crime has become more sophisticated. Technology has changed investigations. AI is beginning to reshape decision making. Digital commerce has blurred the line between stores and online. Customers shop differently. Employees work differently. Yet I still hear people dismiss new ideas with a familiar phrase: “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” Maybe that’s confidence. Or maybe it’s comfort. One of the hardest things about experience is that it can convince us we’ve already seen everything worth seeing. After enough years, our instincts become trusted companions. That’s a good thing – until those instincts start answering questions the business isn’t asking anymore. We shouldn’t worry much about inexperienced leaders. They usually know what they don’t know. The leaders who should concern us are those who believe experience has made them unteachable because that’s where growth quietly stops. One of the best executives I ever worked with had a habit that caught my attention. Even after decades in leadership, he would walk into meetings asking questions instead of giving answers. He wasn’t pretending not to know. He was genuinely curious whether someone else had found a better way. That takes confidence. It also takes humility. The irony is that the more experience
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we accumulate, the more valuable humility becomes. Our profession exists because we’re trained to identify patterns. We recognize behaviors, investigate trends, and learn from history. Those are important skills. But history can become a trap if we assume tomorrow will look enough like yesterday that we don’t need to rethink anything. Every generation entering this profession sees the business through different eyes. They notice problems we’ve stopped noticing. They challenge assumptions we’ve accepted for years. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they’re exactly what we need. The goal shouldn’t be protecting our experience. It should be combining it with fresh thinking. That’s where wisdom lives. Real wisdom isn’t measured by how long you’ve been in the profession. It’s measured by whether you’re still willing to learn from people who haven’t been in the profession very long at all. So... Change My Mind. If you believe years of experience naturally produce better judgment, better leadership, and better decisions, I’d like to hear why. Send comments to “Change My Mind” at david@calibrationgroup.com David E. George, CFE, CFI is managing partner of Calibration Group, Inc. Previously, David served as vice president over Asset Protection for Dollar General Stores, a company with more than 20,000 stores in 48 states. While serving Dollar General, David was responsible for the Asset Protection field team, the Asset Protection corporate team, the Shrink Improvement team, and the Shrink Analytics team.
AGAINST THE GRAIN
PRIVACY IS
ered the ALPR technology at some of their locations. Then the critics got louder. A group of influencers turned their attention to Lowe’s and Home Depot, demanding that the retailers remove the technology from their parking lots. The concern is privacy. And to be fair, there are legitimate questions here. A camera reading the license plate that’s already publicly displayed on the back of my car is one thing. Those clips being stored, searched, connected and potentially shared is another. Who gets access? How long is the information kept? What can it be used for? What happens when someone misuses it? Those questions deserve answers. Which takes us right back to that trip to lacrosse practice. My phone knows everywhere I go. My credit card company knows where I spend money. Retailers know what I buy. My browser knows what I search for, what I click on and how long I stare at something before moving on. And then we joke that Facebook tries to sell us on the very thing we recently had a conversation about. Most of the time, we don’t seem particularly bothered by any of this. In fact, when all that tracking makes our lives easier, we call it convenient. Said differently, we’ve developed a pretty complicated definition of privacy. But we can’t have this conversation without talking about what we expect these cameras to actually do. We want retailers and law enforcement to do something about ORC, stolen vehicles, fraud and violence. We want them to identify offenders, connect crimes and catch people who repeatedly victimize stores.
DEAD By Ryan Bauss, Vice President, TalkLPnews
The other day, I got into my car to take my son to lacrosse practice. Before I had a chance to open Waze, search for the field, or type anything into my phone, it told me how long it was going to take to get there. That creeped me out a little bit. The NSA would be impressed. My phone figured out the lacrosse schedule without a warrant. Or… we’d made the drive enough times, on the same days and around the same time, that my phone had figured out our routine. So, what did I do about this obvious invasion of my privacy? I drove to lacrosse practice. Apparently, my phone knowing where I’m going is one thing. A retailer knowing where my car is? That’s where things get interesting. Ulta took heat after customers discov-
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Doing that effectively may require some sacrifice. Maybe even a little privacy. I realize that’s probably not a universally popular statement. But I’m also not sure we’re being asked to give up something we haven’t already given away. That’s not a free pass for ALPRs or any other technology. There should be guardrails around who can access the information, how it’s used, how long it’s kept and what happens when someone abuses that access. That’s where the argument should be. Not whether technology should be allowed to see something that’s already out in public, but what we’re willing to let people do with it. Today, you may not be comfortable with a network of cameras knowing where your car has been. No need to worry… tomorrow morning you’ll probably put a phone in your pocket that already knows where you’re going. Going with the grain says ALPR crossed the privacy line. Going against the grain says we’ve been on the other side of that line for years. ALPR just made us notice.
“Who gets access? How long is the information kept? What can it be used for? What happens when someone misuses it? Those questions deserve answers.”
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INDUSTRY SIDEBAR
IN BRIEF
Scott McBride, Chief Security Officer, American Eagle
Creative Strategy to Fund Your Budget You’re pitching a change with a real return. Before the project starts, before anyone books the savings, you negotiate a split.
our department gets a compounding budget. The whole thing hinges on one word: pre-negotiated.
Save $1,000, you keep $200 of it. SAVE $1,000 SAVE $2,000 Save $2,000, you keep $400.
“Because then you’re not asking for it after the fact,” McBride said. “They already booked it, and now it’s a savings. It’s baked into the project plan, and you get alignment from those executive sponsors.”
You keep $200 of it
You keep $400 of it
Save $5,000, maybe you keep $1,000.
SAVE $5,000 Maybe you keep $1,000 of it
The money you keep goes into technology, headcount, or into another department entirely. Scott McBride articulated this strategy as a creative way to help make the ROI case come home a bit. The company still banks the majority.
If you ask for it afterward, the money is most likely already spoken for. Ask before and you’ve built a mechanism that funds your next three projects.
Classify your stores. Risk tiers, one through five. Environmental factors, how well the store is operated, allocation of technology and resources. “If you try to spread it like peanut butter, then you’re not getting effective use of all that time, money, resources.”
Use outside experts as credibility, not capacity.
MCBRIDE’S THREE RULES OF FUNDING
His analogy is being a parent: the soccer coach tells your kid exactly what you told them, and the kid listens to the coach. “Sometimes the C-suite or the board will listen to that pitch even more intently because it came with not only your intention, but this outside validation.” It may help your case to consult research, bring in a consultant, or ask a panel of peers to validate your hypothesis.
Plan in three horizons. Near-term, mid-term, long-term. McBride credits Mike Jesse with the version he likes: a do it now, a do it sometime, and a this is what it should look like. The goalpost will move. That’s fine, as long as your pre-negotiated points move with it.
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INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
Turn Every Camera Into Business Intelligence with AI. Catch threats early, protect after hours and share evidence easily
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INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
WHERE THE CASE Two ALTO staff attorneys, Jennifer Zucker Healy of Illinois and Raymond DeLeo of New York, walked through what happens after an apprehension. The failure points are more boring, and more fixable, than most retailers expect. The two ways an Illinois misdemeanor dies
In an Illinois misdemeanor the retailer has to appear at the very first court date or the case is automatically thrown out. If the surveillance footage is not submitted, the judge throws it out too. “There’s two requirements in a misdemeanor case,” Zucker Healy said. “You’re there, and the video’s there.” Losing that way costs more than the case. It infuriates law enforcement, she said, because they spent the time and the tax dollars on the apprehension, and it infuriates judges who feel their courtroom is not being taken seriously. Asked whether an officer would answer that retailer’s next call with the same urgency, she did not hedge. “Oh, it has a trickle-down effect.”
Somebody at the company should own that envelope by name.
Apprehend too early and there is nothing to charge
Zucker Healy flagged a training problem that kills Illinois cases before they start. The standard is last point of sale: past the checkout counter, past the bathrooms, past the final barrier where there is no doubt the person has exited.
“A lot of times cases fall apart when retailers apprehend too quickly. It won’t even pass the probable cause hearing, which is not In New York, the case dies on a desk New York does not require a witness at a a huge threshold misdemeanor appearance. The retailer signs — Jennifer Zucker Healy, to pass.” a supporting deposition describing what happened, sends it back to the prosecutor, and the case proceeds. Easier, until it fails. “It gets mailed to a store,” DeLeo said. “A part-time employee receives it or just kind of throws it on a desk, and no one ever gets back to that prosecutor. So now a misdemeanor case with no supporting deposition signed, it has to be thrown out. That’s what the law says.” A case dies because a piece of paper landed on the wrong desk in a busy store.
Staff Attorney, ALTO
“A lot of times cases fall apart when retailers apprehend too quickly. It won’t even pass the probable cause hearing, which is not a huge threshold to pass.”
Grand jury is not what store teams think it is
New York felonies require testimony, and DeLeo says that is where the biggest breakdown happens on serious cases. Most
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of it is fear built on television. “They think it’s like Law & Order: SVU where they’re going to be in a little box testifying, which is completely opposite.” It is a closed proceeding, with
FALLS APART no outside counsel, no public and no defendant in the room. It also does not have to be the employee who witnessed the event. Any employee who, in the ordinary course of business, can testify to the video and to having seen the offender in the building will do.
Build the binder before the phone rings
Both attorneys landed independently on organization as the highest-leverage thing a retailer can do. DeLeo’s teams build binders with their stores: offender profiles from the AP system, police reports, everything in one place so a detective or prosecutor gets one package with no delay. “In New York, things move very fast until they move very slow,” he said. The start of a case moves fast and investigators want everything immediately. Once it reaches court it crawls. Zucker Healy’s list of what belongs in the file: every item documented individually rather than as miscellaneous merchandise, photographs, receipts showing retail value, preserved footage, the identified employee witness, and a police report for every incident, including the ones that feel too small to bother with. Retention windows matter here. Thirty days sounds generous until a case surfaces in week six. The police report is the piece most retailers skip. “If you don’t have a police report when he’s finally apprehended, the police really
can’t take that past incident into consideration in building a case.”
The law moved in retailers’ favor in New York
Until recently, New York’s ability to combine multiple small thefts into one felony charge rested on case law from 1941. Prosecutors had to prove a single intent, and defense attorneys knocked it down regularly. An amendment in the 2024 state budget changed that, and offenses can now be aggregated across multiple locations and charged as a felony.
“They think it’s like Law & Order: SVU where they’re going to be in a little box testifying, which is completely opposite.”
The pattern has to come from the retailer
— Raymond DeLeo, Staff Attorney, ALTO It matters because offenders know exactly where the line sits. Grand larceny in New York starts at $1,000, so they take $999 and come back tomorrow. “Now prosecutors are able to see that pattern, see that common scheme or plan, and say that this person comes in every day. This is their motive. This is their plan,” DeLeo said. He has watched it work: one docket number carrying eight or nine counts of petit larceny plus a grand larceny, indicted at $6,000 instead of $1,000.
In Illinois, the number depends on the election
Illinois makes retail theft a felony over $300. That is the statute. How aggressive-
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ly it gets charged depends on who holds the office. Under former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, the office ran an internal policy of approving felonies at $1,000 while the statute never moved. Eileen O’Neill Burke campaigned on getting tough on retail crime and brought the office back in line with the $300 statute. A second lever is worth knowing. An offender can be charged with a felony regardless of amount if they already have a prior misdemeanor conviction for retail theft. “It really depends on who’s in office,” Zucker Healy said, which is a reason to track elections in the counties where a chain operates.
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Prosecutors are increasingly receptive to pattern evidence, and Zucker Healy hands over criminal histories spanning years on offenders who have hit stores more than a hundred times. Law enforcement working a local case is not going to dig through every file looking for connections, and turnover means a case running for months may outlast the people who saw it happen. DeLeo named the ceiling on all of it. “Once it leaves the US, it’s very hard to track where the clothing goes.” Neither attorney made any of this sound easy. Both made the difference between a case that survives and one that does not sound like whether somebody kept good records. Scan to watch “Prosecution vs. Policy: Retail Crime in Reform-Driven States” a TalkLPnews / ALTO webinar!
TALKLPNEWS
INDUSTRY SIDEBAR
THE PRESENCE
STUFF
John Vautier on the Communication Skills Nobody Coaches You On. John Vautier coaches communication skills for a living, in a family business his dad started in 2004. He’s been doing it since 2011. He breaks executive presence into things you can actually control.
Eye contact Stop scanning the room. Scanning looks nervous and out of sorts. Instead, deliver one thought to one person, pause, shift your eyes to a new person, deliver the next thought. In a big room, do the same thing to sections. Back left gets a thought. Pause. Front right gets a thought. Pause.
On video, look at the lens Not the gallery. The moment your eyes drop to the bottom of the screen or slide to the right, your audience watches you disengage. Vautier keeps a bright sticky note behind his camera with a smiley face and two words: look here.
Your notes are fine Read them in silence, during your pause. Then look up and speak. Nothing has to be memorized, and memorized doesn’t sound authentic anyway.
Hands Use them. Above the waist if you’re standing, outside the body when you have the room. Open hands rather than pointing or fists. When you’re not gesturing, let them rest at your sides rather than clasping them in front of you, which reads as a barrier. On camera, keep them in roughly the bottom third of frame so they’re visible.
Posture You don’t have to move to be effective. Start balanced, weight even, and move only when you have a reason: to engage a section, to reference something, to facilitate. On video, remember the camera doesn’t move with you, so extra movement just reads as distraction.
Volume is the one everybody gets wrong On a scale of one to ten, most of us live at four to six, which is our one-to-one voice. Speaking to a group takes a seven or eight. It will feel uncomfortable. Vautier says that’s the point, and in fifteen years of coaching he has spent far more time getting people to turn it up than down.
UNSCRIPTED October 2026
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JOHN VAUTIER
Vice President of Sales, Vautier Communications john@vautiercommunications.com
The reason he pushes on volume is that it drags everything else along with it. Louder voices gesture more naturally. Inflection increases on its own. Articulation improves, because soft speakers mumble and blend words. And it forces you to slow down and breathe.
Pause instead of “um” Vautier’s claim is that ninety-plus percent of filler words land in transitions: between thoughts, between bullets, between slides, after a period. Get comfortable with
silence in those gaps and the ums have nowhere to go. The pause feels long to you. It doesn’t to the audience, and it gives them a second to absorb what you said.
On nerves He references a Simon Sinek clip about Olympic athletes, who get asked constantly whether they were nervous and consistently answer that they were excited. The physical signals are the same: racing heart, clammy hands, visualizing what’s ahead. Elite athletes learned to read those signals
as excitement rather than fear. Sinek tested it on himself during bad turbulence by saying out loud that it was exciting, and then used it before speaking to three thousand police chiefs. Adapted from the TalkLPnews webinar with John Vautier, Vautier Communications.
Find more real conversations, insights, and practical LP career advice at talklpnews.com
Three things Vautier wants you to remember when the nerves hit: 1 Your audience doesn’t
know what you haven’t told them and can’t read your mind. They only get what you give them.
2 They’re rooting for you.
Nobody in an audience wants to watch a speaker struggle.
3 If they can’t see it and
can’t hear it, it doesn’t exist. Steady eyes, active hands, balanced posture, elevated voice. All four of those mask the tells.
And Vautier’s acronym for when it goes sideways anyway: FAIL, meaning Fantastic Attempt In Learning. He’d rather you chase effectiveness than perfection, because he doesn’t think perfect exists in this. UNSCRIPTED October 2026
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Reveal the true cost of shrink.
Beyond Shrink a TalkLPnews Research Study
LP leaders can get money approved. What stops them is that the costs they deal with every day never get turned into numbers a CFO can use.
Scan below and read the full TalkLPnews Research Study. in partnership with
UNSCRIPTED October 2026
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TALKLPNEWS
SNEAK PEEK
BEYOND SHRINK The True Cost of Retail Crime.
TalkLPnews in partnership with
70%
of retail crime business cases built got approved
42 of 52 reported real impacts in three or four cost areas
21%
say their budget reflects what crime actually costs
WHAT’S INSIDE • • • • •
Seven findings on what retail crime costs beyond shrink, and what it takes to get it funded A confidence note on every finding, so you know how much weight to put on it What we chose not to publish, and why Where our numbers line up with the 2026 NRF and LPRC report Four things to do before you take a business case to your executives
THE SHORT VERSION • LP leaders can get money approved. Seven in ten of the retail crime business cases built in this survey got a yes. • What stops them is not executive resistance. It is that the costs they deal with every day never get turned into numbers a CFO can use. • The problem is arithmetic. And the single thing that separated an approved business case from a rejected one was how many executives were in the room.
THREE THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE READING THE FINDINGS We surveyed LP and AP executives, not the C-suite executives of their organizations. When this report says what a CFO objected to, that is the LP leader telling us what happened in the room. It is not the CFO speaking. We cannot break results out by retail segment. One pharmacy respondent and four big box respondents do not make a comparison. We have not published one. Where the numbers get small, we show the raw counts instead of percentages. Three out of ten is honest. Thirty percent, off ten answers, is not. Every finding below carries a note on how solid it is.
Get the full story by downloading the ‘Beyond Shrink’ TalkLPnews Research Study TODAY. UNSCRIPTED October 2026
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Wondering what fair compensation in the LP Industry looks like? Retail asset protection has a compensation visibility problem. No federal occupational code. No aggregator that can tell a corporate AP leader from a store-level manager. The 2026 TalkLPnews Compensation Snapshot is an industry-first step in supplying the instruments needed to start the LP compensation conversation.
Scan the QR code for the full survey!
Where LP Goes to Decide. UNSCRIPTED October 2026
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TALKLPNEWS
SNEAK PEEK
COMPENSATION SNAPSHOT A look at base salary, bonus structure and organizational design across six AP/LP roles in 2026.
$230,000 $172,500 median base salary, VP of AP/LP
median base salary, Director of AP/LP
1.4%
gap between our two independent sources at Director
WHAT’S INSIDE • • • • •
Median base salary and quartile ranges for six AP/LP roles A confidence rating on every figure, so you know what to cite and what not to Where public salary data agrees with practitioners, and where it collapses Bonus eligibility, reported targets, long-term incentives and car allowances Reporting lines, org headcount, budget bands, metrics and education requirements
RETAIL ASSET PROTECTION HAS A COMPENSATION VISIBILITY PROBLEM Retail asset protection has a compensation visibility problem. The federal government does not track these roles. Commercial salary aggregators cannot tell a corporate AP leader from a store-level AP manager. And the people best positioned to know, practitioners themselves, have never had a shared reference point to check their own numbers against. This report is an attempt to close part of that gap. The 2026 Snapshot has been built from two independent sources: 49 company-role observations across more than thirty named U.S. retailers, and a panel of senior AP/LP practitioners.
WHY THIS SNAPSHOT EXISTS There is no official benchmark for retail asset protection leadership pay, and this is not an oversight anyone can fix by looking harder. The Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains occupational codes for most of the American workforce. It has no code for retail AP/LP leadership. The two nearest classifications are “Managers, All Other”, with a mean annual wage of $153,890, and “First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers”, at a $54,580 median. The first is a catch-all spanning thousands of unrelated jobs. The second describes store-level security supervision. Neither describes a Vice President of Asset Protection at a $20 billion retailer, and no amount of interpolation between them produces a usable number.
Get the full picture, download the ‘2026 Compensation Snapshot’ TODAY. UNSCRIPTED October 2026
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UNSCRIPTED October 2026
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TALKLPNEWS
LP UNIVERSITY
GRAB YOUR
SMARTZ
Need to get smarter on AI, interviews, investigations, and all things LP? We’ve got you. TalkLPnews created quick, useful cheat sheets and guides built for busy loss prevention and asset protection pros who want practical takeaways. Check out resources like Your First 5 AI Prompts, the LP Pro’s AI Starter Kit, Red Flags You’re the Problem in the Interview Room, and more. We’re all about real tips, and easy to grab tools you can actually use.
Grab your Smartz now... It’s FREE, duh!
Visit the TalkLPnews University Get Smartz site at talklpnews.com/getsmartz/ UNSCRIPTED October 2026
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TALKLPNEWS
UPCOMING EVENTS OCTOBER 26-28, 2026 Join us for WSORCA 2026 in Oceanside, CA. Presented in partnership with FaceFirst by Gatekeeper Systems and WSORCA. Cutting-edge training focused on the evolving challenges of Organized Retail Crime.
REGISTER NOW!
NOVEMBER 9-12, 2026 The CLEAR 2026 conference features a comprehensive agenda addressing traditional Organized Retail Crime alongside the escalating threats of cargo theft and cyber incidents impacting the retail supply chain.
REGISTER TODAY!
JANUARY 11, 2027 There are lots of reasons to be in NYC during NRF! Here’s one more: On Monday night (1/11), the #lossprevention community is heading to the Rooftop again. TalkLPNYC returns with a reception full of industry leaders, solution partners, new connections, and conversations worth having.
RSVP NOW: January 11 - 5–8 p.m. UNSCRIPTED October 2026
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HEARD YOU
HEARD:
THE OTHER CAREER CATHERINE STASIOWSKI VP, Loss Prevention & Safety, Total Wine
Ballet dancer. Not hypothetically. She studied it professionally, moved away from home at fourteen for what was then the North Carolina School of the Arts, and then went to college and studied biology.
DAN PETROUSEK
TIM LAPINSKI
Senior VP of Asset Protection, Ulta Beauty
Small business owner, in hospitality. He loves to cook and to pair food and wine, but he’d keep that a hobby. What he actually wants is concierge guest service. “It’d be nice to be on the other end of that, to provide that service in a way that I know I like it.” Which, if you’ve listened to him talk about partnership, tracks perfectly.
PAUL JAECKLE
Divisional VP Enterprise Risk Management, Helzberg Diamonds
Vice President of Asset Protection, Meijer Stores
Law enforcement, like half this industry. The opportunity actually came up, but by then he was far enough up the private-side ladder that the step back didn’t make sense. “My dad is still heartbroken, I think, that I didn’t become a cop.”
Owner of a bar called The Precinct. Day job mowing highway medians for the state. No emails, no pressure, endless job security because the grass always grows.
BEST ADVICE, WORST ADVICE Best: It’s all about the batting average. From John Velke, as she moved into the VP seat. You won’t always win the argument or get the contract. Keep the average high.
Worst: Don’t go up against the CEO. She ignored it. — Catherine Stasiowski, Total Wine
The line he lives by comes from his leader: don’t ask, don’t get. If you don’t knock on the door, you never get the opportunity. And on ownership: “You own your own development. Nobody’s going to get there for you.”
— Dan Petrousek, Ulta Beauty
Best: Not a spoken thing at all. A boss who was willing to let him make mistakes and step in it, because those were the lessons that stuck. He notes it’s harder to do than to admire, because every instinct as a leader is to take the hit for your people. Worst: Also an action, not a sentence. A boss who tried to build his relationship with his operations partner by managing operations, on things he wasn’t an expert in. “We have to stay in our lane too.”
— Tim Lapinski, Helzberg Diamonds UNSCRIPTED October 2026
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INTRUSION DETECTION ACCESS CONTROL
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See what you’re missing marchnetworks.com vivotek.com UNSCRIPTED October 2026
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