One talk was by audio link because of the blocked air travel due to the Icelandic volcano ash: by Brand L Elverston, Walmart director, asset protection systems and analyses.
The US supermarket chain wants to go beyond what it terms 1980s technology – such as EAS (electronic article surveillance). It wants new thinking – and is looking to go beyond traditional manufacturers to get it. Elverston’s talk amounted to an assault on technologies such as EAS that he described as ‘customer-obstructive’. He questioned for example use of ‘liquour locks’, tags on a bottle of alcohol that the cashier has to take off at the till, taking time. “We have to do some soul-searching,” he said. “Are we doing right by the honest customer? We can do better than this.” He suggested recruiting what he called non-traditional suppliers, think tanks, academia, start-ups, and manufacturers in the US military sector, that may be able to do things differently. Elverston hinted at resistance from the traditional manufacturers. Does every store need CCTV and EAS, he wondered aloud. Or, do video games have to be in locked showcases – even though they are high-theft products? Honest customers do not want to wait for a member of staff to unlock the cabinet before they read the back of the box and decide whether to buy. What does the customer expect? Elverston asked: “Sometimes we don’t consider at all.” He suggested a focus on customers, and no-hassle shopping, rather than the ‘gotcha’, adrenalin ‘thrill of the kill’ apprehending of shoplifters.
As Elverston, a former US Army man admitted, traditional LP has relied on apprehending thieves, whether customer or employee. Recruits into LP have mainly been law enforcers rather than from other parts of retail, such as logistics or merchandising. So LP may not be truly aligned with corporate goals; and may concentrate on shrink and not so much on profit. Stores classified as high-theft may have goods behind locked mesh cages, a solution to shrinkage yet ugly-looking and making it difficult for customers. Elverston in effect questioned the established technologies such as EAS and CCTV, provided by large manufacturers for the last few decades: “We have a tremendous amount of data; but not so much actionable intelligence … there is no central pool of data.” Hence recent efforts by WalMart to fuse these independent data sources, whether from inventories, investigations, or CCTV, to name three. That way the retailer can decide which sources of data are most important for asset protection; and what the company’s liabilities are. A sign of just how enormous WalMart is came when Elverston spoke of wanting to be able to analyse trends – so that new technology might only go in some stores – perhaps ‘only’ 1500 of the chain’s 3700 – to maximise the return on investment. By looking into all parts of its business – supply chain, pricing, refunds – and identifying the ‘shrink opportunities’, the company may be able to give a specification for a product that the user wants. Here Elverston hinted that some US retailers may standardise their process reviews, towards common specs for manufacturers. As Elverston said, the big retailers whether WalMart or Tesco look differently in-store to how they did, even ten years ago; yet loss prevention responses have been about the same since the late 1970s, Elverston claimed – EAS for example has changed very little, and CCTV only tells you what has happened. As he put it: “It still goes ding at the door,” and you don’t know what product is going out of the door when. EAS and CCTV are visible deterrents, but is that the environment you want for the honest customer? WalMart is looking at biometrics; and image recognition products to tackle ‘bottom of the basket’ theft, of customers walking out with items in their basket not paid for, intentionally or not. Also, video analytics, and the integration of digital recording with point of sale, and data mining.
