The House passed it 348-60 in May and police groups are pushing the Senate — here’s what the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act would mean for LP teams. ☕ The Afternoon Coffee Break Read Organized retail crime has a prosecution problem: crews that steal in carefully calibrated amounts, across store locations and state lines, knowing…

Wardrobing, receipt fraud, and organized return abuse — what LP teams should watch at the return desk. ☕ The Afternoon Coffee Break Read Return fraud rarely looks like theft at the register. It looks like a polite customer with a smile and a receipt — which is exactly why it keeps growing while LP attention…

A new Interface Systems report puts hard numbers on alarm failures — and the police non-response risk hiding behind them. ☕ The Afternoon Coffee Break Read Your alarm goes off at 2 a.m. Nobody’s inside. The police roll, the keyholder gets out of bed, and everyone goes home. Annoying — but how much did that…

Shrink doesn’t start in December. The controls you fix in October decide how November goes. ☕ The Afternoon Coffee Break Read Shrink doesn’t start in December. By the time Black Friday arrives, seasonal staff are hired, the floor is reset, and whatever controls you fixed in October are the ones protecting your holiday numbers. The…

What shrink is, where it comes from, and the first five things to do about it. Shrinkage is the polite industry word for inventory that disappears without being sold. Every retailer has it. The difference between healthy businesses and struggling ones isn’t whether shrink exists — it’s whether anyone is measuring it and doing something…

Most stores have cameras. Far fewer have cameras that do any good. Walk into almost any retail store and you’ll see cameras on the ceiling. What you won’t see is whether anyone thought carefully about where they point, what they can actually resolve, or whether the footage is ever used for anything beyond post-incident review.…

Your biggest shrink risk isn’t walking through the front door — it’s already on the schedule. Ask most retail managers where their losses come from and they’ll point at shoplifters. The data tells a different story. Industry research has consistently shown that employee theft accounts for roughly a third of retail shrink — often more…

Boosters, fences, and online resale — how professional theft crews operate and what you can do about it. Shoplifting used to be a crime of opportunity: one person, one item, one bad decision. Organized retail crime is something else entirely. ORC is theft as a business — coordinated crews, planned targets, and resale channels that…

With Partner Tech’s Verifone Commander certification and Scandit’s loss-prevention debut, computer-vision theft detection is moving from pilot to standard equipment. Two announcements, one month apart, signal that AI-powered theft detection at self-checkout is graduating from pilot programs to mainstream retail infrastructure. If you run loss prevention, this is the moment to pay attention. Partner Tech…