The Target forensics lab (2024) (opens in new tab)

Democratising the Mission Impossible fake face technique.

If you go to a store and note the security camera locations one thing that is obvious is most of them are pointed at the employees.

Except at my store where internal shrink is dominated by me throwing things.

That definitely brings an experience from college into focus for me. We were cleaning out the back room and came across a luggage set that had slipped behind some shelves and was missed for like 3 years. It was originally priced at $400 but was so old or was clearanced at $40. I bought it, thanking my lucky stars that we had luggage for our upcoming honeymoon.

About a week later, loss prevention called me in and asked me a ton of questions about the luggage and how it came to be behind the shelves. It was before I worked there so I had no idea. The whole thing seemed weird to me at the time. Now it makes sense. Wild.

In a sort of reverse of that story, back when my teenage son was working at Target, my wife asked me to get a vacuum cleaner. So I went to the Target webpage and found a mid-range model, and texted my son to buy it and bring it home after his shift. He came home and said the only one left was the display model but that he got it for me.

The next day, security called him in to the office, which freaked him out a little, of course. They asked him why he had bought that vacuum cleaner. He said I'd asked for it. They then all laughed, and told him that it was a commonly stolen model and they were using it as a honey pot. When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood. It was always the dad causing problems. And they sent him back to work.

>The hardest to catch are the slight of hand employees that can take money from the safe while it looking like they put all the money in. This is even with cameras watching the safe.

I've read about this in Vegas, where there are people who can palm the the chips so quickly that they weren't able to discern it on 30fps cameras (they had upgraded to 120fps, I think). Didn't know if it was the sort of bullshit people like that like to tell stories about without any evidence or not.

Once you get walked into the room and the folks on the other side of the table start into the Wicklander-Zulawski[1] playbook… it’s game over.

“Take a seat, the door is unlocked and you can leave at any time.”

[1] https://www.w-z.com/private-sector/

I think part of the fixation on "shoplifting" is that a Reddit video showing someone walking in and filling up a bag of merchandise viscerally gets people going in a way that "statistics about wage theft," "invisible employee-caused shrinkage," and "process/control failures" doesn't get people hot-and-bothered.

People will get mad because they visually saw someone steal a tube of toothpaste, but not care about other forms of mass-theft because it's not on YouTube.

> Its ironically more paranoid than working in the financial industry.

Having owned a liquor store for a while, it's not paranoia. The majority of the people you can get to work low end retail jobs will try to rip you off in any way they can.

Criminally minded employees are bad for the bottom line in retail.

Criminally minded employees are good for the bottom line in finance.

The firms in question will filter accordingly.

Great point! I know some pretty advanced statistical analysis is used in my friend's case to detect anomalies in ordering, shipping, etc.

I can actually comment on this a bit as I ran an eBay business during college selling second-hand clothes. A lot of it is about volume and brand. For example, women made up a majority of our sales even if it was men's clothing. Certain brands like Nike, Polo sold better & having hundreds of items up vs. just one and having 5 stars. All of that combined allowed us to sell items daily.

That signin via device is hilarious because it didn't work the last time I was there; the lady had to find someone else who could sign in for her because her device wasn't connecting or something.

I'm sure you meant the code was changing periodically, but now I'm expecting some pseudo-cyberpunk "rapidly spinning barcode" authenticator to show up in a movie...

Turnover dominates margins as a factor in physical retail profitability.

a) that puts an upper cap on how much it makes sense to spend on theft prevention (notably target does not indicate how much money it spends on such activities)

B) such activities can reduce revenues in the first place. For example I don’t even bother going to retailers because they have so many obstacles with locked cabinets that online shopping is just a smoother experience.

Most because it’s hard to quantify how much money they don’t earn because we refuse to shop there due to everything being locked up

The markup is around 30% or higher on each item (or at least that was the case back when I last studied business)

I get there are overheads but that’s spread across all products and supermarkets have a lot of products.

So you’d still have to have a lot of theft in a supermarket before you get close to a dent in those 2% margins.

Edit: as an aside, this is also why high value items such as alcohol are usually at the back of the store. It’s easier to identify and catch someone stealing if they’ve attempted to conceal a product for the entirely length of the shop.

there is. but you'll probably have to force the issue.

Specifically they wait until it's enough to charge with felony theft.

Thats the risk right. If a cashier makes a mistake and doesn't scan and item, nothing happens. If you make the same mistake, you could be hauled off to jail, prosecuted, lose your job. Why put yourself through that risk. Its common enough, that its probably happened to you that a cashier has missed a scan.

On the flip side, you could also sue and win lots of money. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/us/walmart-shoplifting-la...

It's impossible to prove or falsify of course but lower cost to them from having to pay fewer cashiers in theory shows up for the customers in lower prices. The other benefit is self checkout usually crams more lanes into a smaller area so you can checkout more quickly than waiting for the 2 lanes at best I'd often see staffed outside of peak seasons before self checkout.

I can check out faster by rarely having to queue for the register, and I can scan things faster than a tired bored retail worker and know it's accurate. Self-checkout is also much less likely for me to catch a cold/flu/etc. as I'm neither in close proximity to the employee who was in close proximity to every other customer that week, and is touching every one of my items after touching every other customers' items. And, I can bag the goods the way I want them bagged, either for easier carrying, cold items together, or for how I want it organized to un-bag at home.

So, I consider self-checkout a real plus, not them stealing my labor. The exception is when the system is ill-designed or ill-tuned, so it halts and I'm effectively debugging it for them, except nothing is fixed b/c the employee just logs in and waves it through. With that exception, I still much prefer self-checkout.

The payment for me is in not having to wait in line behind 3 different people who are buying 100 items each, and are using many different coupons.

I would pay more for self check out since I am much faster than the employees ever are and I value that more than extra cash.

17 an hour except at a few high CoL stores.

Pointing the beeping raygun is actually pretty fun

It's not tangential; it speaks to the editorial process or lack thereof at this publication that they couldn't catch a misspelling of a major American city. It casts the entire article in doubt.

Definitely talking about Houston.