Supermarket retailers, vulnerable to theft both from within and without, are turning to a wide variety of technologies to both proactively prevent theft and to capture and help prosecute criminals when theft does occur.

Today, digital video surveillance systems, some Web-based for remote monitoring and some integrated with point-of-sale (POS) and/or electronic article surveillance (EAS) systems, are making it possible for retailers to deter and to identify incidents of internal and external theft, as well as to increase surveillance within high-shrink-rate stores.

Also, the latest automated “smart” electronic article surveillance systems, in the form of new “electronic” fixtures, have the potential to deter both everyday shoplifters and organized retail criminals; and a six-month-old centralized network-based communication, monitoring and tracking tool, LERPnet, is helping retailers and law enforcement agents track individuals who commit organized retail crimes (ORCs).

The National Retail Federation estimates that retail losses due to organized criminals who steal large amounts of product from a store, moving swiftly from store to store and region to region, are approaching $30 billion a year.

“By combining our information through the online LERPnet database, retailers and law enforcement can develop comprehensive action plans that specifically target ORC groups,” said Joseph LaRocca, NRF's vice president of loss prevention. LERPnet is the acronym for the Law Enforcement Retail Partnership Network.

According to Food Marketing Institute's 2007 Supermarket Security and Loss Prevention study, whose full findings are being released this month, the median value for supermarket shrink in calendar year 2006 was 1.52% of sales, down from 1.69% in 2005 and 2% in 2004.

The largest contributor to shrink, the study found, was employee theft at 38.6% (it was 38.1% in the 2005 study), followed by shoplifting at 31.5% (down from 35.3% in the 2005 study) and vendor theft at 9.2% (up from 8.8%), while the rest, 20.7%, was attributed to other miscellaneous causes such as waste (vs. 18.1% in 2005).

Executives from 47 retail and wholesale companies representing 8,893 stores responded to this year's survey.

In the 2005 National Retail Security Survey, implemented by Richard Hollinger of the University of Florida, Gainesville, the average shrink rate in supermarkets was reported to be even higher than the FMI estimates, at 2.38% of total sales, compared with 1.59% of total sales for the retail industry in general.