Outsmarting the thieves

Like the overwhelming majority of people, I was taught that stealing was wrong an early age—courtesy of mom, my teachers and the occasional lecture from the nuns in Catechism class.

But on a recent visit to ADT’s Anti-Shoplifting Technology Testing Center in Boca Raton, Fla. it was enlightening to think like a thief—if only for a day—and interact with people whose job it is to catch the bad guys stealing from stores.

If you’ve shopped in a department store, you’ve seen ADT’s security tags on high-end clothing and other items.

But supermarkets are increasingly getting hit by thieves as well, with expensive cuts of meats, baby formula and vitamins among the items sought after by amateur shoplifters and Organized Retail Crime (OCR) rings alike. These items present more of a challenge when it comes to outfitting them with security tags.

To combat these crimes, ADT has been developing security technology that can be embedded in the soaker pads on meat trays and FDA-approved tags that can be dropped into vitamin bottles at the point of manufacture.  “One of the challenges in supermarkets is that you don’t want the security device to reduce the amount of shelf space available,” explained Lee Pernice, director of retail marketing for ADT Security Services.

They’ve also been working to combat internal theft, another problem when it comes to shrink. They introduced NaviView, an integrated video analytics tool tied to the Sensormatic Analytics NaviStor Point of Sale (POS) solution, which will be available in early spring.  Integrating video with POS transaction monitoring helps reduce the investigative timeline associated with internal theft by leveraging the power of statistically based exception reporting and digital video.