Oct 27, 2026
•
4 min read
Australia is building court-issued exclusion orders for violent repeat offenders, state by state. The US relies on private lists. Some states already have the tool and almost nobody uses it.
Oct 20, 2026
Britain passed the retail crime law the US industry keeps asking for. Six months later it is still not in force, and the numbers moved anyway.
Canada publishes the national shoplifting series the US does not have. It shows theft rising alone while almost every other property crime falls.
Oct 6, 2026
The federal law written to choke off stolen-goods resale has produced a single enforcement case — about a missing telephone number.
Sep 29, 2026
Fourteen years after the strongest controlled trial in retail loss prevention, the evidence base for what this industry buys is thinner than the spend implies.
Sep 22, 2026
Shrink vanished from six of nine retail earnings calls this quarter. You are defending next year's budget in the one risk function with no published spend figure.
Sep 15, 2026
Amazon spent nine months trying to keep an AI agent off its store and lost. Nobody has written the rules for what happens next.
Sep 8, 2026
Cross-retailer offender databases now span 85,000 stores. No independent evaluation has ever shown they reduce loss.
Sep 1, 2026
Peak concentrates the exposure onto the smallest seasonal workforce since 2009 — and the count that would tell you what it cost happens twice a year.
Aug 26, 2026
Three years of ORC legislation, record enforcement, and improving shrink — and nobody can connect them.
Aug 18, 2026
Gift card draining is organized, federal, and growing 25% a year. It appears nowhere in your loss reporting — by design.
Aug 10, 2026
NRF killed the shrink survey and replaced it with a theft and violence report. Nobody told the audit committee.
Aug 4, 2026
Cargo theft losses rose 60% on flat volume. Six in ten retailers don't count any of it as shrink.
Jul 28, 2026
3 min read
Edition #13 — 1.2 million demand letters a year. Fewer than ten lawsuits. A court called it extortion.
Jul 21, 2026
Edition #12 — Returns fraud runs USD 76–101 billion a year, several times the ORC number. It reports to nobody.
Jul 14, 2026
Edition #11 — The vendor's own patents put the cost of locked cases at 25–50% of sales. Nobody reports that line.
Jul 7, 2026
Edition #10 — Self-checkout was a labor decision. The loss data arrived eight years late.
Jun 30, 2026
Edition #09 — Why the number AP reports up the chain is not the number that matters
Jun 23, 2026
Edition #08 — Who funds the studies your business case is built on
Jun 17, 2026
Edition #07 — The surveillance apparatus AP built is becoming the lawsuit AP defends
Jun 9, 2026
5 min read
Edition #06 — Eaten from below. Capped in the middle. Closed at the top.
Jun 2, 2026
Edition #05 — Why retail employee theft has $26B of investigation behind it and employer wage theft has almost none
May 26, 2026
Edition #04 — Why returns just ate the loss prevention conversation
May 12, 2026
Edition #02 — When the earnings call and the operating floor tell different stories
May 5, 2026
Edition #01 — Why loss prevention moved from the back room to the boardroom
