I Went Inside America’s Top Lab to Prevent Shoplifting. It Was More Revealing Than I Could Have Imagined.

They call it “Justin’s General Store,” and in theory, there is no place on Earth harder to steal from. Every item sits beneath a chandelier of cameras. The clothes are tagged with sensors that screech or squirt ink, the baby formula sits on shelves that actively monitor weight fluctuations, the razor blades hang on kinked display hooks, and the Tide Pods are incarcerated behind various plexiglass cases, under lock and key. It is the future of retail, and it’s all in one place at the University of Florida. “Nobody in the world has this complete of capability,” Dr. Read Hayes told me. Dr. Hayes is the executive director of the Loss Prevention Research Council and the steward of America’s leading lab to prevent shoplifting, located in muggy Gainesville, Florida. It’s not just Justin’s, the simulated store, with its unparalleled density of anti-shoplifting technologies. Dr. Hayes has made all of campus’s Innovation Square into a live testing ground. Even the surrounds are landscaped with solar-powered towers running cameras, detectors, and more. Also, there is Spanish moss. I parked in the lot and marched to the second floor of Innovation Square’s Innovate Hub. Lest I get any ideas, I was told that the facility had license-plate scanners—parking lot design is one of the many concerns of the LPRC—so staffers would’ve seen the arrival of any criminal element from far away. I was driving a rental, but point taken. Dr. Hayes is best known as the man who brought the scientific method to shoplifting studies—no ideology, just cold, hard facts and figures. Nowhere is there a higher concentration of theft-thwarting tech and thief-busting research. The LPRC does it all: It gathers the reports, it tests out the technology, it grills the criminals, and it recommends the solutions. It even produces the data that says there’s a problem in the first place. All this not a moment too soon, because America, as we all know, is in the midst of a shoplifting crisis. As such, it was hard to find a quiet moment in Dr. Hayes’ schedule to meet. Soon enough, he’d said, he would be off to Bentonville, Arkansas, for the LPRC’s Supply Chain Protection Summit, hosted by Walmart, and then to a virtual product protection summit, and then to a summit on violent crime. For now, we were in the LPRC conference room, where a U-shaped conference table faced a television screen. On it appeared the logos of seemingly every retail company in the country: Walmart and Amazon and Ikea and Dollar General and Kroger and Tractor Supply Company and Publix and Verizon—190 in all. They are dues-paying members of the LPRC, Dr. Hayes told me, and all of them pony up thousands of dollars a year. “It’s a bargain for them,” he joked, given the depth of information he and his team provide. On one wall hung the names of the “Innovate Advisory Panel,” the most active retail participants. On the adjoining wall hung the names of the “solution partners,” the companies that make the loss-prevention tech on display in the lab, the new-age weaponry in the war on “shrink,” the industry’s preferred coinage for the problem. There were 171 of those, also dues-paying. Plus, now, restaurants. At last count, there were over 200,000 stores in the LPRC’s fast-growing private-policing network. In the conference room, the brain trust meets. The vice president of Sam’s Club and her team had just been in. The retailers bring their problems, their grainy footage, their upsetting tales. The solution partners convey their wares. Dr. Hayes and team ingest it all, and science commences. In-house loss-prevention teams from various retailers can come and test out the technologies in a judgment- and sales-free zone and decide how best to arm themselves to stop loss. Of course, like any eager upstart, I was hankering to get into the high-powered hardware. Even the conference room overflowed with it. But before I was ready for that, before we could talk numbers, we needed to talk coinages. I had to learn the language of stopping lifting. Many were Dr. Hayes’ own inventions. First was the Bowtie Model. A bow-tie sticker was placed handily at each conference table seat. The model was hugely important, I was told. The left side of the bow tie was blue, split into vertical quadrants, each section a lighter shade, left to right, as it approached the knot. The right side was red, trending darker through all four vertical stripes. Dr. Hayes walked me through the bow tie: Shoplifters, on the road to stealing, progress through a color-coded countdown to crime. Zone 5, he told me, the far left of the bow tie, represented “the parking lot, or even online.” That was midnight blue. Zone 4 was in front of the store. It was navy or so. Zone 3 was inside the store. Cerulean, let’s say. Zone 2 was in the aisle, soft blue. And Zone 1, that was crime time. It was gray. It was also called “at bang.” The right side of the bow tie—Reds 2, 3, 4, and 5—were the same stages in reverse, as the criminal takes the item from shelf to aisle to store to the parking lot and home. 5, 4, 3, 2—1, crime, bang—then 2, 3, 4, 5. The left the approach, the right the escape. Nine zones in all. “Affect. Detect. Connect,” read the bow tie sticker, which I was encouraged to keep. I would be quizzed on this later, in the field. There would be more coinages to come. On one wall hung a neon sign that read “WHAT IF?” Where did that come from? I asked. “That’s just us,” Dr. Hayes said. “I bought it online.” There was a rack of white lab coats, in sizes ranging from small to XL. Dr. Hayes’ father was a medical doctor; he holds a Ph.D. in criminology from the University of Leicester, in England. There was no medical research going on in the LPRC, Dr. Hayes told me, and no medical doctors on staff, but the dues-paying visitors liked to wear the coats when they visited, just to get in the spirit of scientific research. “We take photos with the lab coats on,” Dr. Hayes said. “The young energy, wearing lab coats—they love it,” he said of the retailers. It was tradition. Also, one time, an intern took to wearing one in the office because he was cold. More colorful language critical to know: red/green. A civilian shopper, infraction-free, was green. But once they snatched something: red. This was easy enough to remember—on the red side of the bow tie, someone was “red.” On the blue side, “green.” Dr. Hayes helped found the LPRC in 2000 to attempt to solve many problems afflicting loss prevention. One such problem was the lack of distinction in the space. While the top criminologists were being spirited away by the allure of cracking white-collar crime, which paid more, no one wanted to do the yeoman’s work of stopping boosters, which, at least at the entry level, married life-threatening risk with near-minimum-wage pay. The establishment of the LPRC was a big first step toward going legit. A year later came Loss Prevention Magazine—now celebrating its 25th anniversary—and a whole industry was on its way to the big time. Another problem to tackle was the lack of organization. Each company had its own shop cops, its own loss-prevention strategies, all balkanized, all alone. Meanwhile, the criminals were organized. This was no Jean Valjean and his loaf of bread, I was told. These guys were hitting all different stores, selling on the world’s largest pawnshop, aka the internet, raking it in. The LPRC was the first chance to get all those corporations—victims—in one room together and level the playing field. Organization is a game two can play. Dr. Hayes isn’t just a scientist; he is a student of history. In one corner of the conference room, in fact, was the Loss Prevention Museum, glass display cases featuring the quaint technologies of yore. Handcuffs, and security-agent badges, and a polygraph kit in a briefcase. Stuff from back when there were store detectives and they would chase and detain suspects. These days, few companies would pay for that labor, or for the insurance necessary to allow staff to rough up a suspect. Also, there was Dr. Hayes’ seminal first book, Retail Security and Loss Prevention. But that was then. Now everything was high-tech and accelerating quickly. A.I. was all over this field already, and soon to be more. The Bowtie Model wasn’t all that Dr. Hayes had come up with, nor were zones of influence, nor the red/green assessment. He also coined the mantra “See, Get, Fear,” for when shoplifters don’t shoplift because they are scared by a surveillance technology that may or may not work. Which also counts, he told me, as deterrence, even if there isn’t much proof that it deters. “You can’t prove a negative,” he reminded me, which is true. And even if you’ve never heard the name Dr. Hayes, maybe you know his most famous contribution by far: He was the guy, he told me, who came up with organized retail crime, a pervasive and influential term that explains a lot of what you see in your local drugstore these days. Organized retail crime was on the lips of retailers and cops and politicians everywhere, a menace, unstoppable. (A 2008 New Yorker piece on retail crime seems to attribute the concept to King Rogers, a former head of loss prevention at Target. Did Dr. Hayes boost it? Well, the two men worked together in the past, so let’s not get hung up on specifics.) The University of Florida was impressed with Dr. Hayes’ work, conferring administrative support and office space. The retailers were impressed, their ranks growing. One city west of the Mississippi whose name Dr. Hayes wasn’t licensed to disclose was impressed—it was about to seal a deal with the LPRC to do some sort of private policing initiative. International surveillance firms, from exotic lands like Ireland, were setting up in Florida to get close to the LPRC’s lab. Dr. Hayes had grown the staff from just a few researchers to two dozen. Next to the museum was a giant white box, with the dimensions of a changing room or a porta potty. “Experience the future of retail,” it read across the top. It was an A.I.-infused sales tool with hologram technology, Dr. Hayes explained. When it powered up, a hologram of Howie Mandel would spring to life, and we would be subject to the cutting edge in salesmanship. But Dr. Hayes wasn’t sure how to turn it on. No need—I was already sold. I was conversant in the language. Now I was ready to see the lab. From the moment I arrived at the LPRC, it was clear that I would not be walking out with anything. I would not be boosting, lifting, swiping, nicking, pinching, jacking, pocketing, rack-raiding, or any of the like. Certainly, I would not filch, would not pilfer, would not purloin. There would be no five-finger discount, and my fingers would not become sticky. Even if I were feeling British, which I was not, beneath the unstinting sun of Gainesville, I would not be trousering or half-inching. I would not graze, and I most assuredly would not be engaged in organized retail crime. Shoplifting: a major issue. There wouldn’t be so many words for it if there weren’t a lot of people doing it. And in these United States, the American people are doing it a lot and more than ever, or so it is said. Shoplifting losses are up a staggering 93 percent since before COVID-19, according to one report that some would dispute. American corporations lost $112 billion to shoplifting in 2022, according to another report that some would dispute. These are record figures. It is an epidemic, say retailers. Nay, it is a social collapse. So bad is the problem that we don’t even know how bad the problem is, in fact. Prosecutors—woke, hemmed in by criminal-justice reform—won’t prosecute it. The police—underfunded, understaffed, discouraged—are so powerless to stop it they don’t show up when the calls come in, which means retailers have just stopped calling. So there isn’t a legal record of the extent of the issue, which is nevertheless worse than you can imagine. Politicians of both parties, who agree on nothing else, know this is so.

Read the full report at Slate ↗