I didn’t come to retail technology from a spreadsheet or a boardroom. I came to it from the shop floor. I spent years in stores, so I never saw loss prevention as a slide in a deck. I’ve seen it as something you live through, shift after shift.
I’ve had, like many retail managers, a lot of abuse thrown my way. I’ve been recorded, screamed at, and threatened. As someone in a leadership position you have to be extremely calm under pressure especially when you’re the one everyone turns to for guidance. You also learn to hold two things in your head at once: this person is doing something wrong, and there’s usually a deeper reason behind it. That doesn’t excuse theft, but it does shape how you treat the human being in front of you.
That tension — what’s right and what’s wrong, and why some people get away with it while others don’t — is what interests me the most about trying to find a solution to the problem.
Don’t Put Yourself In Danger
Companies are constantly moving forward, but colleagues, through no fault of their own, don’t always get brought along at the same pace. The pace being where the business is heading and what they are doing to fix the problem. I made a point, even as a young manager, of deciphering what was working and what wasn’t, rather than just adding to the noise.
What I learnt is that passion is contagious. When a store team genuinely believes in what they’re doing, they’ll do their very best. I had colleagues who would put themselves in harm’s way to save stock. That instinct comes from caring, and it’s the same instinct that makes someone good at this job. It also has to be managed carefully. The rule is that you don’t put yourself in danger over stock, and that’s the right rule. But it collides with a real human drive to do the right thing.
And here’s where it stops being abstract. In San Mateo, California, a Safeway employee was fired after 22 years for trying to stop someone walking out with about $500 of goods; a judge later ruled she had committed no misconduct at all. In Colorado, King Soopers dismissed an employee, Santino Burrola, after he simply filmed a thief in the act. And Lowe’s fired 68-year-old Donna Hansbrough, who took a black eye confronting shoplifters, and only rehired her once the public backlash became too loud to ignore.
Look at those stories together and you see the same impossible bind every time. The colleague believed they were doing the right thing. The company, protecting its people from harm, believed it was too. Both are right, and that’s exactly the problem. When the only tools you hand a colleague are their own eyes and their own nerve, sooner or later somebody gets hurt, or gets fired, for caring too much. Good loss prevention should make heroics unnecessary. It should catch the theft without ever asking a person to put their body, or their livelihood, on the line.
Why the store experience matters at FOCAL
Having worked at a few retailers I have been able to see how differently each company handles the same global problem that we face when it comes to theft. In some, an associate is the front line. In others, there’s a dedicated loss prevention manager who takes the investigation off your plate entirely.
Something I love about our team of consultants at Focal is that we all came from an in-store background. The team has a combined 64 years of in store experience. You would struggle to do the job we do now if you hadn’t stood at that door yourself. When we talk to retailers about technology, we’re not guessing what a bad day looks like. We’ve had it. That lived experience is fundamental to how we build and sell our vision, and honestly, it’s the difference I’ve seen between technology that actually fits a store and technology that doesn’t.
Where Theft Spotter fits, and where it doesn’t
Technology isn’t here to remove people. You’ll always need a physical presence at the door, and you’ll always need someone looking after the technology, because it isn’t perfect. Anyone promising that AI makes store colleagues redundant hasn’t spent enough time in a store.
What Theft Spotter does is come at the problem from a different angle. Think about CCTV for a moment. Even good camera systems don’t cover everything. In my experience, at least half the time I went to check footage, the angle was wrong, I couldn’t see a face, or I couldn’t even make out what had been taken. Not every grocery store is fully covered, and the ones that are, still have blind spots.
That’s the gap. Rather than sending a colleague to traipse through hours of CCTV only to hit a dead end, Theft Spotter can recognise when something has left the shelf and help pinpoint the moment it happened, down to the day and minute. It sees the moment stock disappears from a shelf without a corresponding sale, then alerts the loss prevention team with the time, date and item — telling normal shopping, restocking and shelf work apart from the events that actually matter. Focal’s own grocery clients have more than doubled their rate of theft identification with a fraction of the effort. It saves time, it eases the load on stretched teams, and it works alongside the CCTV and the security presence, not instead of them. When you think about the classics, the coffee, the chocolate, the alcohol that walk out the door again and again, being able to focus attention where it’s actually needed is a genuine step forward.
There’s a lot more this technology can do and I’m looking forward to carrying forward the development and learning within this forward thinking business. If we go back to what we have right now, this works well but it doesn’t replace the person at the door; it has their back. It does the watching no human can do across every shelf, every hour of the day, so our people can spend their judgment where it counts and never have to choose between their safety and their job. That, to me, is the whole point of building this in the hands of people who have actually worked the floor.
Supporting the People Who Show Up
It’s about supporting the people who show up every day who sometimes have to deal with the difficult, and occasionally the frightening. At FOCAL, we build for those people because we’ve been those people. That’s what “Vision Driven Performance” means to me: technology that sees more, so the humans in the store can do what only humans can.
I am honoured to be the first in a series where, in future pieces, my colleagues will share their own stories from the floor as there is plenty more where that came from.
