The Steal (26 page)

But stores keep installing more and more powerful cameras. Remote feeds connected to camera networks allow security cells, sometimes located hundreds of miles away from the stores, to monitor what is going on, and if appropriate, to initiate action. I visited a busy one in west Des Moines that resembled Batman’s cave, complete with a metal roll-down screen installed in the event of a terrorist attack.

Jay Stanley, the director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union, predicted that as stores train more and more cameras on shoppers and shoplifters, the result will “lead to a Wild West environment legal system.”

Cameras initially became necessary because in 1982, Earlest J. Carter, a mostly self-taught engineer from Chicago, figured out a way to beat electronic article surveillance. Carter designed a booster bag—a shopping bag lined with material to resist radio waves and foil sensor tags. Carter lined his bag with tritium, a mildly active isotope used in nuclear fuels and illuminated watch faces, and advertised it in a local alternative weekly for $110. The ad caught the attention of the police. The alternative weekly declined to run a second ad; the retail industry defamed Carter, and the national media cast him as a criminal. According to Carter, the FBI and the Department of Energy investigated him. Tritium is a controlled substance.

After that retail stores diversified their antishoplifting strategies. “Benefit denial devices” “demotivated” shoplifters before they stole as opposed to catching them afterward and gave stores legal relief from false-arrest lawsuits after multitudes of people were caught with EAS. The most successful of these, the ink tag, threatened to spurt ink all over shoplifters if removed. Department stores across the country piped in sentences like “I am honest. I will not steal. If I do steal I will be caught and sent to jail” through teenybopper lyrics and Muzak. An academic named David Riccio tried to sell his version of a subliminal antishoplifting tool based on sounds. “Which is more impactful—the words ‘a baby is crying’ or a baby crying?” he asked, adding, à la
The Manchurian Candidate
, that he aimed to turn a store into “an environment that people are apt to not have an immoral thought in,” by interpolating church bell chimes and choirs.

Civil restitution, whereby shoplifters paid stores in lieu of being prosecuted, caught on. As did closed-circuit television (CCTV), which would shortly upgrade from analog cameras to digital ones, allowing loss prevention agents to sweep a wider footage. In some stores, so-called mystery, honesty, or secret shoppers pretended to browse while waiting to catch thieves, whereas in others uniformed—and sometimes armed—store detectives stood by. Nearly every retail company switched from the onerous (and often unsuccessful) process of training salespeople to attach antitheft tags in the store to “source tagging”—attaching the tags to products at factories in Asia and Mexico where they were manufactured.

“Aggressive hospitality,” a phrase used to describe sales associates chirping “hello,” supposedly thwarts shoplifters’ attempts to steal. “If you see a young lady in Department 46 stealing or trying to steal some lip gloss, use ‘aggressive hospitality’ to help drive her someplace else,” said J. P. Suarez, the former director of Assets Protection at Walmart, on a 2006 staff training video. But as Gregor Housdon, the Walmart LP agent, noted, aggressive hospitality isn’t appropriate for all employees. “Senior citizens, they don’t get paid for hassling with the dude,” he said, referring to his company’s practice of relying on septuagenarian cashiers to double as loss prevention agents.

The retail industry justified these enhanced measures by saying that legally, it is harder to prove shoplifting than other types of theft: The burglar never has the right to be in anyone’s home but her own, the bank robber should never be in the bank, but the shoplifter strolls through the store, a private building, passing as a customer. Yet like capital punishment, transportation, psychoanalysis, shame, civil restitution, the ink tag, subliminal messaging, and CCTV, aggressive hospitality has failed to stop shoplifting.

Since the advent of the Internet, it is easier for ordinary people to see how much shoplifting is going on. When I plugged the word “shoplifting” and the time frame “one week, 1988” into the LexisNexis newspaper database, two or three hundred newspaper stories came up—from a policeman shoplifting nutrition bars in a New Jersey convenience store to a kleptomaniac shoplifting designer purses from a luxury mall in Singapore. But the tsunami of shoplifters was not just a mirage created by technology. According to the Department of Commerce, between 1980 and 1994, an era of unprecedented financial growth (the go-go years), shoplifting offenses swelled 50 percent.

I spent many hours in online news archives reading about shoplifting in the 1980s and 1990s. Shoplifters who got a lot of attention in this era captured the tension between the personal drama they relived while stealing and their larger-than-life criminal exploits. Since then, as the economy has foundered, and as Americans scramble to get into the middle class, some shoplifters resell enormous quantities of LEGOs or
Star Wars
paraphernalia. Others shoplift and hoard tiny, unusable items. The financial boat that lifted many Americans left a lot of people behind, stealing.

 

 

Pressed for the secrets of distinguishing between shoppers and shoplifters, LP agents retreated to fatalism. Some cited the “80-10-10 rule”: 10 percent of the people will never steal from you, 10 percent always will, and 80 percent will if given the chance. Or they slid into banalities: Shoplifters carried shopping bags from other stores, wore sunglasses, hats, or dirty shoes. “You can tell they’re about to steal if they have shifty eyes,” one LP agent said. Or, as it is known in the lexicon, “thrown eyes.”

Mismatching of knockoffs and luxury clothing might also be a warning sign for shoplifting, LP agents told me: bad shoes and a blue pinstripe suit; a Chanel-swathed woman in costume jewelry. And then there is the sixth sense. “A lotta academic stuff doesn’t prepare you for that,” said an LP agent who sneered at a college education as a prerequisite for the job. “Sometimes people who are too good in school are not good defenders of evil,” he said, recalling one colleague who “was working part time and he aspired to be a police officer and he only bagged two shoplifters a month, whereas the rest of us were in the double digits.” He said of another colleague, “If you gave her an SAT, she’d flunk, but she had this radar.”

The closest thing LP agents have to a method is the “six-step rule,” first popularized in 1992. Here are the six “tells” an LP agent should witness before detaining a shoplifter.

1. You must see the suspect approach the merchandise.

2. You must see the suspect take possession of the merchandise.

3. You must see where the suspect conceals it.

4. You must maintain an uninterrupted surveillance to ensure that the suspect doesn’t dispose of the merchandise.

5. You must see the suspect fail to pay for the merchandise.

6. You should approach the suspect outside.

The six steps exceed what retail statutes require in most states for a shoplifter to be detained. In Virginia, all you have to do is observe someone concealing something and you can stop her. Retail stores apply the steps unevenly. Sears and Macy’s use five steps. Walmart uses four steps, which may be why there are so many shoplifting stops there.

The NRF conference’s most popular sessions focused on boosters, which generated a new openness and aggression in an industry traditionally loath to talk openly about shoplifting. The Gap could announce it had recovered $830 million in shoplifted goods and arrested “101 habitual offenders” the previous year without offending its middle-class customer base. Gap managers rarely detained shoplifters and stores did not have dedicated LP staff: Boosters changed that.

But the real action was in the exhibit hall. Each year I attended the conference, I saw creepier antishoplifting devices there. The Smoke-Cloak, when attached to a security system, can fill a room with dense smoke in seconds. The brochure promises a “remarkable, unforgettable experience,” although I wondered who was going to be doing the unforgetting. Other vendors sold all shapes and sizes of fish-eye mirrors—convex mirrors and smoky orbs for the ceiling or the wall—just the thing to turn the store into a surveillance funhouse. There was a “roundtangular” one for those hard-to-surveil spaces, and shiny oculi hanging everywhere.

Thick and thin metal alarm cables of varying lengths can be snaked up the sleeves of minks or inside It Bags and iPods, locking them to metal racks, or “fixtures,” as they are known in the trade. I recalled seeing these at Best Buy, where it was impossible to examine the cell phones because, as in a slapstick comedy, when you pulled them to your ear, the cables snapped back into the fixtures. For those with Superman fantasies, infrared thermal cameras measure heat in dimly lit areas. “Intelligent” shopping carts’ wheels lock when shoplifters push them out of the parking lot. A metal detector supposedly stops those dressed in booster clothing, or “steal wear,” from exiting the store with boosted property. “The secure store,” a model store outfitted with the latest in antishoplifting technology, featured floor mats implanted with sensors to detect booster bags and mirrors that can “understand” the clothes the shopper brings into the dressing room, as well as those the shoplifter is stealing.

The most charming antishoplifting device I saw—though maybe not the most effective—was in a high-end consignment store in Chicago. The store sold pre-worn Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses from the 1970s and pre-worn Jil Sander sheaths from the 1980s. On the wall of the dressing room, someone had hung a typed poem in a small silver frame:

Less literarily inclined merchants inked more direct messages on their front doors. “We have surveillance cameras and prosecute shoplifting and vandalism” read gold cursive lettering on the front door of a lingerie store that would soon go out of business.

But the future of loss prevention lies in high-tech electronic surveillance tools, some of which use the Internet. Others—like radio frequency identification (RFID) smart chips, or “spy chips,” rely on radio waves to track products from the factory to the consumer—are still little used because of privacy concerns. In 2003, after a media maelstrom, Gillette, the maker of the Mach 3 razor, had to abort an RFID trial in England in which merely picking up the razor from the shelf triggered a CCTV camera. But in 2010, Walmart launched RFID on clothing.

One of the most successful devices to hit the market in the last few years is made by IntelliVid, a high-tech retail security and marketing start-up that was purchased by the multinational security corporation Tyco/ADT in 2008. I met IntelliVid’s founder and then CEO, Patrick Sobalvarro, in San Diego. His premiere product, Video Investigator (VI), was the first device to solve LP’s problem of how to track shoplifters without violence. Sobalvarro grew up in Puerto Rico, where he read encyclopedias and “everything I could get my hands on in English.” In the early 1980s, he attended MIT for engineering, but dropped out to join the research staff at the robotics group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, then run by Rodney Brooks, the inventor of iRobot, the robot vacuum cleaner. Brooks would star in the 1997 Errol Morris documentary,
Fast, Cheap and Out of Control
. Sobalvarro later returned to MIT to get his BS, his MS, and his PhD.

Sobalvarro’s and Brooks’s careers have intersected many times since then. But it was in the 1990s that Brooks hooked up Sobalvarro with Flagship Ventures, a venture capital firm and start-up incubator. Sobalvarro was researching vision tracking technology, the science of making robots see. He’d reengineered the two tools he wanted—intelligent video analysis and video article surveillance—to stop shoplifters.

VI would turn store detectives into “knowledge workers,” Sobalvarro said, using the phrase Peter Drucker introduced in 1959. VI promised to shift the paradigm and to propel LP from its “Wild West” origins into lean, clean cyberspace. VI software would sense the frequently shoplifted items (through a series of algorithms). Then an LP person could highlight such an item by dragging a cursor across it. The next time someone tried to steal the item, an alarm would go off. The system is supposedly alert to techniques such as fast sweeping—shoplifters ransacking shelves in minutes. Another algorithm alerts the LP person when people linger around a security gate. The software can also watch the video in every camera and determines which of the hours of footage contain theft.

VI works “like a velociraptor,” said Brooks, referring to the dinosaur made famous by
Jurassic Park
for sensing its dinner scurrying around in the brush. “It gets intrigued by motion.” When a shoplifter snatches items off the shelf, an alarm in VI’s “brain” goes off. The technology then focuses motion detectors on that area, alerting the store detective. VI can also supposedly tell the difference between a shoplifter and a consumer by sensing
how
he grabbed the item from the shelf. And whereas a CCTV camera can only follow one person at a time, VI can follow many people all over the store. In early trials IntelliVid installed beta versions in Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and CVS, which, unlike the first two retailers, uses sales associates to apprehend shoplifters. In initial store reports, according to IntelliVid, VI drove shoplifting down 40 percent.

A group of IntelliVid staffers and I drove to a CVS in Somerville, Massachusetts, where we all pressed into a tiny office with a bird’s-eye view of the store. On his VI handheld device’s video screen, a recently hired sales associate demonstrated “painting” areas where he thought items were being shoplifted. If BIC razors were vanishing, he could “paint” the shelves where they were stocked. Then, if someone shoplifted one, an alarm went off on his handheld device. After that, he could scroll through video footage in real time and see the razor snatcher or he could actually head over to the shelf in question until he came upon the shoplifter in the middle of stealing. At that point, he would say, “Can I help you?” to scare him away. We stood around for a while waiting for a shoplifter to steal razor blades, but no one obliged that morning.