I worked in Asset Protection for a major big-box retailer for seven years. I spent my first two years in an entry-level position and the next five as a team leader.
I left the company a few years ago for a completely different career, but whenever people find out what I used to do, they have questions.
Usually they want to know about shoplifters.
Did we really watch people steal over and over until they hit some magic dollar amount? Could we tell when someone genuinely forgot to scan something? Did we recognize professional thieves when they walked in? Were employees stealing more than customers?
And, of course, how much weird stuff did we see on the cameras?
The answer to that last question is: enough.
But the biggest misconception about Asset Protection is that the entire job is basically sitting in a room watching cameras and waiting for someone to steal.
Catching shoplifters was certainly part of it, but the actual job was much broader than that.
There Wasn’t Some Magic Number We Were Waiting For You to Hit
One of the biggest myths I still hear is that retailers purposely let someone steal until they’ve taken enough merchandise to turn it into a more serious charge.
That wasn’t how we operated.
If somebody stole from us ten different times, we documented those ten incidents. We weren’t sitting around adding everything together and waiting for the total to reach some magic number before we finally grabbed them.
What we did do was keep records.
So if you were a repeat offender, there was a good chance we knew who you were and had documentation of previous incidents. If you stole $1,000 worth of merchandise ten separate times, those were ten separate thefts that could potentially be pursued.
I think part of this myth comes from how internal theft was handled.
When an employee was suspected of stealing, we generally wanted multiple documented incidents. It made the case much stronger and made it much harder for someone to claim that what happened was an accident or misunderstanding.
That doesn’t mean employees were allowed to steal indefinitely. If somebody did something that was obviously intentional, they could absolutely be terminated over one incident.
But here’s something I learned pretty quickly: if an employee intentionally steals once, there’s a good chance they’re going to do it again.
Usually pretty soon.
The Hard Part Wasn’t Seeing Someone Take Something. It Was Proving Intent.
People sometimes ask what happened if they accidentally forgot to scan something at self-checkout or left a case of soda underneath their cart.
The entire job revolved around establishing intent.
There’s a big difference between someone buying $200 worth of groceries and accidentally leaving a case of soda underneath their cart and someone with a history of theft somehow “forgetting” to scan an $800 vacuum.
Context matters.
Behavior matters.
History matters.
We weren’t interested in turning an obvious mistake into a criminal case. If we stopped someone, we generally wanted to have enough evidence to believe they intentionally tried to leave without paying.
And honestly, if you forgot to scan something inexpensive on the bottom of your cart, there was a decent chance we didn’t even notice. We usually had specific people or situations we were paying attention to.
Sometimes an Employee Asking If You Need Help Isn’t Random
This was one of our simplest techniques.
If we thought someone might be considering stealing something, we didn’t necessarily confront them.
Sometimes we’d just have an employee walk into the aisle and ask if they needed help.
“Hey, finding everything okay?”
That’s it.
The company encouraged employees to interact with customers anyway, so most of the time when an employee approaches you in a store, they’re probably just doing their job.
But Asset Protection could use that interaction deliberately.
If someone had a history of minor theft or was behaving in a way that caught our attention, we’d sometimes tell an employee that there was a customer in a particular aisle who might need assistance.
You’d be surprised how often simply letting someone know they’d been noticed was enough to make them change their mind.
Most Shoplifters Weren’t Criminal Masterminds
Most of the theft I dealt with was relatively low-dollar stuff.
A lot of it was younger people taking things they either couldn’t afford or simply didn’t want to pay for.
Headphones were popular. Phone cases. Chargers. Makeup. Small electronics.
Basically, anything relatively expensive, easy to conceal and easy to resell was going to be attractive.
At one location I worked at, liquor was another big one.
Physical media wasn’t nearly as big a problem during my time as people might expect. There were a few people who targeted DVDs earlier in my career, but as everything became digital, there wasn’t as much demand for them.
For low-dollar thefts, police often weren’t involved.
We’d recover the merchandise, identify the person and trespass them from the store. If the person was a minor, there were additional procedures and they generally had to be released to a guardian or police.
Repeat offenders were a different story.
Professional Thieves Were Surprisingly Predictable
We called the more organized repeat thieves “boosters.”
These weren’t teenagers stuffing makeup into their pockets. These were people who consistently targeted specific high-value merchandise because they knew they could sell it to someone else.
And they didn’t necessarily hit one store.
They might travel through an entire area hitting multiple locations.
The company had an internal system that allowed Asset Protection teams to communicate about theft activity. Managers in neighboring stores also knew one another and could call or text when a known group was active.
If a crew hit one store, word could travel quickly.
After a while, we could even recognize patterns.
Certain groups tended to operate at particular times. Some preferred certain days of the week. Some repeatedly targeted the same categories of merchandise.
People like to imagine organized retail theft as completely unpredictable, but human beings are creatures of habit.
Thieves are no different.
One of Our Biggest Losses Had Nothing to Do With Theft
This was probably the biggest thing I misunderstood about Asset Protection when I started.
I thought the job was mostly about thieves.
Eventually you realize that theft is only one way a store loses money.
There were basically three major categories we dealt with: external theft, internal theft and logistical loss.
That last one doesn’t sound exciting, so people tend to ignore it.
But it can be enormous.
One year, one of our stores showed roughly $150,000 in losses from frozen food.
Obviously people weren’t walking out the door with $150,000 worth of frozen pizzas.
We started digging into it and eventually discovered the problem.
When freezers went out of temperature, employees sometimes had to throw away large amounts of food. There was a process for documenting exactly what was discarded so the company could properly account for the loss and potentially recover some of the cost through insurance or vendors.
The department wasn’t consistently following that process.
Food was simply being thrown away without being properly scanned and documented.
On paper, all that inventory had essentially disappeared.
That’s the kind of thing people don’t picture when they hear “Asset Protection,” but figuring out why $150,000 worth of inventory vanished was just as much our job as catching somebody stealing headphones.
In some ways, it was more important.
Black Friday Was Our Super Bowl
Black Friday was a huge deal when I first started.
We’d spend months preparing for it.
People assume every Black Friday is basically the same: open the doors, deal with the crowd and try to keep everything under control.
It wasn’t.
Every year had different problems.
What were the hot products that year?
What time were nearby retailers opening?
Had our store been remodeled?
Where were the crowds likely to form?
What went wrong last year?
What could we do differently this year?
What kind of staffing and budget did we have?
Asset Protection was heavily involved in coordinating the store’s overall operation that day.
It really did feel like our Super Bowl.
By the time I left, though, Black Friday wasn’t quite the event it had been when I started. Online shopping had grown enormously, and COVID accelerated that shift. The giant Black Friday crowds I remembered early in my career weren’t quite the same anymore.
The Job Became Much Less Physical
When I started, there were still some older Asset Protection employees around who had come from a very different era of retail security.
They’d tell stories about how physical the job used to be.
By the time I left, things had moved heavily toward being hands-off.
The focus became less about physically stopping somebody and more about observation, documentation, investigation and reducing loss.
That was probably inevitable.
Trying to physically detain someone over merchandise can become dangerous very quickly, both for the employee and everyone around them.
And the longer I worked there, the more I realized that chasing thieves was only one small part of actually being good at the job.
Not Every Theft Situation Was Black and White
One of the stores I worked at was in the downtown area of a major city with a large homeless population.
Food theft was common.
We obviously couldn’t just ignore people taking things, but we also understood that someone stealing a sandwich because they’re hungry is a very different situation from someone stealing a cart full of electronics to resell.
At that location, we kept premade bags containing things like sandwiches, chips, granola bars and water. We’d also sometimes include socks or ponchos.
The bags contained information about nearby shelters, churches and outreach programs as well.
The idea was simple: discourage the theft while also giving the person another option.
Employee situations involving food or clothing could also be handled differently and sometimes became an HR matter rather than purely an Asset Protection issue.
Those were the situations that reminded you that the job wasn’t always as simple as “person stole something, therefore person is bad.”
There were people stealing because they wanted easy money.
There were teenagers doing stupid things.
There were employees taking advantage of the company.
There were professional thieves who basically treated stealing like a job.
And there were people who were simply desperate.
You learned pretty quickly that those aren’t all the same thing.
Yes, We Saw Weird Things on the Cameras
Any time you put cameras throughout a giant retail store and spend years watching them, you’re eventually going to see things you weren’t expecting.
One of the stranger incidents I remember involved a couple who apparently thought they’d found a sufficiently secluded aisle for the woman to perform oral sex on the man.
They had not.
We had to ask them to leave.
There were plenty of other bizarre moments over the years, but that one has always stuck with me.
Retail exposes you to an enormous cross-section of humanity.
Asset Protection gives you a front-row seat.
The Biggest Lesson I Learned
When I first got into Asset Protection, the theft side of the job was obviously the exciting part.
Watching someone on camera, building a case and recovering merchandise felt like what the job was supposed to be.
The logistical stuff was boring.
Inventory discrepancies were boring.
Figuring out why a department wasn’t properly documenting discarded food was boring.
But as I became more experienced, I realized something.
If your job is to reduce the amount of money a store loses, you can’t become obsessed with catching thieves just because that’s the fun part.
Sometimes the guy walking out with stolen headphones matters.
Sometimes the employee stealing merchandise matters.
And sometimes the real problem is a broken freezer and a department full of employees who aren’t using the inventory system correctly.
After seven years in Asset Protection, that was probably the biggest thing I learned about the job.
The obvious problem isn’t always the biggest one.