You've decked the halls, and throngs of merry shoppers are perusing your wares, looking for the perfect holiday gifts for friends and loved ones. Unfortunately, among them are opportunistic thieves and members of organized retail crime (ORC) organizations looking for an easy score or an opportunity to flip stolen goods on the black market.

The sad reality for retailers is that shrink increases by 15% when the holiday season arrives. Worse yet, the holidays can account for as much as 37% of a retailer's total annual shrink. So what can retailers do to protect their profits this holiday season? Start by leveraging these five technologies and tactics to mitigate shrink and ensure your stores hit their revenue targets for the holidays — and every day.

Like most retailers, you probably have an Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) system in play. But to make the most of it, turn your EAS system into an EAS ecosystem.

Today's leading loss prevention systems use advanced Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to tell users what's getting stolen, when it's being stolen, and which door it went out of. That's why so many retailers are leveraging an ecosystem of Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) hard tags and labels, detection systems, and even predictive analytics, to have the full picture of what was stolen, when it was stolen, and what it means in terms of lost revenue.

You've already got a camera infrastructure in your stores, but why not empower it to do more than passively watch? And why not empower your loss prevention teams to react faster and be more proactive in their initiatives?

With Computer Vision, you can do both. By pairing your existing camera investment with advanced Machine Learning, Computer Vision Analytics can give loss prevention professionals real-time alerts when anomalous behavior is detected, including:

• Shelf sweeps
• Aggressive and suspicious behavior
• Loitering after hours
• Large groupings designed to hide theft activity from cameras (a classic ORC move)
• Employee theft or fraud

Computer Vision can help identify these activities to better enable your loss prevention team to drive more value-adding activities in the store.

Retailers everywhere are feeling the effects of the labor shortage, and it's a safe bet that you are, too. But with the holidays just around the corner, you can't afford to have associates doing time-consuming tasks like applying labels and tags to merchandise. So why not give them a break and up your loss prevention game at the same time?

With Source Tagging, you can do exactly that. With a Source Tagging program, merchandise is tagged at the manufacturer — long before it arrives in your stock room — so associates can spend their time doing more valuable tasks, like engaging with customers and value-added selling. It also ensures that all merchandise is correctly tagged, preventing would-be employee thieves from slipping merchandise into a pocket or bag before it gets tagged. Plus, Source Tagging can be done for almost any product, including commonly stolen holiday items like electronics, apparel, perfume, toys, liquor, and more.

ORC groups are sophisticated, organized — and they cost retailers an average of $720,000 for every $1 billion in sales. These groups may be undeterred by some traditional loss prevention technologies, but an easy way to remind them that they're being watched is by installing public view monitors in high-traffic — and high-theft — areas, like outside of dressing rooms or at self-checkouts.

They won't prevent every ORC event, but they will serve as a powerful reminder that they're under surveillance and that the store will have footage to share with law enforcement after the fact. And beyond ORC, public view monitors can be especially effective at deterring opportunistic shoplifters, as the monitor makes clear that — since they can see themselves — it's likely someone else could be watching.

The holidays are busy, and vulnerable to theft, but does every shift need to be an all-hands-on-deck situation? Almost certainly not, and with the right technologies, you can map your shifts to traffic patterns to ensure your stores are fully staffed for your busiest days and power hours.

How? By using advanced traffic counting solutions that count shoppers and movements at entrances and throughout the store. The best of these can uncover deep insights into consumer movement patterns with up to 98% accuracy. That way, you can know when a skeleton crew is a viable option — and when it's all hands on deck. As a result, you not only save by avoiding unnecessary labor spend, you can also ensure your shoppers can always find an associate, even during the busiest days of the year.

Of course, maximizing profitability also means averting loss events — and labor optimization is a critical tool to disrupting ORC activity. Using our Shrink Management as a Service (SMaaS) platform is an effective way to combat ORC, as the actionable insights and predictive analytics around loss events can not only reveal theft patterns, but identify hot spots so you can ensure associates are posted when and where theft is most likely to occur.

Of course, there's another asset you can leverage to plan labor smartly: Our annual forecast for the busiest days of the season. We use historical data, weather patterns, shopper behaviors and preferences, important events, and anything else our retail experts anticipate will impact shoppers' choices for when to shop to — you guessed — predict retailers' busiest days. You'll need every weapon in your arsenal to succeed this holiday season, so get your copy today.

These are just a few of the tools you can use to prevent shrink during the holidays and beyond. To learn more about the tools, technologies, and tactics you can use to protect your profits, get your copy of our white paper, The 2022 Holiday Loss Prevention Wish List today.

Or if you'd like to start a conversation with the loss prevention experts, get in touch. We're here to help, and we hope your holidays are full of good cheer, great shopper experiences — and overflowing registers!