Many retailers are facing the growing problem of shoplifting. With the economic downturn, it seems more than just thrill-seeking teenagers are out to steal from grocery stores. An article on RDIF News said powerful shoplifting organizations, which can be considered Organized Retail Crime (ORC), cause a retail deficit of more than $30 billion. Specifically, shoplifting equals 2.24 percent of retail sales for supermarket and grocery stores.
These ORC enterprises use trained shoplifters to steal large amounts of goods and then sell them online, on the street, to pawnshops, at swap meets and even to wholesalers who sell the items back to retailers. These criminal acts can not only harm retailers’ bottom line, but can cause health problems, if the resold items face expiration dates or need to be refrigerated, such as baby formula and over-the-counter medicines.
However, using radio frequency identification (RFID) can help reduce this problem, according to Southeastern Louisiana University business professor and RFID specialist David C. Wyld. He said RFID can be used to track the in-store whereabouts of products to reduce shoplifting incidents.
Wyld calls RFDI a “nuclear option” to provide retailers with better business intelligence on what products are shoplifted the most and on how to deter retail theft in the first place. He said that if RFID can replicate the function served by electronic article surveillance (EAS) on retail items, this could eliminate the need for items to be tagged with both.
He notes pilots and experiments underway to test the effectiveness of dual function RFID tags that simultaneously serve both as item-level identifiers anti-theft devices. As an anti-theft device, the RFID can have a tag replicate the function of EAS tags that can be turned on or off to indicate if an item has been purchased or not. The Information Technology Research Center (ITRC) at the University of Arkansas recently released the results of tests it conducted on the effectiveness of such RFID dual function tags in simulated shoplifting scenarios. The Arkansas researchers tested the ability of as many as 50 RFID tags to be accurately read on a variety of apparel items, both in standard shopping bags and in “booster bags” (bags used by shoplifters that are lined with aluminum foil to make the items held inside undetectable by anti-theft surveillance systems at store exits). In many instances, the ITRC tests found that RFID labels performed as well as EAS tags.
He concludes by saying RFID may move the fight against shoplifting to be use at an item level for improved visibility, inventory control and electronic article surveillance.