Issue 3
“It’s a whole lot easier to take away someone’s hope that they’ll get away with theft than it is to catch people. It’s hard to catch people. It’s easy to help them feel the controls around them.”
A veteran expert at a global quickserve retailer spent nearly a decade shifting how their organization understood internal theft. The problem wasn’t just individual bad actors; leadership wasn’t acknowledging the loss existed at all.
The expert positioned investigations as a means of identifying leadership gaps rather than just trying to catch someone.
Every fraud case became an opportunity to strengthen management capabilities.
Every investigation outcome generated structured prevention plans for field leadership.
Here’s how loss prevention leaders turn investigation data into executive-level margin protection intelligence.
But first, your industry brain teaser of the week:
What percentage of retail losses come from non-fraud sources like damaged goods, food waste, and process breakdowns?
Scroll down for the answer.
What's in stock
Here’s what we have in store for you this week:
- The Rundown: How to position your teams as executive advisors
- Worth Your Time: Consumers are losing confidence and slowing on spend
- What We’re Up To: MRC, Shoptalk, and your POV on AI
The Rundown
Imagine managing 11,000+ locations spread across different regions, dealing with vastly different employee cultures, leadership styles, and operational realities.
Most loss prevention teams would simply track how many cases of internal theft they close each month, reporting shrink percentages to operations departments and using that data to compete for budget against other functions.
This veteran expert knew that wouldn’t make a lasting difference. They chose to send executives a different kind of report every quarter. They showed which markets were bleeding margin through point-of-sale issues. Instead of shrink metrics, they explained where the business needed stronger leadership support.
Simply showing executives how many people you caught won’t create a shift. You need to show them where the organization needs help.
The expert applied three behavioral shifts to make a difference:
- Move from “bad actors” to leadership development. The expert reframed every investigation as evidence of a leadership gap rather than individual moral failure. This shift opened doors for programmatic owners across functions to acknowledge risk and invest in prevention systems.
- Create regional relationship models for sustained impact. The team transitioned from decentralized case processing to regional support, where investigators develop ongoing relationships with field leadership rather than just closing cases transactionally.
- Transform investigation outcomes into structured prevention. Each investigation generates a prevention plan for district managers. These plans identify specific gaps discovered during investigations and outline activities to raise standards and prevent recurrence.
After implementing systematic prevention, some regions saw dramatic reductions. “We had some regions that had as few as 12 or 20 work items in an entire month. These high risk behaviors plummeted.”
The complete playbook shares how loss prevention leaders position their function as margin protection engines rather than case processing operations.
Worth your time
We know time is money, so we won’t waste yours
- Adobe revealed what dropped e-commerce holiday returns by 25% in 2025 (Forbes).
- Why customer experience will determine who survives declining consumer confidence (ModernRetail).
- How to adjust forecasting and operational plans as consumer spending is expected to slow this year (Retail Dive).
What we're up to
At MRC, we took the stage with Kevin Dodson from Dick’s Sporting Goods for our session, The Blind Spot in Your $706 Billion Returns Problem: How Dick’s Sporting Goods Moved Beyond Fraud. Built on our TRL Benchmark Report, the data landed—retailers walked away with something concrete to bring back to their leadership teams. We carried the same conversation to Shoptalk the following week.
We also fielded a short AI survey: 15 questions on how retailers are actually thinking about AI right now. Thanks to everyone who shared their honest take before we put our perspective out publicly.
Want to know where we’ll be next? See our upcoming events.
