LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 17 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, Tom Meehan and Featured Guest John-Pierre “JP” Kamel (RFID Sherpas)

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

In this episode of LPRC CrimeScience: The Weekly Review, featured guest John-Pierre “JP” Kamel, RFID specialist, joins Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan, and Tony D’Onofrio to discuss RFID as a data collection tool and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected its role in retail and loss prevention.  Tune in to also learn about LPRC initiatives, ransomware, VPNs & leaked data, recent nation-state cyberattacks, Amazon’s online market share, the rise in mobile and voice online shopping, and top retail technologies in use. John-Pierre “JP” Kamel is a retail, Omni-channel, and RFID specialist. He is a recognized leader in the Canadian and US RFID and Mobility communities and brings over 20 years of enterprise strategy and solutions integration experience, primarily focused on RFID, Omni-Channel, wireless and mobility solutions. Over the past 10 years, JP’s work has been primarily focused on working with retailers, brands, and 3PLs to develop comprehensive RFID and Omni-channel strategies and ultimately helping them build robust and profitable programs. The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 17 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, Tom Meehan and Featured Guest John-Pierre “JP” Kamel (RFID Sherpas) appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Be a leader in loss prevention by implementing integrated solutions that enhance safety, reduce shrink, and help to improve merchandising, operations, and customer service. operations, and customer service. Bosch Integrated Security and Communication Solutions spans zones one through four in the LPRC's zones of influence, while enriching the customer experience and delivering valuable data to help increase retail profitability. Learn more by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Well, welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast. This is our special weekly edition. As always, joined by Tom Meehan, Tony D'Onofrio, our special guest, JP, and of course, our producer, Kevin Tran. And what we're going to do is just do a quick run through, bring everybody up to speed from some of the information that we've got. Always, always trying to support the LPRC community as well as the industry and our partners.

So what we'll start off with a little bit, of course, about what's going on with COVID-19. Here we are. We're still involved, heavily engaged, and heavily affected, and trying to keep track of some of the therapeutics, vaccines, and other supportive care research that is going on, including testing. And I have the opportunity, being at UF, to join in on some of their special webinars where their clinical and preclinical researchers go through what they know, what others know, what they're working on, what might be coming up next.

So, of course, pretty exciting. I mean, over 5,000 trials underway that are known. But as far as now another major, major level three type trials going on where we're talking about large scale, over 30,000 test subjects randomized to either control or treatment. This is that promising vaccine that came about 62 days after the virus, SARS-CoV-2, was the genomic components were specified and articulated. So let's keep our fingers crossed. So far, it appears to be very efficacious and safe. The same typical side effects you might have from any vaccine,

because let's face it, we're activating our body's defense mechanism, so we're going to experience something, hopefully. And so that's what we see with side effects normally. Some new research coming out on how COVID-19 hides once it gets into a cell, how it tries to fool or does fool both our innate and adaptive immune systems. So now knowing that mechanism, you can imagine thousands of physician scientists around the world are mobilized to try and affect that as well as everything else that's going on. But pretty fascinating, listen to the science behind what's happening yesterday. It was really

an intriguing webinar that UF Health put on yesterday. A lot of MD, PhD students that are heavily involved in research, but also understand the clinical aspect. So it's kind of a neat view from that standpoint. So mask, more and more evidence on mask, how that blocks the droplets from viremic people, particularly if both subjects are wearing the mask in addition to distance. So obviously still recommending that we try and stop the spread that way. We're looking still at, of course, a lot of demonstrations, a lot of violence, still looting, some targeted looting. Some of the national brands are being looted and targeted. Some of the Antifa, RevCom, or Boogaloo subjects that are taken into custody, they've got lists, targeting lists, and things like that,

like we see with organized retail crime criminals that know exactly where they're going and what they're after because they know they've got a way to convert things to cash. We're seeing some of the same type of behavior here during the demonstrations. The demonstrations are not just localized in Seattle or Portland, but we're seeing some serious and dangerous ones that spring up and go back down, whether it's in New York City or Chicago, Oakland, Austin, Atlanta, and other places. So everybody's continuing to try and better understand some of those mechanisms and what we can do to better defend while we engage with all of our partners in the community to try and prevent in the first place. The problem is outside agitation and encouragement and funding and equipping that's going on as well.

As far as some Antifa attacks on now black demonstrators, if they carry an American flag in addition to a Black Lives Matter flag. So some new dynamics that are being brought to light and trying to understand how this is happening and what we can do to better and less violently affect it. Some of the other things are happening. LPRC, again, we're having an all-retailer call next week coming up where it will be discussing, again, lessons learned. We've had a little bit of time looking at COVID-19, a little bit about the writing and looting, but for the retailer members

to dig deep, to share what they've been experiencing, how they put up defenses and adjusted and adapted their team members, their tactics, their technologies. And then now some readjustments that they've been making as well as they move forward. So we want to continue that learning loop process with each other and further tease out research on the R3 front, the rapid response research that we're working on. We've expanded and continue to expand to more different types of stores, particularly with curbside, looking at the dynamics, understanding better, safer, more efficient, cost-effective ways to handle curbside and other low-no-contact methods. So stay tuned on all that. We had a meeting, a good planning meeting last week,

a series of calls, and then an in-person, safely conducted meeting with the University of Florida Director of Security and Technology, and three of his team members did a security audit on the UF Innovate Hub building where our labs are located. And that's going to become a showcase of guardianship protection. And so look for the parking lot, the entry exits, the hallways, common areas, and then our lab spaces to provide an amazing infrastructure to do a ton of R&D. We've got a lot of partners lining up, including Bosch, Axis,

Centromatic, NVIDIA, and many others that are going to be providing a lot of technical infrastructure. But we're looking at specific scenarios and how we want to better enable the green shopper experience, the person we want there that's working or shopping there. And of course, impeding the red shopper, repelling the red shopper, documenting the red shopper for possible incarceration, if that's what it takes. But further, through Operation Safe Corps, the NSF plating grant we've got, we're going to be now looking at once we make this a much smarter, safer place, how do we connect that? So we'll have the opportunity with some mass transit, including a driverless vehicle, semi-autonomous bus, and then looking at that pathway to the

greater city of Gainesville, which is becoming a smart city and linking in with some of their smart lighting and some of the other pathways. And then the underpinning of some pretty powerful artificial intelligence capabilities to start to learn and understand dynamics, traffic movements, and prediction for, again, accommodating comfort, safety, and so forth. So very, very exciting. Many of you know we participated. the three of us are regularly on this podcast in the Global Retail Crime Summit. It's our understanding that all of those sessions are now available for those that would like to go at their leisure and look at them, put them out to their team members. We participated in an Access webinar on the science of crime prevention last week. Again, that's going to be available. You can also find these links on lpresearch.org on our

website. Go into the Knowledge Center. Kevin's making those available as well to all of our members and others. So I think that's the main thing that we're looking at here from the LPRC. Impact, very exciting. Another big planning meeting Friday. We've got record numbers already enrolled, and we're anticipating a huge record number for that first week in October for virtual impact this year for the first time, as well as the strategy at for the most senior leaders. So with no further ado, I'm going to go over to our partner,

Tom Meehan. Tom, take it away. Thank you, Reid. Just one quick note, just to be repetitive, the Global Retail Crime Summit, if you missed out, I know it was a full day of a whole bunch of great speakers. Tony and I and Reid all got to speak a couple times there. So definitely tune into it. I think you probably have a week's worth of content there. Really, really good stuff. So a couple of things today. One is you may have heard about this. It depends on what news streams you follow. But Garmin had a pretty substantial ransomware attack. So Garmin GPS company, they lost pretty much everything. And it was held in a ransomware attack. So for those of your listeners that aren't familiar with how ransomware works, basically, hackers work to get into your system, whether it be through an email or a pop up, and

you activate this ransomware on your system, and it basically encrypts all of your files, and then the hackers go ahead and extort money. So for Garmin, they asked for $10 million. With huge, huge ransomware attacks like this, obviously the payment becomes a big challenge. Garmin was crippled. So if you use Garmin for any of their health tracking applications, all of their data was locked down. The verdict is out of whether they're going to pay or not. It does actually look like they will pay the ransomware, but they're still up in the air. There have been some early reports that they had already paid and they didn't.

And then just kind of interesting notes of what the tax implications are of if they pay that ransomware. So there's a very mixed opinion. If you pay ransomware, does it encourage people to continue these type of attacks? Also, what's the risk that they don't give you the key to unencrypt your files? The challenge and reality here is that it becomes a business decision, much like any other decision we're faced with in a fraud is, what's the impact on your customer base and how do you get back into the business quicker? And that really leads me to the increase of ransomware attacks specific around COVID-19, information about masks, the vaccines and short supply commodities, hand sanitizers being used as channels to get ransomware to both the business and the private sector, financial scams offering government assistance if you haven't gotten your unemployment yet, if you're looking for mortgage relief, all embedded ransomware

downloads for technology, video and audio, things that when you're sitting at home, you'd want to use, especially around conferencing platforms and free offerings. These are all things that I would say pre-COVID were definitely a challenge, but as we're much more remote and we're sitting on our computers more, we just have to take that extra step to be reminded that if we don't recognize an email, not to click on anything, if there's a strange pop-up, don't enable things. There are a lot of protections in place today, but unfortunately, ransomware is one of those ones that kind of is a little challenging sometimes for detection suites to come up with. So endpoint management doesn't always detect it. There really are three major challenges. And this is both in the business and the private sectors. During the pandemic,

from a business standpoint, your threat landscape has changed dramatically. So in most situations, you have it built, you have a small workforce out. Today, you're a huge amount of network changes that needed to happen overnight. So the threat landscape changes that way. In some cases, cybersecurity professionals, whether you're at the university, a business, or even a small business, they had to change their controls. They had to adapt and permit more flexibility for remote working practices. And then security teams have to manage incidents in unfamiliar conditions. So if you think about what's going on today, you have a cyber event while there's a protest, while you have stores closed, while people are sick, while they're remote, all of those things really make what I would say is already a complex situation even more challenging.

So ransomware has been on the rise for the last several years. But I think what we're seeing now is very specific targeted attacks around COVID. It's just a reminder to really think through. None of us are immune to it and it is extremely disruptive of when it occurs. Every few months or so, there's a major, major impact. If you remember, I would say we did cover it on Crime Science Podcast, where some municipalities, full states had ransomware attacks that really created havoc. So just something to keep in mind.

And the news also, and this is just kind of when we talk about protection, there were seven VPNs that had leaked their log data. And for listeners of virtual private network, this is really not generally going to be this type of thing is not generally going to be a business VPN, but a VPN allows you to connect securely and basically creates an encrypted tunnel for your traffic. What's interesting about these seven that leaked their logs is all seven of them claim to not keep logs. So the interesting point here was these were services that were advertising they did not keep logs and these logs were leaked.

And what the logs actually show is IP to IP traffic. So it actually shows where you surfed. It isn't detrimental from like an identity theft. It is from a privacy standpoint that people could actually see what you were doing. It's important to note that these services were predominantly free services. And what I continuously kind of remind people is if nothing is free, it's not really viable for a company to not log you. They need to be able to monetize the activity somehow. So while VPNs certainly keep you safe in some capacity,

it's important to know that it doesn't offer full anonymity. So it's just a reminder. I think I constantly am reminding folks to use your VPN that's provided from your business or get a good private VPN if you're traveling or if you want to keep an extra layer of protection. It's certainly not a foolproof, but if you're traveling in these unprecedented times, I would highly recommend making sure you have a good one to secure your conversations. And then I'll round out with, I know we talked a little bit about this in the last couple of weeks, but nation state attacks still are on the rise. So the Department of Justice charged two Chinese nationals who allegedly were hacking the COVID-19 research,

We're hacking the COVID-19 research, both at academic medical universities and public companies around vaccinations, as well as both the United States, the UK and Canada have allegations against Russia for cyber attacks of similar nature going around COVID-19 research. Again, we talk about current events here, and the key here is that there is a fine line between trying to steal research data and getting in and actually causing havoc. So these are expected or thought to be nation-state attacks where they're sponsored by the government. It's important to note that the Russian hack was tied to a group that is loosely connected to the government where the Chinese attack these folks were at least allegedly working for the government. It's just a reminder out there that this is not just, you know,

we're in an odd situation here where we have nation state attackers. We have what I would say is weekend warriors, people that are sitting at home now that are doing it, and then professional hackers all coming after that. And it also leads us into, as we get closer to the election, that these attacks are going to probably get worse. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Tony. Thank you very much, Tom. And really, first, a great pleasure to introduce my special guest or our special guest, John Pierre or JD Campbell, who is a retail omni-channel and RFID specialist. He is a recognized leader in the

Canadian and U.S. RFID communities with 20 plus years experience. Prior to joining RFID Sherpas, he led RFID practices at VeriSign and Bell Canada. He also led a mobility solutions practice at Cap Gemini. JP is a frequent speaker, author of multiple articles, and was co-chair of APC Global Canada. And he's also an inventor. He holds 15 patents in RFID and mobility. So it's my great pleasure to have JP tell us where we are in retail with RFID, JP. Perfect. Thank you very much, Tony. So I'll give you kind of a high level overlay of the landscape of where things are from an RFID perspective. And then we'll talk a little bit about how RFID has impacted retailers, especially from a COVID perspective and how they've been leveraging the data that they've been able to gather to do more within COVID. And then I'll see if there's anything I've forgotten. I'll let you ask any

questions if appropriate. So really when you talk about RFID, there's a few things that kind of jump to the forefront. Really RFID is a data collection tool. It's the ability to rapidly collect without the requirement for line of sight information within the store. And so you can get a full inventory of an entire store in an hour, in two hours, depending on the size of the store, very quickly and very accurately. And what does that mean? How does that translate? Well, really what that means is that stores can now start to operate with the true inventory position of that store known. And that has a massive impact from an operational perspective, from a planning and allocation perspective, from an ability to get the right product onto the floor perspective.

And then also from being able to make much better decisions back at head office with regards to things like LP and other things. So I'll get into a couple of those things and kind of what the implications are. So I usually break it down into customer experience impacts, operational impacts, and financial impacts. And if we talk about the customer experience impacts, usually what we're talking about there is the ability to ensure that you have the full assortment on the floor that you want on the floor for the customers. So making sure that if it's in your store, you've got it on the floor and available for your customer to shop, being able to minimize. And if you do, you know, if you do have to disconnect from the customer, you have shorter disconnects and disengagements from your shoppers while

they're in your stores. And then the ability to really connect the online world with the physical world. And so you've seen retailers do a really good job of this. If I now know exactly what I have in the store in real time or near time, I can actually put that information onto the web to try to drive traffic into the stores or help customers know if the item that they're looking for is actually in the store before they show up. And that's actually one of the things that some retailers have been doing very well during COVID to really kind of try to drive some of that traffic into the store. If somebody wants to try something on or do something, they can ensure that it's actually

in the store through the web. If you talk about operational impacts, you see a whole slew of areas where really retailers are able to make big differences. So from a store management perspective and from a labor perspective, most retailers are finding that they're able to do much more in a shorter period of time. So you're able to be more efficient in doing things like filling the floor. You're able to really do more with less, which is really important during this time. And then really kind of connecting from an operational perspective, one of the key things we're seeing is that omnichannel piece. And so

in the past, when you're trying to turn on omnichannel, whether it's buy online, pick up in store, or buy online, fulfill from store, what you're seeing is you're usually applying some level of buffer stock to the inventory to make sure that the item that you are trying to sell is actually in the store. So, as you know, most retailers, according to NRF, retail inventory accuracy at the SKU level sits somewhere between 65% and 75%. And so, most retailers are applying a buffer stock to say, if I don't have at least X number of these in stock, don't make it available for my omnichannel customers. And so whether you're going two or three, whatever that threshold is, essentially you're closing off the amount of inventory you have to sell. And so from an RFID perspective, what you're able to do is you know exactly what's in that store at that moment.

There's no guesswork anymore. And then you can make the decision, do you want to say I need to have at least one in the store? Do I need to have at least two in the store? What do you want to do based on your own business rules rather than on a concern about what you actually have in the store? concerned about what you actually have in the store. And so we're seeing the available product from an omnichannel perspective really go up with retailers who are using these types of solutions to drive the available product. There's a whole slew of other operational benefits. We see things like right through the supply chain, if you can start to have visibility right from the point of manufacture right through your supply chain, what we start to to have visibility right from the point of manufacture right through your

supply chain, what we start to see, especially for brands who have a wholesale business, being able to do something at the point of manufacturing, ensuring that it's being packed correctly, and especially if you're doing direct shipments from the factory, then you're able to cut down on some of those chargebacks. You're also seeing that in the supply chain as things flow into your own supply chain. If you're going from your own DCs out into another retailer, from a brand to a retailer, or even from a store or a brand out into its own stores, you're able to have much more effective and accurate shipping directly there. And having the ability to say, I know I shipped this, it was in the carton, is very helpful really right across the board. When we start

talking about, well, what are the financial impacts of some of these things? And so, you know, typically when you talk about things like back-to-front replenishment and ensuring you've got the right product on the floor, you don't have any holes in your inventory, you're able to replenish that throughout the day as you're selling through on some of the product, you start to see an increased number of units being sold because you've got the right product on the floor at the right time. But also, especially for fashion merchandise, you start to see increased margins, which are specifically due to more full-price selling. So As you can move up that chain of full-price selling, you're able to sell more product that's closer to full price and therefore increase your overall margins.

Some retailers are indicating that they're seeing a reduction in the amount of labor needed in the store to do things like replenishment and refill. You're starting to see higher conversion rates as well, which, of course, in this day and age, maximizing conversion rates is really critical. And when you start to take a look at the data, how are you using that? Planning and allocation, you're able to do more in the store, you're able to get the right product to the right store, you're taking out any of that guesswork, and you're making sure you've got what you have. But also one of the things that we're seeing retailers really, you know, retailers who are starting to get mature

in this area is being able to start cutting production and saying, you know, I know that I have too much product in my supply chain. And now that I know exactly what I have, where it is, and what's been used, I can actually make better decisions on what I want to produce. And so we start to see retailers who have gotten to that maturity level who start to cut back on actually products that's being manufactured, but still be able to meet and exceed their sales numbers. When we start talking about other areas, one area that's obviously of real importance in this podcast is from a loss prevention side. And there's a number of areas where we've seen some real benefits. And so the one thing that we talk about with all of our clients as they're

rolling out RFID is to say, let's take a look at the analytics that RFID is driving. And the reason for that is, you know, there's a whole slew of RFID enabled loss prevention solutions that require a fair bit of capital to be implemented. So things like RFID at the point of sale, you know, doing fraud management and doing checkout and doing a whole bunch of things at that point of sale, which then allow you to do some alarming at the exit. And of course, it's different than the traditional EAS in that, you know, the traditional EAS solutions give you a beep, but you don't actually know what's at the door versus RFID is uniquely

identified right down to the unit. So you will actually know what's actually leaving that door, be able to know, is it your own product? Is it someone else's product? What exactly from your store is being taken? And that information can be pushed down to whoever is doing the intercept. But all of that requires a fair bit of capital, whether you're putting exit readers or whether you're putting readers at your point of sale. And so things that can be done without a lot of capital but have a tremendous value from a loss prevention perspective is really some of the analytics and leveraging the RFID data that's already being collected as part of the cycle counts in the stores. And what do I mean by that? part of the cycle counts in the stores. And what do I mean by that? If a cycle count is being done in the store twice a week, you can start to see trends in the data from a full inventory snapshot, take it out over a period of time and start to make decisions based on that information.

And so traditionally speaking, you know, you may do counts, you know, you may do one, two, three full counts in a store per year, depending on the store, and then do snapshots or smaller cycle counts or inventory counts for categories that are high shrink or have been problem areas. But if you can get a real-time snapshot of the actual inventory in that store twice a week, which essentially is like doing a full count of that store, a manual count of that store twice a week, and start to track the data that you see from that, you can start to see trends that are developing in your stores in between those manual counts or those full counts that you do anyway. And you can start to be adjusting your strategies throughout the year instead of waiting for those manual counts

to happen. And we've seen some real value being driven for the loss prevention teams by implementing some of these analytical tools on the RFID data. There's a number of different areas where we're seeing RFID data be leveraged from a loss prevention perspective. One of the retailers that we were doing work with stuck some RFID readers at the exit, and they were using it. So they had a policy that unless the customer had, if they'd lost sight of that customer anytime during the customer journey, even if they know that that person had put something in their bag

or had put something under their shirt, they were not able to intercept. But using RFID at the exit, if they got a read of that product that they were suspecting the person took, they could make a decision of whether they wanted to intercept there or not. And so it wasn't necessarily connected to the alarming, but it could be used by the in-store loss prevention teams. We've seen some really interesting solutions from a fraud detection perspective, especially returns fraud, where a retailer can take a look at an item coming back and scan the item at a point of sale, and they can actually see if that item was ever marked as sold. And so, if someone's doing a receiptless return of an item that was never marked as sold, they can start to make decisions

as to how they want to handle that. One example of a retailer that we were doing some work with, they actually had an incident where somebody brought up to the counter a fairly large amount of product for a receiptless return. And what was interesting is that product had actually been seen in the morning cycle count. So maybe several hours before this person was coming back to do the return with, and that product actually had never been through point of sale. And so you can start to see, well, obviously maybe this product never even left the store. It was just picked up off

the counter and brought over to the desk or whatever it was, but it was a very interesting observation that was made by the team. Some other interesting solutions that we're seeing from an LP perspective is enabling investigations with RFID, not just in the store, but also one such example included for an ORC bust that happened where an RFID handheld or an RFID reader backpack was placed in with the team doing the ORC bust. And then the data was reviewed from that bust to take a look to see, well, what actually was stored? Was anything that was there? Could they identify what stores it came from? Could they identify when the last time it was seen? And give the police some information to use that can give them an idea of where this team was operating, where the product was coming from, when this product was taken. And it was very helpful for those teams as they were doing that investigation.

One last area, which may not necessarily be as interesting, but I've always thought these projects are kind of cool. We've seen a fair bit of diversion and counterfeit product detection using RFID. One solution, actually, that we've now seen at two different retailers we helped prototype was an RFID-enabled backpack that essentially could be walked around certain areas where they knew there was gray market material or diverted product. And then they can use that information to start making decisions as to how they wanted to handle diverted products, which is if you could identify the distributor that this was sold through, the party that this product was originally sold through that shouldn't have ended up in the channel that it's in, you can start to have those conversations with some real data to support your position with these organizations

who are putting product where they shouldn't be. I think, Tony, that's kind of a quick snapshot of kind of the world of where things are with RFID today. One thing I'll throw at you, if you take a look at some of the largest retailers in the world today, we've started to see some of those largest players really kind of come down the RFID world. So you're seeing, you know, in specialty, you're seeing Uniqlo, you're seeing Zara, you're seeing H&M using RFID. Obviously, in the world of department stores, you've got Macy's using RFID. You know, They've been doing it for a number of years.

From a brand's perspective, you're seeing wholesale brands really kind of uptick in terms of that use of RFID. And the latest news, I wouldn't call it new news. It probably has been out since December, January, maybe even a little bit before that, is Walmart is turning back on their RFID program. And we're talking about another excess of billions of tag product coming into the marketplace. And then you've got people like Nike and Under Armour and Adidas and in the sporting world all turning on RFID onto their product.

And so really, we're starting to see a confluence of retailers, especially in the apparel footwear and accessory space, start to use RFID. And then you've got the mainstays of like Lululemon, who's really taken it to the next level with how they've integrated with Omnichannel and continue to knock it out of the ballpark, even during COVID, with their integration between physical and digital. And of course, Target has been doing some really interesting things with RFID. So really, the big players have all kind of adopted it now, and we're starting to see it no longer be a fringe technology, but really something that the masses are using.

So with that, Tony, I'll hand it back to you. And if there's any other questions, I'm happy to answer. No, thank you very much, JP, for that excellent update. I appreciate it. Let me move on to some other industry data that will be important this week. And number one is I want to talk about Amazon because Amazon will be in the news this week. So Amazon, the Wall Street Journal this week published their market share for online. So Amazon has a market share of 38% of the online retail sales. And I was shocked how far behind Walmart is. It's actually only 5.8% share for Walmart and then eBay at 4.5%.

So really Amazon is a dominant player and online and continues to be. And also interesting from the Wall Street Journal is the share of Amazon for cloud services. So Amazon has 48% of global cloud services followed by Microsoft at 16%, and Alibaba in China at 8%. So again, very dominant position.

And in fact, it is the web services that is actually driving the majority or 70% profitability of Amazon. So as you hear Jeff Bezos this week speak publicly, keep in mind the market leadership that they do have in the online retail industry. Let me shift gears to some other interesting data that I found this week. There was a new PwC global consumer study that actually asked how often do you shop with mobile devices? And this reemphasized again how shopping is changing. So on mobile phones prior to the pandemic, it was 30%.

That went up 45% during the pandemic. And 93% said they plan to continue that going forward. Also, during the Global Retail Summit, I talked about voice as a potential future channel for retail. And actually, PwC pointed out that smart voice assistants were being used at 15% prior to the pandemic for shopping, and that went up 23%. So voice is becoming another one of those platforms.

And as I said in the global retail summit, I think also social commerce is gonna be an important platform for retail going forward. Some interesting news from CNN this week, where they summarize what's going on in terms of bankruptcy. So, so far this year, 21 private and public retailers have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That's more than double

than the same period last year. In total, last year, only 20 retailers in 2019 filed for bankruptcy. So really a major, major acceleration, especially in sectors such as apparel and some of the things that we just talked about. And then finally, which retail technologies will receive the greatest investment in the post-COVID-19 environment? This was interesting because I know Reed and team at LPRC is spending a lot

more time in this area. So the top three are 38% is home delivery, 22% is curbside pickup, and 22% is contactless payment. So those are the top three technologies that are getting attention in the post-COVID-19 environment. Again, I would encourage working with the LPRC to optimize these from our loss prevention point of view. So with that, I'm going to turn over to Reed. All right. Thank you so much, Tony, JP, obviously Tom as well for a great wrap-up. We're really excited about this interface, this integration of visibility data that come from RFID,

particularly down to sometimes the SKU unit level. Very exciting when you tether that, especially with CCTV. Some of the mobile signatures are coming out of devices when people opt in and otherwise. And then, of course, point of sale data. So, you know, the idea of combining and then leveraging artificial intelligence capabilities to make sense and really understand patterns for prediction or certainly better prognostication and things like that hold a lot of promise, particularly for the Green Shopper's user experience. So thanks so much for that summary, and it's very exciting. And by the way, Tom, on the Garmin device, I've had one for probably almost six years that I use for workout,

and you can gauge all kinds of things, sleep, for example. And I was one of those probably millions around the world that woke up and like, man, this thing won't sync. I was one of those probably millions around the world that woke up and like, man, this thing won't sink. So but it just is it really, really hits home on how just one person clicking on one thing they shouldn't that looks maybe very, very convincing can lead to absolute disaster. And so at our team, I know we work on it constantly and you just never know. But both UFIT and then for the LPRC side, we're trying to and we recommend that. So everybody, please stay safe out there. Distance, mask.

But please, at any time, give us a ring. Hit our website, lpresearch.org. I want to again thank everybody for listening. So signing off from Gainesville and thank you to the team. the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Office of Prevention Research Council.