LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 236 Ft. Scott McBride

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

In this episode, Dr. Cory Lowe, Director of Research, and Scott McBride from American Eagle discuss how research and real-world retail strategies come together to tackle today’s biggest challenges. From theft prevention to innovation in-store, they share practical insights on what’s working – and what’s next – for the future of retail.

Hi everyone and welcome to crime science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners as well as other professionals. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening everyone. Welcome to the crime science podcast. My name is Corey Lowe. I'm the director of research here at the LPRC and I have the great pleasure and honor to be joined today by Scott McBride.

chief global asset protection officer and American Eagle Outfitters. Welcome. Hey, welcome, Corey. Thank you for the invite and thanks for having me on the podcast. Fantastic. It's very good to have you, as I said.

You've been doing a lot of work lately with enterprise security risk management and really trying to drive the industry in a different direction, trying to innovate and think about things differently. What do you see the greatest challenge being in moving that direction? And if you would just explain

what enterprise security risk management is, that would be very helpful to you. Sure, Corey. So as I exited my chairmanship with the NRF as head of the council, I looked at the landscape of what this industry has been driving towards and the evolution of loss prevention to asset protection and what might be next. And in conversations with other leaders, it quickly became apparent that to gain a bit greater seat at the table and to be more accurate. integrated into the organizations as part of the leadership teams of our individual companies,

that risk and managing risk is exactly what the board of directors does, exactly what the leadership team does in any company, but especially in retail. So understanding how we take what we do every day in protecting people, product, and property, and turn that into a conversation about risk. And risk is inherent. We can't get rid of it. We can mitigate it. We can make it smaller or we can protect ourselves from it in different ways. And we do that every day in security.

We do that in international travel. We do that with all the things that we are charged with in the corporations. But turning the conversations into their non-no conversations. They are just this is how we should be doing it. Or this is what I call it go correctly conversations. So if we're going to do this project, we should do it this way, is our recommendation from an asset protection perspective with the metrics, with the numbers, and with those risk conversations.

So that's really what the essence of this is. All of the models that are in the world out there are general. They're about different industries, any industry. So our task that we've self-assigned to our working group and the things that we're working on is how do we retailize a risk model for, ESRM within retail organizations, specifically asset protection departments. Awesome. Speaking of ESRM for retail, we've talked about this several times outside of the podcast,

but what do you think some of the characteristics of retail are that makes those broad ESRM models less applicable to retail? Yeah, I mean the first and foremost one, Corey, is our shops are open to the public. right? We're not behind the fences of a manufacturing facility. We don't have access control like a corporate entity like a financial services company would. So we are open to the public and any number of psychoses can walk through the door and affect our teams, affect our stores, attempt to steal our products, create mayhem, which we have to protect ourselves from. So the risk mitigations and the risk conversations of how we do that and how we do that well, keeping in balance, the budget,

the payroll of the store, the design of the store, you know, all the things that we're here at the LPRC studying and talking about, the environmental criminology and those types of things, all come into play in how we have those conversations internally and how we affect that in a positive way for our organizations to strike the balance that we need to strike. So we have maximize sales, we have reduced or minimized losses and events. Fantastic. Now, this enterprise security risk management approach seems brilliant. It seems like a very, very good way for the industry to move.

But sometimes I'm concerned that the maturity's not there. What do you see as being the greatest barriers to retail adopting a retail-specific ESRM model. Really right now, Corey, it's the newness. So it's existed in many other industries for quite a while. Under the ERM umbrella inside of corporations that are managing risk all the time, ESRM focuses on the security side. So it's not a, it's not the greatest description that we like, but it's the most common. So we're adopting the ESRM acronym. and model, but it's really enterprise, asset protection, risk conversations that we're having. That's just too long and it's too conversome, and it's not known. So one is the newness.

Two is I've had many, many conversations with other leaders, my peers, my contemporaries, and we're all doing it. We just haven't really called it anything or named it or aligned it into structured descriptions, documents, decks, presos that we do within our organizations. We have an educated up, down, and sideways through our organization for having understanding and visibility of what we do and how we do it. As an example, I took all of the aspects of my department that are involved in insurance. And you think, okay, well, your asset protection, you're really involved in insurance. Well, we found out where you're really involved in insurance.

Well, we found out we're involved in work comp. We're involved in general liability. We're involved in property and fire protection and life safety. We're involved in KRE. We're involved in cargo coverage. We're involved in business continuity coverage. So we are involved in every single insurance product that our company has. The premiums are big.

The premiums for insurance for American Eagle are bigger than my payroll in my department. So there's an opportunity for me to have a significant. effect on what that cost is, what our deductibles are, what our expenditures are, and how we mitigate that. So we took all of that, we assembled a deck, and we call it ORM, operational risk management. It's a term. Little Gemini help maybe help me find a term that was out there, but I use that now as a template for some of the conversations that I'm having internally. And it works really, really well. Yeah, I really like that operational risk management. That encompasses a lot more than security, but I think it's an ambitious direction for the industry to travel. And you're leading that charge in a lot of ways. So you're steering the industry in a different way.

You've also been steering policy in a different way too, making change and making waves in a number of different ways. You've spent a lot of time with policymakers working through organized retail crime and what it entails and what it's going to require to really address it. What do you think is still missing from the conversation and not receiving the attention that it really deserves in this conversation about organized retail crime? Yeah, that's a great topic. First and foremost, I'm just humbled and proud to be the spokesperson for the industry.

And it's just a unique opportunity. The opportunity I had working with the association partners and then the support that my company gave me to allow me to speak publicly, regardless of what the topic was, it was going to carry the American Eagle name because that's my title, right? So they had some risk in allowing me to do so, and they supported me in letting me do it. So I'm glad that people are proud of me and say I did a good job because I, I, worked really hard at getting there and then of course representing well. The challenge we have now is truly understanding the full and complete scope of organized retail crime. We have worked

for years and decades with the ORCA's and the collaborations at the local level to try to affect, deter, you know, all those things at the booster level, at the local fence level. But what we're finding now because of some of the signal information that we're getting from our RFID enabled products, and that's from different retailers, but I'm in that group, is that there is a huge amount of this that is TCO, transnational criminal organizations that are calling the shots that are directing people to do this, that are monetizing the stolen goods and exfiltrating those stolen goods out of the country. So that's a new aspect of this crime. Not that we didn't understand that it was there, but the magnitude of what that is and the volume of what's going on.

That's where all these products are really going. So how do we get this legislation passed? How do we get federal resources that can help us pull the cases together better, chase these criminal elements to the corners of the earth, if necessary, to disrupt those criminal enterprise? disincentifies this as a way to do crime, keep more of the goods inside the country, keep more of the goods in our shops, and allow our good customers, the paying customers, to come in and have product availability, have size availability, and have the choices that they deserve every single day. Fantastic.

So this is a very complex problem. It touches on so much of our society. society, it touches on so much of your retail operations across different functions. It touches them and affects them. How do you manage all of that? Making sure that your programs are touching not just your internal stakeholders and making sure that you are engaging with them in the way that you need to, but also your external stakeholders that you need to be engaging with and partnering with to solve these things.

Yeah, so I think, Corey, over the decades that we've been more, working on. And I think I gave my first ORC presentation like 25 years ago at a conference of sorts. And, you know, so this has been a problem that's been ubiquitous. It does change. It has morphed. It has, you know, evolved on its own based on the global issues. Pandemic impacted it. Post-pandemic impacted it. Societal shifts in disruptive behavior. antisocial behavior has affected it and all those things. So I think that, and this leads to one of the other questions we prepped for, is that, and a comment I made earlier was the business that we're in is not without risk.

Our job is to understand those risks, mitigate where we can, keep the pressure on the right people within our organization, but also externally that can help us, that we, deserve that attention from. In this case, we're talking about legislators. Sometimes we're talking about certain law enforcement agencies that we'd like more help from. Sometimes it's an understanding, sometimes it's a misunderstanding that we have to straighten out. So all those things occur in this frictioned environment and learning how to operate within that frictioned environment in a smooth and fluid way. So I think that by keeping the pressure on,

by being consistent and being disciplined in our approaches, which is some of the very best descriptions of what the asset protection departments bring to their organizations, it's going to happen over time. And the second premise is that organizations, and this applies to companies, this applies to departments, This applies to society.

This applies to the government. They're only going to move so fast. So we have to understand that and have to set our expectations appropriately. It's not that we can't be expectant to go a little faster and be ready to go faster. But if you're really overly expectant that you're going to get it done that quickly, you're going to be disappointed, you're going to be disgruntled, you're going to be diminished, and you're probably going to walk away someday. So I think maintaining that discipline to understand that the reason it's not happening is because something else needs to happen.

And we may be unknown to us what that is or someone else has to come around to it. So what I call it is ready for next. So be ready for the next move. Whatever that next move may be, you may not even know what the next move is, but be prepared to move. Be prepared to act. Be prepared to take action when the opportunity presents itself. because it might be a very short window of time. And really, back to the Corka bill,

every time we've thought we've been stalled, we've made a step forward. So it's one of those really counterintuitive situations, especially with dealing with the government, that causes us frustration at times, but if you don't get too frustrated, you can stay along for the long haul. Yeah.

I love talking to you. I love having conversations with you because you do span so much in your organization. You touched on it earlier. How do you keep all of that moving in the same direction without fragmentation? Yeah, it's a great question. I've had that conversation with some of my contemporaries because I've shown them some of my charts and they're like, whoa, that's a lot what happens if you're too diluted, right? And I, one is I'm a likes to go guy, so I'm all in, right? So if I'm all in, I'm going to make sure we're all in. But what I have is

great team members and I've empowered specific people on my team to be champions within certain elements of that of the organization and to you know learn what they can from those other departments about how those other departments think how those other departments operate because that's intelligence I can use on how we communicate how we present ideas to the organization depending on who the stakeholders are at the table for whatever we're attempting to do. And the understanding of that has been, you know, it's almost like magic in some ways because people then believe it's their idea or they're on board or you're speaking their language. And everybody, you get much more synergy that way than just using your own vernacular

and your own abbreviations and those types of things that then become like, well, they're always talking about things I don't know what that's about or I don't know why they keep saying it that way. So learning to communicate better from a position of understanding has helped tremendously and then being willing to delegate but follow up with the team on having that spread so that we're able to cover all the bases. Yeah. You're pretty tremendous leader, right? You're leading the conversation on organized retail crime and really driving that forward you're leading the industry internally on changing how we think about our role today and tomorrow and then you're leading your team delegating and doing everything you're doing across so many

different areas you've obviously learned a lot of lessons over time right and I'm sure you've learned some of those the hard way what is a lesson that you wish you would learn 10 years earlier or that you learn the hard way and wish you hadn't learn the hard way. Yeah, I'm glad you gave me that one ahead of time so I could kind of do a little inventory. But the one that comes to mind that I think fits everything we've talked about today is that nothing's black and white. You know, we start off in this business, or at least I did, and some of the team that I grew up with in this world was right and wrong. Stealing is wrong, theft is wrong, shrink is bad. I'm not saying shrink is good, but shrink is, you know,

you know, bad. So, but it gets very black and white. And we've been accused of that back in the day of being too black and white, you know. And I think the understanding that it is a risk conversation. It is a understand first before being understood conversation. And not to say that you're going to make emotional decisions about every single person that has stolen from a store. But if you can do an interview with a store associate or a manager in a store that has stolen from the company, and you've proved that through your investigation, and you've had that sit down with them,

and you've used the appropriate method to speak with them in a non-accusatory way, and you've gotten them to tell you that they did it, and they get up from the chair, maybe as the police are coming in the back door of the store to come and take them away, and they shake your hand, then you've come from a position of understanding on how to communicate with that person. and that's always been a goal. You've also reduced the risk of them coming back and saying that you did this or that or took liberties or accused them of things. So I think that understanding that it's not black and white, that it's about people

and people are not one way or the other. They're a mix. There are a menagerie of things together that make them unique. But those uniquenesses are what make. us special about what we do and how we do it. And I think that's just how situations in our companies are, how the next conversation you're going to have with your bosses and all those things. And I think learning that, I don't know if I'm speaking like I'm the grand old man of this, but I wasn't like that at the beginning. I wasn't like that at the beginning. It was very black

and white. I was very hard-nosed. I was very linebacker-ish type of person out in the field. but I made my bones and I learned and I grew and I got into a larger position, but I have a greater vision of what the landscape looks like right now. Yeah, those shades of gray are important to understand. So it's been a fantastic conversation. I'm going to continue this conversation with you after we've wrapped this up, but I appreciate the conversations that we have. I appreciate the role you play in the industry and in society to solve all these problems

and protecting people, places, and property. So thank you for everything, Scott, and thank you for everything you do for the LPRC. Thank you, Corey, and thanks to your team for everything you do at the LPRC. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast, presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council.

If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at LPRsearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes, 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 Loss Prevention Research Council.