LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 43 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan, and Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

In this week’s episode, our co-hosts delve into the types of curbside pickup shoppers, the future of malls, 2021 store experience projections, the most important retail technologies in 2021, fake COVID-19 vaccination cards, and much more. The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 43 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan, and Tony D’Onofrio 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 this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. We use Bosch Camera's onboard intelligent video analytics to quickly locate important recorded incidents or events. Bosch's forensic search saves you time and money by searching through hours or days of video within minutes to find and collect video evidence. Learn more about intelligent video analytics from Bosch in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at BoschSecurity.com. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science, the weekly series joined by colleagues Tony D'Onofrio, by Tomeehan and our producer Kevin Tran. A busy day for us here at the LPRC today, February 2nd, 2021. We've got our big annual LPRC kickoff normally hosted by Bloomingdale's and their wonderful flagship store in Manhattan as the day after the NRF big show every year.

Clearly, because of pandemic, it's virtual. And thank you, Tom, by the way, as one of our recurring hosts there during your Bloomingdays. So with no further ado, we'll launch into the podcast as we tend to other duties as well, but we're excited always to talk with each other and you all about what's going on in the world. Starting again as we are during the weekly series, talking about the global pandemic, the virus called SARS-CoV-2 and the disease called COVID-19 that comes from that. and the disease called COVID-19 that comes from that. We'll talk a little bit about the spread and understand disease.

And we've got the top scientists, physicians, physician scientists around the world, and others, computer scientists, everybody that's interested, doing all kinds of research and development around the virus and preventing and treating it. But there are some interesting case studies that come out trying to understand, in the same way that criminologists like myself try to understand the spread of offending, particularly violence, but that it is almost viral in some cases and is more transmissible probably because of social media and encouraging each other and setting examples and also providing this specter of an erosion of consequence that you're not going to get in trouble. And we see on the left and the right and these protests that have gone on for

the last nine or 10 months that, you know, all the selfies and all the videotapes and, you know, all the video of each other and so on, they're providing themselves and others potentially some kind of in the moment entertainment that ultimately documents and enables prosecution and some consequence. But in the moment, that's what we all deal with in all of us in crime prevention, loss prevention, asset protection, in trying to help people do better. And look at dynamics of spread, there's an interesting case study of, and I'm not going to pronounce it probably, and I apologize, Manaus, Brazil,

where in the first wave, back in the March-April 2020 timeframe, evidently based on an inference coming from blood donations. And there was a lot of participation from this metro area, evidently near the rainforest or in it, of around 2 million humans, 2 million people. It looked like about 70, 80%, around 76% were exposed based on antibodies and that the antibodies were not presumed at that time or later to launch and sustain themselves for too long. So the idea was potentially in the spring, because of such heavy infection spread,

that they probably achieved some kind of group or population or herd immunity. So they sort of went back to somewhat normalcy, but they had a huge surge. They had hospitalizations, incredible amount of death, these horrific scenes like we saw throughout the United States and around the world of mass burials and so forth. But then now, starting in September, October, started to experience the second wave. And now it's off the charts, evidently. And we see the same thing with an incredible amount of serious disease and death. And it seems to defy the idea of, well, wait a minute. I thought that this community probably achieved herd immunity in the spring, certainly with ongoing infection and other therapies. They also went through a series of lockdowns, even though they did come out of lockdown and even had demonstrations when they did in late fall, which may have contributed

to this new wave, but the idea that waves come. So they've also, as many of you know, have identified several variants through the analysis of the different virus types that they're getting out of the sampling from the population and have identified several variants that look to be more transmissible, possibly even more virulent, and possibly even might render the vaccines a little less efficacious. So, you know, now there's a hypothesis, two or three or four hypotheses about what's going on and what are the lessons learned? Is this generalizable to here in the United States or other places around the world? So, you know, stay tuned. But the idea is, again, that, you know, viruses spread. That's what they do. They transmit to survive. And it's

that infection and transmission, the transmission chain is what we talk about every week on this podcast. And we also know now from the biologists that, you know, transmission, particularly massive infection, enables adaptation. It's the same thing, I believe, again, in crime prevention, that if you don't dose properly, the same as antibiotics, even with a bacterial infection, you might take out something or temporarily delay, but you might actually make it worse if you don't do it right or we don't apply enough of a dose.

And we may have seen this in some of the writing where people were arrested, but only a few of the groups that were causing destruction, that were breaking windows, looting, burning, attacking people, and so on, where most were not arrested. Or even those that were, most were not prosecuted. They might have even been released within an hour or two. So does that make things worse? And we're seeing the same thing potentially with virus and with the virus around the world where there's this, the strains come out, there's adaptations, mutations occurring in different areas as they adapt and overcome in the same way that humans do. So stay tuned to that. But that's what we're trying to do. We talk about masking and, and then simple things about masking, we see a double, triple, quadruple mask and so forth. But again, we're just trying to set up barricades and

obstacles for the aerialized, you know, and droplets that, that come out of us, that the particles, the viral particles are in, and that's the only way to transmit the virus from one person to another other than touching and touching a surface or a person. That's why we're continually washing hands and to a certain extent surfaces, but so stay tuned and pay attention. We know that the same case, so it can't be transmitted if you're not near another person. It won't be transmitted if we are, if both people are masked, particularly if there's enough of a filtration, enough of an obstacle course that none or very few of the viral particles make it in through another person's, through that obstacle course and into them.

And I think a big thing that we're all learning too, of course, is the difference between infection of exposure to a virus. And that may account for this high level of antibodies being found. And then they're infected, but did they actually get the disease? Did they launch enough of an immune response, both innate and adaptive, to fight the virus? And now they may have some immunity for a month, a year, something in between, or who knows. So there's a lot going on. And so when you look at if you're exposed, if you're actually infected, in other words, we onboard some viral particles, but we're not, we didn't get the disease COVID-19, you know, or if we did, maybe we're asymptomatic. We may be

symptomatic mildly exhibiting one or more, or maybe serious disease or even death. So, you know, these things are relatively, they're based on common sense, on logic models, on observation, like any science. And I think, again, it's all directly relatable to what we all do in crime control. So that's why I kind of bring it up and look at, but, but we learn and we, every time we think we've got something, we know better. And any of us that have been in loss prevention or asset protection for more than a year, more than a decade, realize that every time we think we've got something, we feel like we're playing whack-a-mole and it can come back, come back stronger, come back weirder, more adapted. And how many of us have seen how criminals adapt and they, we call it displacement,

right? And place or time or target or method and seriousness and so on of what they're doing. So I think on the vaccine front, again, probably over 50 in preclinical. We understand there are at least 37 in phase one. Dose ranging and safety profile trials, phase two, there are about 24 vaccines. There are now 20 in phase three. 10, as we know, either have emergency use authorization or are fully approved around the world. Now that's 10, and we believe that there are two more with Novavax and with the J&J. And then we know now with AstraZeneca is approved in some places, but the United States may well have four or five or more vaccines approved by summer and in wide circulation because of the operation warp speed.

There are already millions of doses that are either in production or have been, just awaiting the possibility of approval. We understand at least four vaccines have been abandoned, two by Merck, that were safe and effective but just didn't blow past the 50% efficacy goal or objective or requirement that the FDA laid down early in this pandemic. But a lot of activity in that area, a lot of research around reinfection after vaccines. And some of us have seen some anecdotal things around that. But again, the idea here is that the vaccines provide us a lot, but they don't provide everything, and nothing, of course, ever will.

But it's important to note all the research that's going on. On the encouraging side, there's a lot going on in the vaccination area. We saw the prior administration reach the 1 million a day goal. Now we're about, evidently, according to retorts, we're at 1.3 million per day in the United States. Over 33 million Americans have been vaccinated with the first, and it's going to be closing on 7 million of those will have completed two doses. We know that, so that's pretty significant. Over 100 million people have been vaccinated in 62 countries around the world. And so around the world, we're four to five million per day are being vaccinated. So that continues. Again, we saw it's like with the blood flow into the capillaries, that down in those capillaries is very difficult for tiny, tiny health departments that might have one or two people or even a dozen to try and get out and conduct the immunization process. We've seen in LA and other places where there's been a little bit of disruption, where somebody's tried to disrupt the process.

So that provides us further hurdles and a challenge to those of us in crime and loss control to try and help better understand and help protect. And that's why you saw at LPRC, we talked about a planning call, and then we had the actual first vaccine call with multiple, multiple retailers on there, as well as the National Association of Chained Drugstores and FMI. So we'll continue to support in that area. Good news there. So we know the J&J is probably close to potential approval. It looks like they've got from 49 to 80 plus percent efficaciousness. It does range though, because in South Africa, where they were fortunately did the trials, there was unfortunately this new variant that seems again to be highly transmissible and may even evade somewhat the vaccine's mechanism of action. So that's going to be, you know, stay tuned there, but it still gives people a fighting

chance and a better chance for us to break the transmission chain in addition to staying away from others and not getting too close into that viral cloud or masking or both. So, you know, going over to the therapies really quickly, you know, Regeneron announced that they are monoclonal antibody cocktail, which evidently includes two different forms of that therapy. It seems to be very, very efficacious, and they don't identify it's a phase one or two, but it looks like several hundred test subjects, participants, which, of course, in our field is pretty robust. But that looks to be very promising. So at the LPRC front, I mentioned that we are having today, and this will be out there and available, LPRC kickoff. We've got four amazing panels going on as part of that, a great leadership there that are going and doing some deep dives into what they experienced in 2020, overall lessons learned, mistakes, adaptations that they made, that we made as a group, and then what they're doing to leverage all the learnings in 2020 for 21's success. And of course, all the adaptations of the retail enterprise that

each of us are assigned to protect, and those adaptations, and how we continually, as an APLP field, need to adapt, adjust, but get ahead of things, better leverage technology, and distance remote participation by our employees and contributions and so on so with no further ado I'm going to go over to Tony D'Onofrio and Tony CEO of ProSecure Retail Global if I'm getting the title correctly and then we'll go to Tom after that but Tony you got this pretty much. A pleasure to be on this. And again, great update on what's going on with the vaccines and COVID

and also looking forward to today's LPRC event. So let me start with what's happening in the parking lots with the curbside retail. There's some new research from sale through in terms of four curbside customers to know in 2021 in a survey that of us consumers 31 percent that use gopis or buying line pickup and store or curbside pickup this year they identify four different types of shoppers i'm sharing this because this is going to become a very important sector for retail going

forward, shopping in the parking lot. So Persona One is the new shopper who's new to the brand. Welcome emails, which is a way to get them there. They have an open rate of 50%. And the key to this Persona is to work it into your welcome series, be crystal clear in the confirmation, promote your mobile app, recommend popular products, get social, click and collect. Persona number two is the bulkist beginner. So the beginner would buy online, pick up in store. 39% purchase from new brands during the quarantine and 88 percent plan to stick with those new brands. So for this segment, it's about segmenting by the customer's motivations, spotlight your safety requirements, update your website filtering, try trending, collaborative

filtering recommendation, working into your re-engagement messaging. Persona number three is the pickup probe. 83% of consumers are happy to share their data with brands for personalized experiences. For this persona, facilitate a frictionless pickup experience, personalize as much as possible, prop up post-purchase messaging look ahead with predictive analytics and understand the time that time is of the essence and then the final persona number four the loyal shopper this is a very critical shop for the loyal shopper lifetime value is 30 percent higher than average for this persona mix up the messaging, edit to the abandonment, lean into your loyalty

program, incorporate interest-based recommendation, and think about what you can test. Consumers are clicking, collecting 78% more than they did pre-pandemic. Brands doing it best include Target, Home Depot best buy kohl's dick's sporting goods walmart alta buda alta beauty and others it this is to me is a critical new way to shop that will make it's not going to go away it's going to continue and for a key part of this audience we got to figure out how to continuously protect it so it's a little bit about shopping in the parking lot. Let's go to the mall and see what's happening to mall. And this research is from JLL,

and they called it playing better in retail in 2021. So in 2019, the retail and restaurant brands that provided the most interactive and engaging experiences led the market. In 2020, it was those that provided safety and ease of purchase. In 2021, convenience will remain as a key metric for better performance. For malls, consumers are looking for centralized pickup areas. In one of the surveys that they cited, 70% of pick-up shoppers said they would like to pick up, they would like to have one pick-up area in the mall. Currently, apparel

and accessory stores account for 57% of total mall space. The study also highlighted the percent of bankruptcies by sector in 2020. So 25% of the bankruptcies in 2020 were apparel. Home furnishings were 14%. Restaurants were 11%. Department stores, 11%. Others, 39%. And then JLL, which specializes in real estate, really thinks about what's going to happen to malls, and they see malls morphing into office space, more industrial, residential, educational, and medical, in addition to shopping.

And what they see is a trend of employees seeking shorter commutes and mixed-use benefits. commutes and mixed-use benefits, Moscow served the demand for 15-minute cities in the near future with retail centers linked to business hubs and affordable apartments all within a ready-made mixed-use district. JLL is predicting that by the end of 2021, 80% of the office workers that were inside offices in 2019 will be back into offices because of the vaccines. But we're not ready to declare a victory for urban retail. Positive signs are in the market, which were difficult to find in 2020, and they're now beginning to emerge in 2021. So the mall will be back. It will be different, but not necessarily as we've seen it in the past. And to me, and I've been following this for a while,

if you want to understand what's going to happen at the mall, look to Asia and especially to China to see the future of the retail mall. And I'm going to close with one of my favorite studies that comes out every year about this time in terms of what's happening to technology inside of retail stores. This is a 2021 store experience study from RIS News. In there, they also provide some data. For example, once the numbers are all counted, they expect that total retail sales in 2020 will be up nearly 3%. For 2021, the projections are for in-store sales to be up 4.8%, which is a very robust number.

Desktop commerce up 9.7%, and mobile commerce up over 12%. Overall retail growth is projected to be up 4.7% in 2021, which, again, is very robust. Store count is expected to be up 4%, and 1.8% of stores will be remodeled. Tier 1 retailers will spend 5% more in IT for the enterprise and 4% more for stores in terms of technology. Also interesting, they shared how we're spending money in stores. So total revenue shared by customer journey, 72% of the money is being spent in store. spend in-store. Buy online is 11%. Buy online delivered from DC is 11%. Store delivery, 5%.

Ship from store, 5%. Vopis click and collect, 4%. Other, 3%. And then they also highlighted the market leader. So the ones that are doing it well, where are they spending their money? And they're defining market leaders, anybody that claimed 10% or higher increase in sales in 2019. So those market leaders are spending 44% higher, have 44% higher store count growth. They have 39% higher remodel growth. So they're remodeling and opening more stores. They're also spending 69% more on IT enterprise infrastructure, 23% more on store IT, 20% more on buy online, pick up and store technologies, and 18% more on store delivery. And finally, some of the key areas that I really like to study, the top five priorities for retailers in 2021 are personalizing the customer experience, supporting contactless payments, upgrading customer relationship management, loyalty programs, empowering store associates to improve customer service, and optimizing the digital journey for store fulfillment. They also list the five technologies, the new technologies that will be most important

in 2021, and they are SD-WAN, so bigger pipes or wide area networks, RFID, microservices, infrastructure, architectures, video analytics, and edge computing. And they end with a forecast that retailers expect 5G usage to grow 11x in the next five years. So that's a little bit where technology is going in 2021. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Tom. Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Reed. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Tom. Thank you, Tony.

Thank you, Reed. Just a couple of quick points. And I'll start off with the COVID vaccination update. So there are two things and one we've been speaking about, but it's just a quick reminder of there have been a really large amount of websites popping up with home remedies, if you will. up with home remedies, if you will. Some actually talking about prepayment to register for vaccination. I only continuously remind it because it continues to happen. It's actually predominantly in the UK today, being almost every day something new comes out. And as what we normally see is things that tend to occur from a nefarious nature in the UK transition very cleanly to the United States, we are seeing these websites

pop up. And again, some of them from, I think, two weeks ago, I said, look very, very official and ask for very small amounts of money to prepay. That's just a reminder of that today, there is no prepayment or pre-registration that requires payment on the web. The other thing to be mindful of is that in some states, legitimately, there are pre-registration in the U.S. to get onto a list. Be very, very careful when you're registering to make sure that it's an official site and that you're not giving out personal information. What you will find with most of these registration sites is they're actually simply just looking for

name, date of birth, and email. They're not actually the legitimate sites asking for much more than that. As always, any personal information should be safeguarded, so just be very, very careful where you're putting that information if you are registered. I know that when I registered for the state of New Jersey, it asked very little information. So just something to keep out there. Unfortunately, the bad guys are creating honeypots, if you will, in some cases, just to collect information. Another COVID-19 piece that's starting to occur is as people are very excited and posting their vaccination cards, there are two things that are occurring. This has been very, very rarely seen in the U.S. so far, but again, in Europe, it's happening pretty regularly where people are posting their

vaccination cards. And there's kind of two things here to be mindful of. One, there's personal information on those cards that when you post the picture uh some people aren't fully blacking out and they're basically posting that personal information for everybody to know the other one which is a newer phenomenon which i do uh see very little in the u.s today i see quite a bit in europe is the sale of these cards so someone goes on takes your card it takes a picture of it, photoshops it, goes out and prints it. And you may be asking yourself why someone would buy one of these cards. Well, in certain places in the US and worldwide, these vaccinations are hard to get. So if you want to travel and you want to move around, these cards in theory will help you do that. So in the

UK today, you can go online and buy a card that is legitimate, but doesn't belong to you, belongs to someone else. So Reid got his vaccinations and he posted online, the scammer takes it, cleans it up, puts your name on it, and then sells it to you for 250 euros or 250 pounds or $300, depending on where you're buying it. And then when you go to travel, you can use that to avoid quarantine, to avoid things. So this is a new phenomenon. I expect it to increase. And again, it isn't an anti-vaxxer thing. It's really a, I can't get my vaccination yet and I need to travel. So just a kind of a reminder as always, be very mindful of what you're posting online. Once it's

online, it doesn't go away. So if you're getting that vaccination card, please, I know we're all very excited about it, but if you're going to post it, make sure that everything is blacked out so that no one can use it, either from your personal information standpoint or from a standpoint of being able to sell that. And then I'll wrap up with kind of a, just a note on Tony talked about the trends and what's coming and all of them, if you really think about it, are digital. And one of the things that all of us really have to work very carefully on is as the digital acceleration is occurring at such a rapid rate, we are basically digitizing everything. And I know Tony and I've spoken about this many times before, but your digital risk footprint increases dramatically. So all of these things that are occurring require an extra special

look. And I know that the LPRC is doing that through many of the working groups, whether it be the data, the ORC or the innovations working group to really say, how do we stay ahead of that and mitigate some of these potential losses? We are starting to see some of the fraud exposure that occurred from the rapid change over to e-com and some of these fraud numbers that are coming out. And it's just a reminder, as always, as you approach new digital ventures, that you do everything you can to safeguard them. And back over to you, Reid. Wow.

Thanks so much, Tom and Tony. A lot of good information. We tried to do it, do it right, do it quickly. But please, as always, for any of you out there, if you've got any insights that you need to share, any questions, any comments or critiques, please send them to operations at lpresearch.org. Please visit the lpresearch.org website, explore, and again, reach out to us. We want to hear from you and we take it to heart what you say, as long as it's productive. So with that, I want to thank Tony and Tom, our producer, Kevin Tran, you all out there. Please, everybody stay safe, productive, do your best, have fun. And with that, signing off from a 30 degree Gainesville, Florida, stay safe.

Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute

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