Body cameras, much like the ones police have been wearing for years, are becoming more common among retail employees as theft increases.
The parent company of TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods has announced it is having some workers at its stores wear the body cams to decrease “shrink,” the retail term for theft. TJX, the parent company, said it expects shrink to be flat this year, in part because of the measures.
“One of the things that we’ve added, we started to do last year, late towards the year, were body cameras on our LP associates,” TJX CFO John Klinger said on an earnings call last month. “And when somebody comes in, it’s sort of—it’s almost like a de-escalation where people are less likely to do something when they’re being videotaped. So, we definitely feel that that’s playing a role.”
Company officials also say the camera is meant to record incidents for legal, safety, and training purposes.
Not many U.S. retailers have so publicly embraced body cameras yet, but in the U.K., grocers including Lidl and Tesco, Britain’s biggest grocery chain, equip employees with cameras.
“Money spent on making sure people are safe at work is always well spent,” said Tesco CEO Ken Murphy last year. “But it should not have to be like this.”
Retail theft has been a growing problem at stores, but exactly how much financial damage it has caused is still a bit uncertain. One report claimed retail losses of $100 billion in 2022 due to theft. Last December, though, the National Retail Federation was forced to revise a report from earlier in the year that claimed organized retail crime accounts for nearly half of overall industry shrink. The revised report also deleted any estimate of organized retail crime’s overall impact in dollars.