Fifteen years has gone by quickly—until I look at my photo in our first issue compared to my current photo. When we started the magazine in 2001, we knew the industry needed a publication and hoped that we could find a way to fill the need. Thanks to great support from retailers, solutions providers, and readers, we’ve stayed afloat and hopefully met at least some of that need. There’s still a lot to do, and we look forward to continuing to serve the loss prevention industry far into the future.
This September–October issue coincides exactly fifteen years to the month that we published the premiere fall 2001 edition. This issue is our ninetieth publication. All of the covers over the past fifteen years are reproduced in the special gatefold cover of this edition. In addition, our good friend Bill Turner, LPC, has spent the last two months looking through each of those magazines to write a three-part retrospective.
We turned the tables on Jim Lee, LPC, the magazine’s executive editor and cofounder, who normally interviews an industry executive for each issue. Given some of those ninety interviews involved multiple people, he’s interviewed well over a hundred people who gave their insights about the LP world. In this edition, he gets his opportunity to offer some of his observations.
Lee also writes the Parting Words column at the end of the magazine. But given he sat for the executive interview, we gave him a reprieve in this issue so as not to tax him too much and asked the magazine’s COO Kevin McMenimen, LPC, and Director of Marketing Merek Bigelow to try to fill his shoes.
Our friends at Wicklander-Zulawski have been writing about interviewing and interrogation since 2001. By my calculation, that represents something like 130,000-plus words to help educate our industry investigators. In this edition, they look back at the changes they have observed over the past fifteen years and look forward at what might change ahead in the world of interviewing.
Another close friend of ours and to the LP industry is Dick Hollinger, PhD. He too has written for the magazine since the beginning. We coaxed him out of his recent retirement to put down his fishing gear and look back at that first article where he profiled The Container Store to provide an update.
We ran a series of articles in 2006 and 2007 called Legends of Loss Prevention where we profiled several icons of the LP industry. We asked the author of that series, John Velke, now the vice president of loss prevention and safety for Total Wine & More, to recap that series. As an aside, Velke is an accomplished writer in his own right with several books to his credit. His latest title, Prove ‘Em Innocent: The Art & Science of Workplace Investigations, was just released and is highly recommended.
We also tracked down Mimi Welch, who wrote the Women in LP column in the premiere issue that eventually morphed into Diversity in LP. Mimi is alive and well in Seattle, Washington, where she’s still consulting and advising individuals and organizations on creating better workplace environments. Today she’s focusing on bridging the generational gap between millennials and baby boomers. A sample of her current work is in this issue.
Finally, Bob DiLonardo, who edited our Industry News column for fifteen years, looked back at some of the key topics and events that influenced the industry over that time. Also in that section is a report on the results of a new survey on cash management conducted by Tellermate that offers some interesting insights.
While much of this issue commemorates our fifteenth anniversary, we also feature articles on current topics like crisis management and organized retail crime, plus many of our regular columns.
One new section called LPM Digital gives our print readers a glimpse into some of the original content and daily reporting we are publishing on our digital channel. Check here in each new edition of the print magazine to see what you may be missing. If you are not a digital subscriber, we encourage you to take advantage of our daily e-newsletters and breaking news by signing up at LossPreventionMedia.com.
It’s gratifying to look back over the past fifteen years, but it’s exciting to look forward to what awaits the loss prevention industry down the road. Please stay with us for the ride.
