RFID has been a vital retail technology for almost 20 years, but what started with a simple beep at the exit is now a critical piece of enterprise-wide loss prevention and inventory intelligence strategies. And while its uses in retail are many, it is RFIDโs unique ability to counteract organized retail crime (ORC) thatโs become a much-publicized area of focus during the pandemic.
To explore how RFIDโs abilities to interdict ORC have maturedโand how they continue to add value by protecting inventory from warehouses to storefronts and beyondโSensormatic Solutions recently held a virtual event, โThe IoT of Retail: Using RFID to Bring Down Organized Retail Crime.โ The event featured Joe Coll, vice president of asset protection and strategy at Macyโs, who spoke at length about the retailerโs ongoing RFID journey and the value it continues to deliver.
Major ROI From Humble Beginnings
Today, Macyโs leverages RFID for a variety of mission-critical roles, but according to Coll, that wasnโt always the case.

โWeโve been at this journey now with RFID for some time at Macyโs, and it didnโt begin where it is today,โ he said. โWe began in a simple format for RFID, just merchandise visibility for our customers that were coming into our brick-and-mortar locations and making sure that we had the representation of product on the floor that our books told us we did.
โBut whatโs really exciting is that it hasnโt stopped there,โ he added. โWe continue to grow and iterate on RFID as an organization. We continue to push our merchant partners and our vendors to understand the unlock value of RFID tagging their product at the source.โ
But what started purely as an inventory play soon bore fruit as a loss prevention tactic.
โShortage visibility is completely tied to merchandise visibility,โ Coll said. โAs we grew RFID at Macyโs, we began to migrate out of just doing a financial inventory once a year in January, to start doing a monthly cycle count in our stores, scanning every EPC that was on our products every 30 days, resetting our book stock in our stores, and in essence, being able to understand what the report card was in the last 30 days.โ
This, Coll said, enabled the retailer to pivot from setting a single yearly loss prevention strategy to being able to pivot and iterate on a rolling 30-day cadence.
โHaving the ability to change that strategy every 30 days and continue to talk about it with the store leadership led to a significant improvement in our storesโ ability to execute and deliver results on those strategies.โ
An Incredible Unlock
While shoplifting and other forms of retail fraud are nothing new, retailers have been so impacted by ORC during COVID-19 that law enforcement and legislators from Florida, Wisconsin, Virginia, and beyond have begun to tackle the issue in earnest. In terms of pure revenue, shoplifting alone now costs retailers 2-3 percent of their overall sales, compared to just 0.7โ1 percent prior to the pandemic.
โWhat youโre seeing in the media over the past 24 months is just the sensationalizing of all of the retail theft thatโs happening,โ Coll stressed. โItโs on the mind of every CEO.โ
But itโs not just the revenue loss from stolen inventory thatโs keeping CEOs up at night. Itโs also the lost productivity resulting from the countless man hours required to identify what went missing, who took it, and gathering the evidence required to build a criminal case.
So how can RFID put those CEOsโ minds at ease?
โHistorically, if somebody walked out of a retail store with an electronic article surveillance (EAS) tag on a product that they had stolenโor on 100 productsโyou would have no idea of the difference,โ Coll said. โFurthermore, you wouldnโt even know which item they walked out with. Youโd just know that the item they walked out with actually had an EAS tag on the product. But when you introduce the ability to combine EAS with RFID and video of the event, you unlock the game of โwhodunnit.โ
โNow, youโre answering the who, the when, the what, and the how. In the past, getting that answer took a lot of labor and investigative support,โ he said. โHaving a technology at our entrances thatโs truly connected across our entire network gave us the ability to incredibly increase the efficiency of this process. It truly gave us an incredible unlock.โ
Get More Insights Today
To learn more about how RFID delivers value to Macyโs and other retailers, view the recorded webinar today.