Loss Prevention Research Council Weekly Series - Episode 160 - Latest Retail Trends Shared at Axis Retail Leadership Forum
With Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D'Onofrio, and Tom Meehan
The LPRC is in full swing preparing for IMPACT 2023. Our hosts discuss our prep and welcome a new research scientist, Caleb Bowyer, to the team.
Some other topics covered this week are the recent Axis event and some takeaways, some recent retail trends and how they affect us, and latest cybersecurity updates and best practices.
This week I want to focus on some updates that I delivered on the state of retail at the Axis Retail Leadership Forum this week. Let me start by saying that LPRC was well represented by a presentation by one of our producers Diego Rodriguez who did a great presentation on all the activities taking place at the Loss Prevention Research Council.
The audience was 73 individuals representing 43 retailers and the meeting was held in the Google Cloud Innovation Offices in Silicon Valley.
As this event was sponsored by Axis, I opened the presentation by asking the question in which country was the CCTV camera invented. The choices were United States, China, Germany, and Japan. The answer to the question is Germany. The CCTV camera was invented in World War 2 by the Germans to watch remotely the launch of their V2 rockets as they sometimes tended to explode on launch.
The first mass public use of the CCTV camera was the coronation of Queen Elisabeth in the 1950s. And this is probably when London starting acquiring its reputation as one of the most video surveilled city in the world. There are currently nearly a million cameras installed just in London or roughly one CCTV camera per 10 people. If you do go to London, you are like to be captured on CCTV up to 70 days per day. All this London data from Clarion UK as of 2022.
Also, interesting that in 2021, the world overall crossed over 1 billion CCTV cameras installed with China and the United States having the most. If you look at top 10 cities with the most CCTV cameras per 1000 people, the top 4 are all in India. Number 5 is Singapore. London is number 10.
I provided an update to the audience on the state of the world economies using July 2023 data from the International Monetary Fund and OECD. Globally, gross domestic product is projected at 3% for 2023 and 3% again in 2024, according to the IMF. This is actually an improvement from the forecast earlier this year.
For advanced economies such as the United States, the projected growth for 2023 is projected to be 1.5% in 2023 and 1.4% in 2024. This is a dramatic decline from the 2.7% growth that advanced economies saw in 2022. All this data from the IMF.
United States growth is projected to be just 1.6%, slightly better than the advanced economy average for 2023 according to the OECD. For 2024, the current projection is that USA economy will only grow 1%.
To the audience I asked a second question which I though was very interesting. Which countries have the highest thefts per 100,000 people. The choices were United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, or Sweden. The answer was a very surprising Denmark, followed by Sweden.
I commented this was interesting as multiple of the Scandinavia countries that include Denmark and Sweden are considered the happiest countries in the world. What is this theft data really telling us. The data by the was from World of Statistics which publishes their content regularly on Twitter.
I reminded the audience that retail is a very vibrant industry that will keep on growing into the future. In 2023, according to Emarkerter, retail as an industry is valued at over 30 trillion dollars. It will rise to nearly 34 trillion dollars by 2026.
Retail ecommerce will keep on growing but a slower pace. By 2026, 24% of total global retail sales will be online. This means that 76% of total retail sales in 2026 will still be in physical stores.
Stores are not going away. They are actually the opposite, becoming much more important to making online sales more profitable. One of the stats that I shared is that online orders cost retailers 10% to 15% more than purchases made in a physical store.
For the first time I also shared some forecasts for the 2023 holiday season. NRF project that this years’ holiday sales will grow 4% to 6%. Just over 80% of the holiday spend this year will be in physical stores.
Also interesting, this holiday season, AI will influence $194 billion dollars in global online spend. Buy on Line and Pick Up in Store will drive an incremental $28 billion dollars globally. Social media advertising will drive 10X more holiday shopping visits than traditional marketing. And 17% of gifts this holiday season will be resold or used items saving 32 billion pounds of waster from landfills.
The five hottest technologies for retail leaders which are defined as those that had 10% or more growth the previous year were RFID, Updated Point of Sale, Microservices, Edge Computing, and Extended Communications into the parking lot.
The top 5 technologies for 2023 are projected to be Geo location solutions, Tools for associates, electronic shelf labels, mobile checkout, and Loss Prevention Prescriptive Analytics. The top 5 technologies analysis for both 2022 and 2023 are from the IHL Group. Great data in the presentation on the actual value they delivered for those retail leaders.
I ended my presentation by stating that loss prevention is at a key critical moment in importance. Over 200 retailers at the CEO and CFO level brought up the problem of shrink in the last round of earnings call.
I reminded the audience that more needs to be done, including improved LP technologies, improved legal frameworks around controversial technologies and organized retail crime. And stronger partnerships between retailers, law enforcement, solutions providers, government entities, and industry groups such as the Loss Prevention Research Council. According to NRF, over 6 in 10 retailers believe that a federal ORC law is required to address challenges with professional thieves.
Loss Prevention by stepping up has the opportunity to be part of the C-Suite and the Loss Prevention Research Council is a great place to partner in driving this improved future.
