Telaid Then and Now: Loss Prevention in the ‘80s Vs Today

Before real time analytics and AI powered cameras, loss prevention was a job built
on hunches, film canisters, and a lot of standing around. Three Telaid leaders who
lived it firsthand, Mike Korcuba, SVP of Sales, Jim Brodzik, Director of Enterprise
Accounts, and Wayne Bidwell, Director of Enterprise Sales, sat down to compare
notes on what the job actually looked like in the 1980s versus what it has become
today.

A Department of Three or Four People
Korcuba's LP career started in a department store environment in the Northeast,
where a typical department ran on three to four people total. One full time employee
covered a standard forty hour week, with part timers filling in the gaps so the store
had at least one security presence on the floor during business hours. The job back
then, as Korcuba describes it, was built around catching the shoplifter or internal
thief in the act, a sharp contrast to today's focus on proactive prevention and safety
for associates, guests, and the brand.

The toolkit matched the era: grainy VHS tapes, black and white CCTV cameras, and
view booths or observation posts where a team member could sit in a high risk area
and watch customer behavior, waiting for the moment someone stopped being a
customer and became, in LP terms, a client. Korcuba also spent time sitting outside
a store in the mall, watching people walk in, and running selective surveillance on
anyone who looked like they were on a mission that was not shopping.

Bidwell's path into the industry ran through alarm technology rather than the sales
floor. As an intrusion alarm technician, he dealt with motion sensors so sensitive that
an incoming fax machine transmission or hot exhaust from a mall floor cleaner could
set off an alarm. It was, in his words, working on genuinely antiquated systems.

Staffing Was the Budget, and CCTV Was a Luxury
Ask any of the three where the loss prevention budget actually went in the 80s, and
the answer is unanimous: staffing, year in and year out. Whether a store got an
upgrade to alarms, locks, or guards depended heavily on that location's risk level. A
store lucky enough to get a CCTV system in that era might have had a dozen
cameras covering 100,000 square feet, with pan tilt zoom cameras that assumed
someone was actively watching in real time and ready to make a quick handoff from
the camera room to the sales floor the moment a shopper became a shoplifter.

Those early cameras had decent resolution but no color, which meant a clean
incident report depended on getting to the sales floor fast enough to see the
merchandise with your own eyes. Bidwell adds that not every store even had CCTV.
Some relied on holdup switches connected to 35 millimeter cameras, which meant
that after an incident, a technician had to physically visit the store, pull the film, and
drive it to a Fotomat, the small roadside photo huts that once sat in nearly every
strip mall parking lot, to get it developed within the hour before handing it off to the
asset protection manager or the police.

Capital investment in theft deterrence technology, like an early EAS system, was a
hard sell in that era. Korcuba notes the ROI on those systems was not fully
understood or accepted for close to another decade, until they became standard
equipment across the industry.

Three Different Paths Into the Same Career
All three came to loss prevention from different starting points. Korcuba's
introduction was almost accidental, a hotel security job that involved watching an
office tower or convention center and, on a good day, driving the courtesy van for
guests and flight crews. A retail manager who saw his background offered him a
shot at a store security role, a path he believes still exists today, even though the job
itself has changed dramatically. Brodzik's route ran through the stores themselves,
working as a clerk and shelf stocker and admiring the loss prevention staff on-site
before eventually joining an organization that built loss prevention technology, a full
circle moment he calls serendipitous. Bidwell started in 1987 as an ADT technician,
equipped with a beeper, a company phone card, and a work van with a built in radio
system, in an era well before cell phones existed.

What Counted as High-Tech in the 80s
Ask the group what passed for cutting edge technology at the time, and the list
reads like a museum exhibit. Korcuba points to microwave EAS systems installed to
fight high shrink locations as one of the earliest real investments, and to the shift
toward covert surveillance kits that let LP teams start catching internal theft, which
he notes was consistently more damaging to profitability than external shoplifting
because internal actors had far more access and could stage merchandise before
removing it.

Brodzik highlights a different strategy from the same era: benefit denial. Introduced
in the late 80s, the ink tag held two vials of ink and was designed so that forcibly
removing it from a garment would ruin the item the thief was trying to steal. Selling
that concept into retailers, he says, took a lot of evangelical persuasion at the time.
Similar tools included locking loops for leather coats that prevented removal from
the rack, and versions that would alarm if the garment was taken off entirely.

Bidwell's high-tech era centered on the shift from key switch intrusion alarms, where
a technician might have to confirm fifty individual doors were secured across a few
zones, to digital alarm communicators. That shift let retailers monitor systems from a
security operations center or a UL listed central station and flag when an alarm was
disarmed earlier than expected, a signal that something at the store might be wrong.
The pager, Korcuba adds, was its own quiet revolution, letting store security
managers relay a description and a heads up to a neighboring store the moment a
suspicious person left one location and appeared headed toward another.

The Adrenaline They Still Remember
Asked what they actually miss about the old days, none of the three romanticize the
job itself. Korcuba is candid that the work was undervalued and involved a lot of
standing around, but the one thing he does miss is the adrenaline of an
apprehension done right: approaching a suspect respectfully, avoiding an
altercation, and protecting both the business and the people around it without
exposing the brand to backlash. Bidwell echoes the sentiment, but frames what he
misses as the relative simplicity of an era with fewer risks and fewer safety
concerns, when loss prevention was about protecting against the few rather than
managing risk against the many.

From Standalone Department to Cross Functional Partner
The clearest throughline in today's environment, according to Brodzik, is not a single
piece of technology but a shift in how the function operates inside the business. In
the 80s, loss prevention stood alone, focused purely on stopping shoplifting. Today's
asset protection team partners closely with operations, supply chain, procurement,
sourcing, and finance, and that partnership is what has allowed the technology itself
to evolve as far as it has.

On the technology side, Korcuba points to real time video tied to point of sale data
as the standout capability of the modern era, catching what he calls the paper cuts
as they happen instead of waiting for a loss large enough to justify a case file.
License plate recognition, watch lists, and RFID systems that can flag a shelf sweep
of forty items in real time are giving teams the ability to work smarter rather than
harder. Bidwell sees analytics and AI as the next frontier, pointing out that cameras
are increasingly being watched one hundred percent of the time, not by a person in
a back office, but by the technology itself, with new applications for that capability
emerging on what feels like a daily basis.

Ready to take the next step? Contact Telaid to see how we can partner on your next project by integrating smart technology.