The Quotable Richard Hollinger
When ABC needs a political expert, they call in George Stephanopoulos. For health questions, CNN always seeks out Sanjay Gupta. When we need a Loss Prevention (LP) expert, Jeff Stein always helps out. And when working on a story about retail crime, the world’s news outlets employ University of Florida professor Richard Hollinger.
Dr. Hollinger is the author of Crime, Deviance and the Computer, Theft by Employees and Dishonesty in the Workplace: A Manager’s Guide to Preventing Employee Theft and every year he conducts the National Retail Federation‘s annual National Retail Security Survey. The research his team has provided for the last eight years helps set LP strategy nationwide. For example, this year’s survey found that employees were responsible for 47 percent of retail theft, up from last year’s high of 41 percent. And when Dr. Hollinger is quoted in the New York Times saying, ”We have never seen employee-theft numbers quite this high” — LP pros began to concentrate more on internal theft.
You could almost call Dr. Hollinger the Alan Greenspan of retail theft — one sentence from him and markets and people begin to move.
On the retail balancing act between security and customer privacy, Dr. Hollinger was quoted in Business Week, saying
“To keep shrinkage low with metal detectors and security might be a draconian environment, like going to the airport vs. going to the mall, which encourages shopping with its fountains and music.”
And Laura Landro of the Wall Street Journal sought him out for commentary when she was apprehended by Kmart Loss Prevention pros.
Back in 2004, his research pointed out the rise in return fraud and his consulting work with The Limited lead to a Washington Post story, where he was among the first to alert retailers to the fact that the Internet is being used for much more than just sending Evites to friends. The WAPO story reported that
“In recent years, scammers have used the Internet to launder the money — people steal merchandise, return it for credit slips at stores, then turn those credit slips into cash by selling them at a discount on eBay or other online auction sites.”
$30 billion, or 1.7 percent of sales, went out the door and online due to retail fraud in 2003 and Dr. Hollinger estimated that that about half of that loss may have been related to bad returns.
His solution? Technology — and for that reason he is an Identity Resolution Daily favorite. Here, he tells WAPO
“Over the decades, retailers realized they were leaving the door wide open for fraud and a number of the major ones realized that . . . there has to be some technological solution to this.”
There is a technological solution, Dr. Hollinger, and we’d love to come to Florida to tell you a bit about how identity resolution can help out with return fraud, Organized Retail Crime (ORC) and other forms of retail fraud.
