StopLift Checkout Vision Systems is being rolled out to the entire Big Y supermarket chain to catch this growing source of employee retail theft.
 
After seeing the impact in initial stores, Big Y is currently installing the StopLift's video recognition software throughout its 56-store chain, headquartered in Springfield, MA.  The technology detects what the retail industry calls “sweethearting”, a practice which occurs when cashiers pretend to scan merchandise but deliberately bypass the scanner, thus not charging the customer for the merchandise.  The customer is often a friend, family member or fellow employee working in tandem with the cashier.

Already 35 Big Y stores are on line with StopLift.  The rollout will be completed by the end of the year.
 
StopLift, headquarted in Cambridge, MA, will monitor 100% of Big Y’s existing security cameras mounted over the checkout registers.  As soon as a “sweethearting” incident occurs, the StopLift software flags the transaction as suspicious, identifying the cashier and the date and time of the theft.

Unpaid items left in the basket — Bottom of the Basket (BOB), Middle of the Basket (MOB), and Top of the Basket (TOB) — will also be detected by StopLift’s technology. 

Retail theft is the fastest growing crime in America, according to the FBI.  In a recent survey conducted by the Food Management Institute of 156 food industry loss prevention executives, 75% said that theft-related loss has increased over the past three-six months.  Nearly two thirds are dealing with increased employee theft.  Loss prevention executives draw a direct link between the nation’s economic woes and increasing theft-related shrink levels.

The National Retail Security Survey reports that $41.6 billion was stolen at U.S. retail stores in 2006.  Of that, 47% or nearly half of retail theft is committed by employees, two thirds of it by sweethearting. 
 
“While we retailers can’t increase our revenues in this economy, we can now reduce our shrink,” said Mark Gaudette, Director of Loss Prevention at Big Y.  “Sweethearting has contributed to the rising cost of food, and if we can prevent it, we can hold down food prices.
 
“Based on what we’ve seen with the initial installations, sweethearting has been more extensive than we expected, whether it’s the cashier not scanning items or leaving them in the basket,” he said.
 
Supermarkets, with their average 2% profit margins, are particularly vulnerable to sweethearting, which has accounted for an almost 35% profit loss industrywide.
 
“If you can’t sell more in this economy, you can still lose less,” said Malay Kundu, CEO of StopLift Checkout Vision Systems, headquartered in Cambridge, MA.  “We want to enable supermarkets and retail stores to prevent this growing source of employee theft, which will hold down prices while improving their bottom line.”
 
Retailers have tried to track theft through data mining, but, because sweethearting specifically involves items not scanned, as Kundu notes:  “How do you do data mining when there’s no data?”
 
“Malay Kundu is truly a visionary in addressing sweethearting,” Gaudette said.  “This type of theft has been costing the retail industry $13 billion a year and, before StopLift technology became available, there had been no way to detect it.”
 
StopLift’s computer vision technology — patent-pending in more than 30 countries — visually determines what occurs during each and every transaction to immediately identify fraud at the checkout.  Dishonest associates are identified on the basis of video evidence the first time they conduct a fraudulent transaction, rather than months or even years down the road, significantly reducing inventory shrinkage, deterring future theft, and boosting profitability.
 
The technology eliminates costly, time-consuming human review of video, drastically reduces and deters fraud at the checkout, and significantly improves profitability, Kundu said.  Rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach, StopLift develops targeted applications to address the specific needs of retailers from different sectors including general merchandise, grocery, and specialty retail.
 
Gaudette noted that StopLift will also enable Big Y to improve its cashier work force overall through better training as well as better systems to detect and control employee theft.

“Based on what we have seen with the early results, we have re-evaluated our cashier training program, integrating Stoplift video examples into both our orientation and our ongoing computer
based training platform in order to significantly impact our losses due to unintentional missed scans,” Gaudette said.
 
StopLift Checkout Vision Systems grew out of Kundu’s Harvard Business School research study “Project StopLift” on Retail Loss Prevention.  With technological research insights Kundu developed while at MIT, Project StopLift concluded that video recognition could be used to automate and, thus, make possible the comprehensive examination of surveillance video.  Prior to founding StopLift, Kundu developed facial recognition systems for identifying terrorists in airports.