Macy's Asset Protection Insights | NRF 2025 with Joe Coll

Hello, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton.

And I'm Anne Mazinga.

And we are coming to you live from day two of NRF from the Fusion Group podcast studio in booth 4938.

And joining us now, Ann is a man that I've been anxious to meet for some time.

I know you have as well.

Yes.

And that is Joe Call.

And I want to get Joe's title right.

Joe is the vice president of asset protection operations and strategy at Macy's.

Joe, thank you so much for joining us and making time for us today.

I'm glad to be here with both of you.

Well, yeah, I want to hear a little bit about first of all your background and then your current role at Macy's.

Tell us a little bit about what, what the day, what a day in the life of Joe looks like.

Yeah, for sure.

So my background would take probably about 30 minutes to go through my entire history at Macy's.

I've been with Macy's now for about 27 years.

Have you really?

Did you do like the training program and stuff?

No, I actually started out selling dress shirts and ties.

Oh, man.

As a part time sales associate.

I wonder.

You look so sharp.

You've got, you've not wearing a tie right now.

But I started doing that when I was about 18 years old and it was my first introduction into retail asset.

But I really didn't even know it existed until I got that job.

Figured I was going to become a police officer.

Figured I'd get into asset production to just understand a little bit of it before I became a cop.

And then one thing led to another.

27 years later, I am still here.

And I have the distinct pleasure right now of leading asset protection for all of Macy's department stores.

Under my responsibility is all of our stores nationwide.

I also have responsibility for our supply chain asset production teams.

So all of those teams that handle the distribution centers, fulfillment centers.

And then the third area is our fraud strategy, our group that handles all of our Macy's private label cardholders, protecting all those customers.

And cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity do a bit.

We've got ciso, chief Information Security Officer that handles that.

But a lot of what we do blends over into the world.

There's a lot of cross coordination going on for sure.

Yeah.

Right.

So what brings you to nrf?

I mean, I know you live in, you live in New York, right?

I live in New York.

Not too far.

My office is just down 34th Street.

So even walking distance to NRF.

So I would imagine most of the people that are here today can't say they can walk from their office to the convention center.

But I have that privilege having an office in Herald Square.

I come every year to the nrf.

What I love about the big show is over the past four or five years you've started to really see a transition at nrf.

You walk into almost every single booth and there's going to be components of video, there's going to be asset protection discussions in every one of those boots.

Five years ago it was hard to find it and it really is.

Seeing that transformation is exciting.

The exit gates or something was probably like it.

The checkpoint security things and that was probably it early on.

That's true.

You're the talk of the industry now.

Your area is really the talk of the industry right now for without a doubt.

Yeah, I mean, talk a little bit more about that.

Like shrink theft.

It's a huge, huge topic on the minds of retailers right now.

How are you at Macy's kind of approaching a strategy to eliminate that or minimize it as much as possible.

It's definitely complicated.

I'll tell you though, I've been doing this 27 years.

Theft was there when I started.

Theft will be there when I leave for sure.

I think over the past few years though, what really has been added to it is the amount of violence that's around theft.

Oh really?

That has really changed it for everybody.

And that focus for us on customers and colleague safety has become so paramount.

We've always said it, but we now live it every single day.

With every decision that we make, every strategy we put in place to help combat the retail theft that we've got, we've got to have an eye on.

If the strategy we're doing is creating more risk for our customers and our colleagues, then it's not the right strategy.

And what have you done differently at Macy's given that over the last few years?

And what have you found successful?

Yeah, for sure.

We've.

We've been spending a lot of time training our colleagues, our people, leaders in our stores on things like de escalation or even no escalation.

You got to get to the point of just no escalation for those customers as well as an unfortunate necessary training for us is active threat training, being able to shelter in place inside of stores.

Past few years we've been training everybody on that because it's a reality.

You can't go a week around this country and not hearing about gunshots in a mall.

Or broken glass in a mall that everybody says that's gunshots and everybody's running for the exit.

So being able to train your teams in a moment of crisis to be prepared to shelter those customers and their colleagues inside the store is paramount.

It's important that they understand what they need to do if the situation arises 100%.

I want to step away from Macy's for a second.

I want you to put your industry hat on.

And this is actually the question.

Of all the questions that we created for nrf, for all our slate of interviews, this is the one I'm most excited to ask.

I want you to put the industry hat on.

There's been a lot of different tactics and ways different retailers have approached, you know, combating shrink or combating theft.

Like some retailers are even putting products behind glass.

Yeah.

What is your opinion of what strategies are going to work?

Which ones aren't?

As you look at what the industry has been doing over these last few years, give.

It gives us your take.

Yeah.

So I will.

I will definitely not speak from the vantage point of Macy's, although we do have things under glass.

Yeah.

We've got fine jewelry, we've got fragrances, we've got things like handbags that are tethered to fixtures.

It's really an interesting question because just on Saturday we had about 50 legislators from around the country inside of our Macy's Herald Square store talking about retail crime and what we're doing on it.

And one of the questions they asked was, hey, I went to go buy a jacket earlier downstairs and it had a cable on it and it was tethered to the fixture.

Why are you doing that?

And it was a moment for us to kind of step back with them and educate them on.

We don't just get a new product into a store and say, we think this is going to get stolen, so let's tether it down so that the customer can't buy it.

We're making that decision based on data, based on risk, based on previous loss events.

So what I shared with them was we're only doing that as a last resort.

And when you see some of these other retailers that are putting things like, you know, common necessary needs that you have detergent.

Yeah.

You know, when that's behind glass, it's because if it wasn't behind the glass, it wouldn't have been there.

It's actually been stealing.

They're stealing it all off of the shelves, every single item.

So what I've seen.

And I'll tie it kind of Back into NRF is we just were at a vendor, and I won't plug the name on this podcast, but we were just with a vendor about an hour ago talking about how you can engage the customer with a loyalty perspective.

So I think about, you know, if you've got CVS and you're a CVS loyalist, do you have the ability to then be able to get that locked up item?

Because you've proven that you are a good customer to them and you don't need to rely on the colleague for it.

So I think that's going to be where the future is.

I also do believe, though, because of the rise of retail crime, if we can drive greater accountability for the retail crime that's happening, we, with our district attorneys, our attorney generals, our legislators that are putting these laws into place, we'll start to see a blunting of this rise of retail crime and people will relax some of those standards.

So you think we will see, you think we will see more solutions like that across the industry where, you know, engaging with loyalty or apps or smartphone devices to give the consumer more power to unlock the experience that's in front of them if needed?

Yeah, you're seeing it today in a lot of pharmacy.

Yeah, they're starting to, I mean, it's costly.

So you've got to weigh that option of deploying that.

And then potentially, like I said, if we're able to blunt this, we start to see it kind of come back down to reasonable levels, then that technology isn't necessary.

So we really need to understand if that is viable, that we will see it blunted and be able to say we can relax the standards inside of our stores without having to make that investment.

Hey, Joe, so you, I'm curious because you had like law enforcement and you have, you have direct communications with, with the teams that are trying to prevent this and the attorney, the district attorneys, like you said, how important is something like RFID technology or computer vision technology as you're thinking about, you know, how, how we help provide that law enforcement team with the data that they need to actually prosecute some of these things?

Because I think in a lot of cases we're hearing like we, because of the, the danger to our associates, we're just like, people will leave and then you call law enforcement.

And we had this happen, you know, roughly this number of people, but there's not enough detail for law enforcement to actually go follow up on that.

How important do you think technology is that can give them this number of items were taken at this time?

It was this many people, like, how do you feel like that relevance can help the law enforcement team?

I feel like it's a loaded question because we're very deep into rfid, but I'm going to answer it anyway.

It was a little bit of a softball question, and maybe you didn't know it well.

We have about 95% of our product inside of our stores as RFID on it, and it has significantly changed the game on how we are building investigations for law enforcement.

So past few years, law enforcement has been struggling with getting people to be officers.

So when you bring an investigation into them, if it's not fully baked, they don't have the time to work it because they're dealing with other crimes that are more serious in nature around their communities.

For us, when we take RFID and we can package it up, we basically just give it to them or we give it to a prosecutor and just say, all you need to do now is, is prosecute this.

We've done every other aspect of that investigation.

And RFID, we've been in the RFID game since about 2011, and in 2016, we significantly got into it in a greater way to be able to understand what product is leaving our stores without being paid for.

And that has been the biggest evolution in technology in my career that I saw.

Wow.

Wow, that's great to know, Joe.

I want to put your industry hat on again, too, real quick.

So one topic, it kind of goes back to the glass question, too.

And it's, you know, it's all germane to the conversation we were having even around rfid.

And I've been having a lot of conversations about the Costco or the Sam's Club model where you have to show an ID to enter.

Like, does that.

Do you think we'll start to see more of that throughout retail as we go forward, or what are the puts and takes with that model, as you think about it?

Look, they've got low shrink for sure.

And, you know, when I speak to my peers in the industry, it is not a model for everybody, though.

Yeah, you've got to.

You're paying to get into that model, into BJ's and Costco, and it works for them.

We are a proud Costco family at home as well.

So we're visiting there every single week.

And you've come to expect it there.

You know what you're going to have.

I think if you showed up into a Macy's on a Saturday afternoon and you experience that type of friction, that's not what you're accustomed to.

And I think that'd be difficult for the consumer.

Yeah, I think it'd be really difficult to transition those customers.

I think they're used to it in those environments and I don't think you'll see it.

You're seeing a little bit of it in like Home Depot and Lowe's.

Some of them have a little bit of that gate to manage traffic and where you can go in and where you can go out.

But there's like a balance to the amount of friction you can actually create because you don't want to drive that customer away.

You ultimately just want to drive away the bad customer from that location and make sure that the good customer has very little friction.

Hence why you're singing about the technology of, you know, unlocking the cabinet with your phone as opposed to maybe requiring them to do something on entry.

That's interesting.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well, Joe, let's talk about the year ahead.

What are your priorities and your team's priorities at Macy's as you think about the future of, of asset protection, of reducing or eliminating shrink.

Yeah, I tell you, when I think about what 2025 has ahead, I can't.

I'd be remiss if I didn't pause and say we've got to reflect back on 2024 and we got to do a good job of recognizing our team.

So as we just talked about all that has been happening in retail, all of the violence, I'm incredibly proud of all of my teams and the work that they put forth every single day.

If we don't focus on recognizing them for that, thanking them for that slow slowing down to make sure that that is meaningful.

Before we start to instill our priorities and strategies for 2025, we'll really miss the moment because it is incredible to have those teams showing up every single day.

As I said, law enforcement doesn't want to do law enforcement.

Imagine being an asset protection or loss prevention inside of a retailer right now.

It is a difficult job to do and I'm incredibly appreciative and have a high amount of respect for all of the teams, not only just in Macy's, but around the industry.

From our perspective on strategies, though, it's going to continue to be a focus on customer and colleague safety.

Until we see that change in the industry, that has got to be our number one and we'll continue to build that out through training, technology.

You're seeing things like body worn cameras.

We're working with some of our communication device partners to get real time alerting and the ability to alert a people leader if you're in a risky situation.

So everything we're doing right now is focused on that safety side of it, which also will have a positive impact on theft mitigation.

So keeping an eye on both.

Love that.

Love that.

Safety is still the first priority.

That's a very key call out there.

And, yeah, the stores, it's a thankless job, but you can't thank them enough, right, Joe?

That's the way it goes.

Well, Joe, thank you so much for joining us.

Taking time out of your busy schedule.

You came down from the headquarters here to meet with us and tour the NRF building and all the great technology on display here.

And thanks to the Fusion Group for supporting our content throughout the show.

That concludes our coverage for today, right?

Yeah, that wraps us up.

That wraps us up for day two.

We'll be back tomorrow again, though, so rest assured, we'll be back here in booth 4938 until tomorrow, and be careful out there.