Tracy Alloway had asked about the liability of sending staff after someone walking out with a full cart. Glenn, who runs asset protection for Home Depot, says the retailer has had people injured and killed in these incidents, and that organised crews often send in homeless or addicted people to do the actual theft. Shrink is the industry's word for inventory lost to theft and error; he trains 400,000 store associates to let it go.
almost impossible to put it in a store at a Home Depot store. We have eight separate entrances in and out of our building.
How much of this is a liability issue in the sense that, okay, I can tag an item and I can hear an alarm ring if someone is going out with it without paying. But there's still an issue over whether or not you want your employees, even your security guards, going after people who might actually fight back and be dangerous. And I'm sure we've all seen, you especially, Scott, the videos of some guy who just fills a massive shopping cart and walks out of the store with the security staff looking on.
It's the bigger issue than the financial, right? Like at the end of the day, there's a certain level of, we understand there's going to be some shrink in our stores. There's a certain cost of doing business. When you open up to the public, you're going to have some of this type of pieces of it. But this is the problem specifically with the organized retail crime folks, the professional criminals. A lot of times they're using homeless folks, addicted folks, people that are maybe on the down and down low, and they are monetizing them to go in and do this. And their only thought process is: I'm leading with this product because I need to get my money. I need to get my whatever. And they will do violent things. And they have done violent things. And not only, you know, has it happened in retail, it's happened specifically to us. And we've actually had people injured. We've had people killed in our stores in these types of incidents where that is just, we're not going to allow that. So our security folks are asset protection people in stores. They're trained. They're trained not only on how to do what they do, but also how to de-escalate, how to observe and pull away from those situations when they start there. But we also have 400,000 store associates who are very passionate. They don't like to see stuff stolen. And we train them very clearly on like, you don't get involved with these things. You back away, and we do give them the same, you know, a slightly different but different, but still de-escalation type training because that's the problem. I'll trade the shrink for the safety of the people every day of the week. And my leadership team and our board would back us on those decisions all day long. We are never ever going to put people in jeopardy. Our associates and our customers are the number one priority.
I've been hearing, we've been hearing about RFID tags for 25 years now. I would have assumed that the price of this hardware would have come down dramatically, such that you slap a little tag on, and if it like, you know, it's not very easy to remove. And then by the time you go through some gate or entrance, it sets off an alarm. Can you talk about why in 2026 that technology is still actually expensive and hard to scale?
No, I can't. I don't understand it. It's your lips to God's ears, right? Like it's one of those things where I'm with you. And I will say a Home Depot environment, a little different. We are a hardware store with basically a Faraday cage of steel throughout our stores. We do a passive RFID does not work in our stores. You have to go to an active pinging RFID technology. We've tested it. We know it can work. Again, it's all about typical. Can you just
explain that it does not work in your stores? Actually, I don't know anything about this. Can you clarify that?