Key takeaways
- Only 21% of LP leaders say their budget matches the cost of retail crime.
- Frictionless reporting turns store teams into an extension of a lean LP team.
- Small-dollar events become police-ready cases when they’re documented and connected.
Only 21% of loss prevention (LP) and asset protection (AP) leaders say their budget reflects the full cost of retail crime. That’s from Beyond Shrink, a 2026 TalkLPnews survey of 52 LP and AP executives conducted in partnership with Auror.
Lean is often the default size of LP teams. The department starts out as a preceived cost center almost everywhere. The ones that earn more trust and resources are able to prove the cost and overall impact of crime and violence in stores.
Cosentino's Food Stores delivered a 346% ROI for its LP team in its first year with Auror, and Boot Barn closed 162% more investigations year over year (YoY). Here are the five challenges we hear most often from lean LP teams, and how leaders at Boot Barn, Heritage Grocers Group, Holt Renfrew, and Cosentino’s Food Stores are overcoming them.
1. “I don’t have a team. I have me.”
For a lean loss prevention team, every role belongs to the same few people.
“If one of my LP managers wants to take some PTO time off, or is out… next person is me. So, I wear a lot of hats.” — Orlando Torres, Director of Loss Prevention, Heritage Grocers Group
At Heritage, each LP manager covers 15 to 22 stores in remote areas, an hour or more apart. At Boot Barn, a team of 12 covers nearly 600 stores in 49 states with no store-level LP roles.
What the numbers show
When LP is lean, the workload shifts to the stores. In the Beyond Shrink survey, 60% of LP leaders said manager time is pulled away from running the store to handle incidents, the most reported workforce impact.
How lean teams overcome it
Make it easy to collaborate with your store teams.
- Heritage store teams document events and store directors can add law enforcement as collaborators in Auror, with legal’s sign-off.
- At Heritage, HR and Risk and Safety started reporting in Auror too. As a result, store-level cases went up 120% YoY.
- One Auror retailer’s security operations center (SOC) triages and packages events, then assigns them to store investigators, so no single person owns every case.
“Obviously technology helps magnify or is a force multiplier for your team of any size.” — Brian Huff, Director of Loss Prevention, Boot Barn
2. “I don’t have time to manage another tool.”
Lean teams can’t afford a tool that requires its own admin. Every hour spent on training others or rebuilding a report is an hour not spent on investigations. And anything pulling store teams off the floor and away from customers doesn’t get used.
What the numbers show
More than three in four LP leaders in Beyond Shrink (77%) said security staffing, equipment, or technology costs went up, and the biggest reported operational cost of retail crime was labor.
How lean teams overcome it
Find tools that remove work for your team. For many lean teams, that means prioritizing ease of use, quick onboarding, AI features, and structured data. When reporting takes minutes, stores actually do it and LP stops spending hours piecing together what happened.
- Cosentino’s Food Stores cut median report time from 120 minutes to 8, with 100% of stores reporting.
- Boot Barn halved it: 40 minutes to 20 within a few months on Auror.
- Heritage went from waiting as long as a day for the full story to logging a case with photos in 15 minutes.
- Another retailer replaced manual face blurring with automated facial redaction, giving hours back to the LP team and the privacy office.
3. “We’re at a disadvantage with fewer stores.”
Big retailers have more stores, more incident history, and analysts to spot patterns. With fewer stores, a lean team often only sees its own slice of the picture and can’t tell a one-off from an organized retail crime group.
What the numbers show
Repeat offenders aren’t brand loyal, and they don’t stop at state lines. More than 1 in 4 repeat offenders on the Auror Network hit multiple locations, and the top 10% of offenders are responsible for roughly 60% of stolen value.
How lean teams overcome it
Retailers can’t add stores overnight, but they can see far beyond their own. From day one, Auror customers are backed by 92,000+ stores and 3,700+ law enforcement agencies.
- Heritage shared events on a person of interest (POI) committing liquor thefts across several states. He was arrested, and LP managers at other retailers, including some not yet on Auror, reached out to add to the case.
- Boot Barn saw a family from Florida hit stores across the Carolinas, Colorado, and Texas. Events went to every store in their market with images, so neighboring stores were ready before they were hit.
- Cosentino’s (32 stores) kept 15 of its top 20 POIs out of its stores in year one with Auror.
- Another Auror retail partner has six stores, and its Greater Toronto Area locations get hit by the same ORC groups, sometimes on the same day. The team pushes photos, MO, and trends to every GTA store so the next location can prepare its people.
“I [had] never even spoken to any other grocery retailers out there, but now that I’m on this platform and this network, now I’m getting more exposed to the other grocery competitors out there.” — Orlando Torres, Heritage Grocers Group
4. “Police will always prioritize the big guys.”
Police departments are stretched, and a lean team’s cases are often small-dollar. That fuels a fear that a national chain with a bigger case will always get the call back first.
“Smaller cases, unfortunately, you get lesser attention than those large ones, and we’re finding now that when we build these ORC cases, and really start to connect the dots and show the… activity, it’s getting a lot of attention from police, and it’s supporting us in court cases.” — Conor Cox, Holt Renfrew
What the numbers show
Most states set felony theft thresholds at $1,000 or higher. In Texas and Wisconsin, the highest in the country, it’s $2,500. At $15 a theft, it takes more than 160 thefts before a repeat offender’s activity adds up to a felony, and that's only if every one is documented and connected.
How lean teams overcome it
Police prioritize the most complete and connected cases. The LP teams that come to law enforcement with a case, rather than a single incident, will have the advantage. When small events are documented, lean teams can hand over police-ready cases.
- Heritage, Pomona, California: One POI took $10 to $15 at a time, several times a day. The store documented every incident with photos in Auror. When officers responded to a call, the team shared enough connected incidents to clear California’s $950 felony threshold and secure a conviction.
- Boot Barn, Houston: One store report pulled in 10 related events within a week, nearly $8,000 tied to one POI. Houston PD made the arrest in under three weeks.
- Holt Renfrew: ORC cases now average $10,000 to $30,000, built from connecting smaller incidents.
- Cosentino’s: Sharing evidence with police used to mean burning a CD. Now the team compiles video, images, and an itemized list of what was taken.
The biggest surprise for Boot Barn was how fast police engaged once cases were shared.
“Our store would create an event, and within minutes a crime analyst for the local police department would reach out to the store. Our [regional loss prevention manager] hadn’t even had a chance to review the event yet, and that police department already had things working, had [the POI] ID’d, [and a] warrant in the works.” — Brian Huff, Boot Barn
5. “I can’t justify the cost.”
Finance and Operations teams want to see a return on LP spend before investing more.
“We’re a cost center. It’s hard to get funding, so we really had to demonstrate where we were moving the needle.” — Conor Cox, Holt Renfrew
What the numbers show
The Beyond Shrink survey found that the executive team usually isn't the barrier. Seven in ten retail crime business cases LP leaders built in the past two years were approved. The bigger issue is that many never get built. The costs of retail crime are hidden in other budgets: manager hours land in store operations, and store closures influenced by crime get recorded as real estate or market decisions. Without a dollar figure attached, these costs never turn into numbers a CFO can use. While 42 of the 52 LP leaders reported real impacts in three or four cost areas, many are unable to connect the dots.
How lean teams overcome it
The survey points to three things that make a loss prevention business case stronger:
- Bring more than one executive into the room. Business cases taken to one executive were approved 4 of 12 times. Taken to two or more, 21 of 24 were approved. Where Operations was engaged, 15 of 18 were approved, versus 3 of 9 when the conversation stayed inside LP.
- Give Finance a number it can audit. Count manager hours to capture more of the cost of retail crime.
- Turnover data is the most requested and least available. 63% of LP leaders want more of this data.
Lean LP resources don’t have to mean fewer results
Cosentino’s saves two to three hours of reporting per event and reached a 346% ROI for the LP department in year one.
“We actually have ROI in the department, we’re not a cost expenditure… The amount of savings we had just in labor alone covered the cost [of Auror].” — Chris Vandiver, Director of Loss Prevention, Cosentino’s Food Stores
Heritage was able to justify the cost of Auror with a single case. The Pomona case during the pilot, which helped document 25+ small thefts, was enough to make the case for every store.
“Talking about this one case itself, that was a no-brainer… we were able to justify [Auror’s cost], because our goal was to do this at every single store.” — Orlando Torres, Heritage Grocers Group
Connected intelligence helps LP teams do more with less. See how loss prevention teams big and small use Auror.
