Home Depot put one combination drill kit under a microscope and found it was buying the $799 product 4.2 times for every time it sold one.
Retailers usually describe theft as a cost of doing business and assume that locking a product behind plastic costs them the sale. Scott Glenn says the arithmetic runs the other way on some products: sales go up, because the item is finally in stock.
"I'll trade the shrink for the safety of the people every day of the week."
Glenn runs asset protection for The Home Depot's 2,400 US stores and 400,000 store associates, after ten years at Kohl's, ten at Sears as chief security officer, and a start out of law school at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 53 minutes of audio, 22 minutes of reading.
Here are the 15 insights that matter.
👤 Guest: Scott Glenn, Vice President of Asset Protection at The Home Depot, who ran security at Sears and Kohl's before joining the retailer in 2018
🎙️ Hosts: Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, the Bloomberg journalists who present Odd Lots
📰 Published: 10 September 2026 on YouTube (Bloomberg Podcasts)
🔴 YouTube | 🟢 Spotify | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 53 min | ✅ Time saved: 31 min
Key Takeaways
Locking a product up can raise its sales rather than cut them, because the shelf is no longer empty
Glenn found one $799 drill kit Home Depot was buying 4.2 times for every one it sold
About 30% of Home Depot's shrink is self-inflicted, and the rest is theft and fraud
He calls the self-inflicted half "things we do to ourself"
The long-standing industry split puts more malicious loss on employees than on shoplifters
The numbers he has heard all his career: 40% associates, 35% walk-in theft, the balance operational
Passive RFID does not work in a Home Depot, because the store is full of steel
He calls the building "basically a Faraday cage"; tags are cheap, the readers are not
Organized theft rings now resell through peer-to-peer platforms, which the 2023 federal law did not cover
Home Depot builds pricing models to spot its own stolen product and then has to report it to the platform itself
Technology-heavy goods and gift cards resell at 70% to 80% of retail; deodorant and painkillers go for 30 to 40 cents on the dollar
Home Depot hands police a case file that is roughly 80% complete, because the police cannot build it themselves
A typical organized-retail-crime case takes about 70 days from discovery to handoff
Cargo theft is growing through paperwork rather than force, and AI is making the paperwork convincing
Rail gangs hit the one car carrying what they want, which Glenn reads as evidence of inside information
The first federal organized-retail-crime bill has passed the House and is attached to the defense authorization
Glenn, who was "doom and gloom" on this seven years ago, counts 35-ish states with task forces under their attorneys general
1. What Walks Out the Door
Tracy Alloway opened with the simplest question available: what is the most stolen item at Home Depot, by volume and by dollars.
By volume it is power drills; by value it is copper and wire, because both are commodities with a resale market. "When the price goes up, it becomes really valuable to the bad guys," Glenn said of copper, which he described as a commodity that fluctuates in price
Glenn's own house was stripped of copper before he had moved into it. Between closing on the house and moving in, someone took all the copper out of the HVAC units — this while he was eight years into running asset protection for a hardware retailer
Weisenthal matched the story with a theft from a historic property near him in Connecticut, where someone broke into a house next to the Nathan Hale Museum, an old colonial homestead, and took a quantity of copper pipe. Glenn's response: "It happens everywhere"
Glenn appeared in a Home Depot apron, on the company's earnings day, and treated the question as a matter of culture rather than costume: "It's part of our culture. It's part of what we are"
2. From the ATF to Retail
Alloway asked him to explain how he had ended up in the chair, and the answer ran through federal law enforcement.
He wanted to be an architect, then a federal agent, and ended up in retail security by way of a summer job. "I went to school to be an architect when I was going into college and realized that I wasn't very good at math. So I decided to maybe go work for the FBI"
He went to law school, joined the Treasury Department and worked for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, then left. "Realized that I did not like government service. It just wasn't my gig"
The way back in was a student job catching shoplifters at Target, which he had done during summers for extra money and which became the door back into the industry after he left government
The career since then has been three long tenures: ten years at Kohl's department stores, ten at Sears as chief security officer, and eight so far at Home Depot, which he joined in 2018
3. What Shrink Actually Is
Alloway pushed for definitions before the conversation went any further — what counts as retail theft, and what counts in the shrink number a company reports.
Retail theft is a spectrum, and Glenn's team deliberately works only at one end of it. "There's definitely low level opportunistic, I'll even call it the need shoplifters that are out there." At the other end are organizations he describes as cartel-related, transnational gang-related and international, "whose sole existence is to monetize theft" and to fund money laundering, drug trafficking and human trafficking
Shrink itself is an inventory-accounting term, not a crime statistic. "When we talk about shrink in retail, we're talking about at the end of the day, I have inventory on my books. And when I physically go to count that inventory, it's not there"
Home Depot splits shrink into what it does to itself and what is done to it, and reports the split to its board. Roughly 30% of its shrink is operational and administrative — "things we do to ourself" — and the balance is what he calls malicious
The company also splits shrink by where it happens: the supply chain, the stores and the online business are three separate buckets, each of which can carry operational, financial and malicious loss. The largest share sits in the 2,400 retail stores
Glenn said Home Depot is good at controlling the half of the problem it creates, which is why the operational share is the smaller one and why his attention is on the rest
4. Tens of Billions a Year
Alloway asked how big the problem is across the industry, and whether it is genuinely getting worse or simply being counted differently.
Glenn called this the most debated question in his own field and declined to give a clean answer. On the total he would only say: "It's in the billions. It's in the tens of billions"
The reason nobody can produce one number is that retailers do not define the terms the same way. What one company books as operational shrink another books as administrative or malicious, and retail accounting versus cost accounting changes how markup enters the figure. Home Depot works with RILA and the National Retail Federation to get better estimates
The long-standing industry rule of thumb splits malicious loss more toward employees than toward shoplifters. The numbers he has heard for as long as he has been in retail: "40% of shrink on the malicious side is done by associates working for the company," 35% is people walking into the store, and the remaining 20% to 25% is the self-inflicted operational and administrative kind
He changed his own mind about organized retail crime after arriving at Home Depot in 2018. "I have become a believer in one, organized retail crime exists. It's become more lucrative. It's become more pervasive. And it's become more dangerous"
He believes the shares are drifting upward and that the problem has been underreported since COVID, so police reports and FBI uniform crime data do not capture it. He also credits the growth of online resale — "places where you can resell very impersonally" — for making theft pay better than it used to
Weisenthal had to translate one piece of retail shorthand for the audience: Glenn's "Omni" is omni-channel, meaning online sales
5. Building the Case
Alloway asked how anyone can tell, from a single theft, whether it belongs to something organized. Weisenthal followed up on why the police are not doing this work.
In any single instance, Glenn said, it is almost impossible to tell — the signal comes from the conversation afterward. A store detective who stops someone taking a drill sometimes hears that it was for a deck at home, and sometimes hears that the person was sent in with a list and would be paid in cash or drugs on delivery
That intelligence is collected locally and worked centrally. Home Depot has a team in Atlanta of organized-retail-crime specialists, most of them former federal, state or local law enforcement officers, whose job Glenn describes as sorting the wheat from the chaff
The stitching together is done with video analytics and repeat identifiers — the same person, the same car, seen in store A and then store B, with an apprehension report from a third building — because an individual arrest rarely stops anything. As Glenn put it: "They might be put in jail and they'll be out the next day." Bail, or a no-cash-bail rule, puts the same person back in the same stores
Glenn's account of working with police starts from the police being unable to come. "Sometimes it's hard enough to get the police to show up," he said, without blaming them: departments are under-resourced and retail theft sits below robbery, carjacking and murder in the queue
So the company's own investigators aim to hand over a case file that is roughly 80% complete — everything a detective needs to walk in front of a judge for a search or arrest warrant. Glenn's reasoning is that a file that removes the labor gets picked up far more often than one that tells a detective "you just go figure it out for me"
He rejected the idea, put to him by Weisenthal, that retailers let thieves accumulate goods to reach a charging threshold. Home Depot does not do that, he said; where someone is allowed to walk out, it is because the company is following the product to the fence. "We're not trying to like build up big charges on people"
6. Why Tech Won't Hit Zero
Weisenthal made the case that this should be a solved problem — tag the drill, watch the aisle, train a model to spot someone leaving without paying. Glenn's answer was about capital expenditure.
Glenn's first response was that the plan is technically fine and financially impossible. "I love your thought process. That is a really expensive thought process"
The scale of the building is the problem. "And you think about a Home Depot store, 140,000 square feet of a working warehouse" — covering that with cameras good enough to detect a concealment means hardware and processing power in every store, not just AI at the front end, where the company already uses camera-based analytics
He put the trade-off in plain financial terms. How much shrink a retailer accepts is set against the capital and operating expense of driving it to zero: "The number we aspire to is zero. The number we'll get to is somewhere north of that"
Embedding a chip in the product itself has been tried and does not scale. Asked why a power drill cannot carry a tag that sets off an alarm, Glenn said the margin does not support redesigning a production line for a Milwaukee drill to insert a Bluetooth chip, and the store still needs readers to detect it
Home Depot's building is actively hostile to the obvious technology. "We are a hardware store with basically a Faraday cage of steel throughout our stores," he said — passive RFID does not work there because the steel blocks the signal. An active, pinging version of RFID does work, and Home Depot has tested it
The cost is in the readers, not the tags. Glenn said tag costs are "nil at this point" and that the expense is the hardware needed to read them everywhere it matters — in a store with eight separate entrances. Weisenthal, who said he had been hearing about RFID for 25 years, asked why it is still expensive in 2026; Glenn's answer was "No, I can't. I don't understand it"
Glenn added that RFID's real promise for a retailer is not theft but inventory accuracy — knowing where a product is, whether it sold, and what needs replenishing
7. Shrink Traded for Safety
Weisenthal raised the liability question: even with a working alarm, does a retailer want its staff confronting someone who might fight back?
Glenn said the safety issue is bigger than the financial one, and that this is where organized theft differs from opportunistic theft. Professional crews often use homeless or addicted people to do the stealing, and those people arrive with a single objective. "And they will do violent things. And they have done violent things"
This has happened in Home Depot stores. "We've had people killed in our stores in these types of incidents," Glenn said, which is why the company's rule is unambiguous
Asset protection staff are trained to de-escalate and disengage, and the 400,000 store associates are trained not to intervene at all. Glenn said associates are passionate and dislike watching product walk out, so the training is explicit: back away
The trade is settled in advance, and he says his leadership and board back it. "We're never, ever going to put people in jeopardy. Our associates and our customers are the number one priority"
8. Boosters and Fences
Alloway asked what happens to the goods after they leave the store, starting with the term itself: what is fencing?
The chain starts with recruited thieves, whom the industry calls boosters. "Boosters are the people that do the stealing." They are given a list, money and in many cases drugs or the promise of drugs on delivery, which Glenn described as the hook that stops them keeping the product and the cash
The next link is a consolidator. "The fence is kind of the consolidator of the product" — a garage, a warehouse, a flea-market stall — and the fence's real work is cleaning the goods, stripping electronic tags, store stickers and price labels before resale
Where the cleaned product is sold has moved twice. It used to go to Amazon and eBay; since the INFORM Consumers Act, which Glenn said took effect in 2023, it has moved to peer-to-peer markets such as Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace
The money moves up the way it does in any organized crime. A share is kicked up to whoever is running the operation, which Glenn said can be five people in an apartment who decided to become organized retail criminals, or a cartel, or a Chinese or South American transnational gang
9. Meta and the Loophole
Weisenthal asked what the right role is for the owner of a peer-to-peer platform, and where the gap sits between that and what the platforms do now.
Glenn's explanation for the gap is cost. "The short answer is it's very expensive to patrol your platform, to know your seller, to make sure that you really understand that they're a legitimate business and that they're a legitimate reseller"
The federal law that required exactly that has a hole in it. INFORM made the traditional marketplaces verify high-volume sellers — the same duty Glenn has to know his own suppliers, he said — but did not cover peer-to-peer resellers. "Can't explain why it happened, just it happened," and platforms will not add the governance unless they are made to
So Home Depot polices the marketplaces itself, using price as the signal. "If Home Depot sells this combination drill kit for $499, how in the heck is Tommy1234 selling it for $200 at volume? How can he sell new in-box product at a price lower than my cost?"
The models get progressively narrower: a seller who moves a lot of drills, then a lot of drills new in box, then a lot of drills new in box under Home Depot's own cost
Many investigations now start on the platform and work backwards to the store. Glenn called it "whack-a-mole to a certain degree" across millions of sellers, and "an uphill climb"
On Meta specifically, Glenn said he is both disappointed and surprised. He acknowledged the company has departments doing this work and that Home Depot works with them, but said the burden is inverted: "It seems a little backwards to me that I should have to come and tell them that they've got somebody selling stolen product on their site," rather than the platform knowing who its sellers are the way Amazon and eBay now must
10. What Stolen Goods Fetch
Alloway asked whether fences price stolen goods near retail or dump them at a discount.
The rule Glenn has heard is that the more technology is in the product, the closer to retail it sells. "What the general consensus is, the more technology-laden the product is, the more it sells closer to retail. That plus gift cards"
Home Depot's own categories sit near the top of that range. "So we see a lot of our products selling in the 70% to 80% of retail range"
Consumables sit far lower. Deodorant, T-shirts and painkillers tend to move at 30 to 40 cents on the dollar, which is a different business from reselling a connected power tool
Alloway's summary of it was that the illegal market prices like any other. Glenn agreed that anything internet-connected or technology-driven carries most of its resale value with it
11. The 4.2-to-1 Drill Kit
Alloway asked about the balance between reducing shrink and the customer experience of standing in front of a locked plastic case waiting for someone with the right key.
Glenn hears about that experience from his own leadership. "I get a few of those emails every week from our from our leadership," he said, before making the case that the decision is a data exercise rather than a preference
The number that won the argument inside Home Depot was a purchase-to-sale ratio. "We found that one particular combination of kit that we were selling for $799, we would buy it 4.2 times for every time we sell it"
That is a conversation with the finance organization, not the security team. "Now, go have that conversation with your finance folks," Glenn said; their reply was that "that's a gross margin mix we don't like," and that getting to break-even on the product would be a genuine business opportunity
What limits how far Home Depot will go is who its customers are. "We're in a business that 50% of our revenue comes from pros and contractors," and a contractor who leaves a job site for a drill the system said was in stock, and is not, is also a loss. So the locked list is deliberately curated
The friction is engineered down rather than accepted. Every lockup carries a QR code that summons an associate by phone, and Glenn gave the measured number: "And it takes, on average, about 90 seconds for that lockup to be unlocked by a person." Glenn wants self-service next: if the code is scanned by a customer the company can identify as a professional in its loyalty program, he asks why that person cannot simply be let in
Locking a product up does not reliably cost the sale, which is the finding that surprised Alloway most. "There are some categories where that is true. There's also many, many categories where actually sales go up because you're in stock"
Glenn's answer to shoppers who will not tolerate any friction was blunt: that customer is buying from Amazon, which does not sell power drills the way Home Depot does
12. Fraud Moves Online
Weisenthal asked what the dominant form of shrink looks like in the e-commerce business.
Online, the loss is mostly payments fraud rather than theft of goods. Credit-card fraud and gift-card fraud are the main routes: "But it's typically around the payment side and the gift card and credit card fraud"
The second route is return fraud. A customer buys a product, takes it out, uses it, puts something else back in the box and returns it for a full refund — so the company pays out the credit and keeps nothing
Weisenthal raised the version of this that retailers create themselves, where a returns process tells the customer to keep the item because shipping it back costs more than the product is worth. Glenn confirmed that happens
13. Trailers, Ports and Rail
Alloway turned to the back end of the business — everything that happens between a factory and a store shelf.
Glenn said supply-chain theft is growing, and sorted it into three modes. The first is pure diversion: a full trailer load redirected en route, including at ports and transload facilities, sometimes back onto a container ship and straight out of the country
The second is the crude one. Drivers have to park somewhere during mandatory rest, and thieves break into the back of the trailer and take boxes off it while the driver sleeps
The third is paperwork, and this is where Glenn named AI as the attacker's tool. Fraudulent bills of lading and pickup documents now look convincing enough that a driver can arrive, claim a numbered trailer and drive out with it. He said electronic billing is closing that door, and that what is new is the volume rather than the scheme
Rail theft has become a bigger problem over roughly five or six years. Cars parked in yards are stripped by groups of people, and there is a lot of dead track where that can happen unobserved
What Glenn finds notable about rail theft is how well targeted it is. "But they have really good intelligence, which is interesting." They do not open every car: "They hit the car on the rail that has the product that they really want to go after" — firearms, electronics, connected devices — which leads him to believe crews have people inside the shipping and trucking companies
The conversation reached Glenn because of a Bloomberg story Alloway had read, which put rail-cargo theft at $200 million a year, and an earlier Odd Lots episode in which Truck Parking Club's chief marketing officer mentioned cargo theft in passing
14. AI on the Defense
Weisenthal asked whether the tools now called AI are useful on the retailer's side of this.
Glenn framed AI as a throughput problem rather than a detection problem. "We have more cases than we can investigate," so the value is in shortening each one: a typical organized-retail-crime case takes about 70 days from discovery to the handoff to a police department, and compressing that means closing more of them
Home Depot has just replaced the video system in every store to get analytics onto the cameras it already owns. "We just replaced our entire video analytics, our video management system in all 2,300 stores to an upgraded version that allows us to now put edge analytics on our cameras, the ones we have"
What those analytics flag is behavior, not identity. The system picks out a person lingering too long in one space, avoiding associates, or standing somewhere customers do not go. Glenn was explicit that the full version Weisenthal described — recognizing a sequence of actions as a theft in progress — is coming but not possible yet, because he does not have enough cameras
On the offensive side, the company already crawls the resale platforms. Glenn said Home Depot has its own company doing web crawling to identify suspect listings, and that anything which compresses the investigative cycle is where AI is being pointed
15. The Bill in the Senate
Weisenthal closed on politics: given the public backlash against surveillance, is there any appetite among lawmakers to change this?
Glenn's answer was the most emphatic thing he said all episode. "I am super bullish on where this is going"
The bill is the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, and Glenn described it as the first federal law of its kind. "This is like literally the first organized retail crime act at the federal level that provides resources, prosecutors, coordination centers." He said it has passed the House, has been attached to the National Defense Authorization Act, awaits a Senate vote, and that the president has indicated he will sign it
His argument for federal involvement is jurisdictional. Theft that starts in one Georgia county and ends in South Carolina or North Carolina is interstate transportation of stolen goods, and therefore already a federal crime — but with no federal resources attached to it. The bill would amend the federal statute on transporting stolen goods, and covers organized retail crime, cargo theft, and gift-card and payments fraud in one piece of legislation
The support is bipartisan on his count. Glenn put House sponsors at 100 to more than 200 across both parties, said there are many bipartisan Senate sponsors, and counted "35-ish states that have organized retail crime task forces led by their attorneys general," in Democratic and Republican states alike
The change of political weather is what he finds remarkable, having been on the other side of it. "Seven years ago, I was doom and gloom on this. Nobody was taking this seriously." At the time, he said, the movement was toward decriminalization and defunding police departments
Bonus Insights
Glenn refused the facial-recognition question rather than answer it loosely. Asked by Alloway what the state of the art is and what a shopper should expect walking into a large store, he said video analytics in general are "getting really, really good about recognizing people," that Home Depot does not discuss specific technologies, and that the privacy conversation is legitimate: "I think it's fair to have conversations about privacy." Then: "But I'm probably not the person to really talk about facial recognition"
Weisenthal disclosed his own behavior as a counter-example to his own argument. He said locked pharmacy shelves make him think he will start buying online, and that he never does — he is back in the store every week
Alloway's closing worry was the loyalty-app workaround, not the cameras. Being able to scan a QR code and have a shelf open because the retailer knows who you are is convenient, "But on the other hand, you're kind of getting close to an almost identity system for shopping"
She also flagged the edge-analytics behavior scoring as the uncomfortable part, describing "some slightly dystopian aspects in there" in a system that classifies a person standing in a corner too long as a risk
Weisenthal's view was that the deployment decision is not really a decision. He said people might complain, but "if the technology exists, it will eventually be implemented," and that the limiting factor on all of it is whether evidence converts into prosecutions given liability rules and a strained police force
He also took Glenn's whack-a-mole point to its conclusion. Crime migrates rather than disappears: as stores harden, theft moves to payments and returns fraud, and even a robot security guard with no personal safety risk would simply relocate the problem — "But then there will be a theft on the robot supply chain and so forth." Alloway's line for it: "The misaligned robot security guard"
Glenn's bottom line is that retail theft has become a professionalized, interstate business whose economics a single retailer cannot change on its own — which is why he now spends as much time on federal legislation and marketplace pricing models as on cameras and locks.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
The Home Depot (Glenn's employer; 2,400 US stores, 400,000 store associates, and half its revenue from professionals and contractors)
Target (Where Glenn caught shoplifters as a student and began his retail career; also cited by Alloway as a retailer that has closed stores over crime)
Milwaukee Tool (The example Glenn used for why embedding a chip in the product does not scale — the margin will not pay for redesigning the production line)
Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist (Where fenced goods moved after the INFORM Consumers Act tightened the larger marketplaces; peer-to-peer sellers were left out of the law)
Meta (Glenn says it does police its platform but should be finding underpriced stolen goods itself rather than waiting for retailers to report them)
Amazon and eBay (The marketplaces INFORM made verify high-volume sellers; Amazon also came up as the alternative for shoppers who will not wait for a locked case)
National Retail Federation and RILA (The trade bodies Home Depot works with to estimate an industry shrink number nobody can agree on)
Flock Safety (Named by Weisenthal as the current focus of public backlash against camera surveillance)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The Great Modern Train Robbery: Thieves Steal $200 Million a Year (The Bloomberg feature Alloway cited as the reason she started looking at cargo theft)
INFORM Consumers Act (The federal law requiring online marketplaces to verify high-volume sellers, which Glenn says left peer-to-peer platforms uncovered)
Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (The bill Glenn is "super bullish" on: passed the House, attached to the defense authorization, awaiting the Senate)
Trucking Is Booming Again, And Drivers Aren't Happy About It (The earlier Odd Lots episode whose guest mentioned cargo theft in passing, which is why this episode exists)
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