Loss Prevention Research Council Weekly Series - Episode 96 - San Francisco Crime and Emerging Tech Surprising Start 2
With Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D'Onofrio, and Tom Meehan
Petty Thieves Plague San Francisco. ‘These Last Two Years Have Been Insane’
https://www.wsj.com/articles/crime-san-francisco-petty-thieves-small-businesses-11647797642
Interesting article this week in the Wall Street Journal on the crime trends in San Francisco. The online edition titled the article Petty Thieves Plague San Francisco. ‘These Last Two Years Have Been Insane’.
Some interesting highlights or more appropriately lowlights from the article.
Among the 25 largest U.S. cities, San Francisco has had the highest property-crime rate in four of the most recent six years for which data is available, bucking the long-term national decline in such crimes that began in the 1990s. Property crimes declined in San Francisco during the first year of the pandemic, but rose 13% in 2021. Burglaries in the city are at their highest levels since the mid-1990s. There were 20,663 thefts from vehicles last year—almost 57 a day—a 39% increase from the prior year, although still below the record of 31,398 in 2017, according to the police.
Smashed storefronts are so common that the city launched a program to fix them with public money. Car owners leave notes declaring there is nothing of value in their vehicles, or leave their windows open to save themselves from broken glass. Videos of shoplifters hauling goods out of drugstores such as Walgreens have gone viral, and a smash-and-grab robbery by 20 to 40 people at a Louis Vuitton store last November made the national news.
Owners of small businesses say the costs of security and repairs are eating into profits already diminished by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the Castro, the neighborhood where Cliff’s is located, shops have recorded nearly 100 instances of smashed windows and doors that cost $170,000 to repair since the beginning of 2020, according to the neighborhood’s merchant association.
Businesses have been affected in every corner of San Francisco, even traditionally low-crime areas such as the Sunset District, where commercial and residential burglaries rose 80% in between 2019 and 2021.
Have not been to the city in a while but these stats are quite disturbing and unfortunately not totally always isolated to San Francisco. Again, engage with LPRC to help.
Then and Now: The Surprising Start of your Favorite Retail Technologies – Part 2
https://www.tonydonofrio.com/blog/technology/then-and-now-the-surprising-start-and-success-of-your-favorite-technologies.html
This week I am publishing the second part of my new article series on the surprising start of your favorite retail formats and technologies. Part 1 included a review of the first department store, first supermarket, and the first use of a bar code in a retail store. In part two, the focus is all on technologies starting with the first item purchased online.
As with other emerging technologies, one can debate the origin of c-commerce. Candidates include a pizza, weed, a CD or computer parts.
The first real online transaction that involved data encryption software to send a credit card securely took place in August 1994 on a website called NetMarket. On August 11, Dan Kohn sold a CD of Sting’s ‘Ten Summoner’s Tales’ to a friend for $12.48 plus shipping.
Once the internet could be used as a secure shopping channel, online shopping’s success was inevitable. In 1995, Amazon.com and eBay launched their online shopping platforms, soon followed by Rakuten in Japan and Alibaba in China.
A decade ago, e-commerce made up only 8% of total retail sales in the United States. The pandemic, as with most digital technologies, became a major growth accelerator for e-commerce. According to McKinsey, COVID-19 compressed 10 years of e-commerce adoption into three months.
At peak in 2020, worldwide e-commerce grew over 25%.
E-commerce will continue to grow double digit crossing $6 trillion worldwide by 2023. China has by far the largest retail ecommerce market, representing 52.1% of total worldwide sales. USA is second but at only at 19%.
As of 2021, over 2 billion people worldwide shopped online — that’s over one in four people. ‘Field of Gold’, which was one of the tracks on that Sting CD that started it all, perfectly summarizes the journey riches that ecommerce has accumulated since its surprising start.
The next technology that is present is the smartphone.
The surprising start of the smartphone was on August 16, 1994 when IBM released the Simon Personal Communicator to the market. Although the term “smartphone” didn’t come into existence until a year later, Simon had many of the features of a true smartphone, such as built-in applications like an address book, calendar, calculator, and notepad. It even had a touchscreen, although it required a stylus.
The price of that original Simon smartphone is not too price from the price of an iPhone today. IBM priced Simon at $899 with a service contract ($1,435 in today’s dollars. The original Simon was on the market for six months and only 50,000 units were sold.
Fast forward to 2007 when the Apple iPhone emerged and the world was forever changed. In many of my articles, I name the smartphone as the third megatrend that transformed retail.
Today we have all been trained to stare at that smartphone screen. In 2021, just the top 5 largest smartphone markets crossed over 2 billion units in total usage.
Finally, part 2 explains the start of robotics. “The word “robot” was coined in 1920 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek and he imagined artificial, fully functional servants.”
The first industrial robot was the Unimate, developed in the 1950s by Joseph Engelberger and George Devol. The original purpose of these early prototypes was to perform tasks that would harm humans.
In 1959, a Unimate prototype was installed on a General Motors assembly line to move hot pieces of metal. The introduction of robots in the manufacturing process led General Motors to become the most automated automotive plant in the world. Robots could build 110 cars per hour, more than twice as fast as any other automotive plant at the time.
The global market for industrial robots was $43.8 billion USD in 2021. The market is expected to grow at a compound-annual-growth rate (CAGR) of around 10%, reaching nearly $71 billion USD by 2028.
In the retail industry, the robots are accelerating their invasion. One in four retailers are currently working on a robotic project and 47% report that they will be working on an instore robotic project in the next 18 months.
The pandemic raised the profile of robotic automation in warehouses and stores. Sixty-three of retailers say robotics increased the importance for use in warehouses and 42% see greater importance in stores.
Again take the opportunity to engage with LPRC to learn more about all these technologies and how to optimize their deployments.
