What are the key takeaways from this Odd Lots episode?

Key insights include: **Shrink Breakdown:** Home Depot categorizes shrink into three environments — retail stores, supply chain, and online — each containing operational, financial, and malicious subcategories. Roughly 70% of total shrink is malicious (externally caused), while 30% is self-inflicted through operational or administrative errors. Focusing resources on malicious shrink yields the highest return on investigative effort.; **ORC Investigation Pipeline:** Retailers build cases by cultivating intelligence from individual store apprehensions, then cross-referencing vehicle, license, and identity data across multiple store incidents. Home Depot's internal team, staffed largely by former federal agents, targets cases where a single individual appears across 4+ stores, compressing a typical 70-day investigation cycle using video edge analytics and web-crawling tools.; **Fencing Economics:** Stolen goods move through consolidators who strip identifying tags and price stickers before listing on peer-to-peer platforms like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. Technology-connected products sell at 70–80% of retail value; commodity items like deodorant or over-the-counter medicine sell at 30–40 cents on the dollar. Listings priced below a retailer's own cost at volume are a primary investigative trigger.

What did Scott Glenn discuss on Odd Lots?

Scott Glenn, VP of Asset Protection at Home Depot, breaks down organized retail crime from in-store boosters and fencing operations to supply chain diversion and fraudulent bill-of-lading schemes, explaining how retailers investigate cases, deploy technology, and push for federal legislation through the COORCA bill. Key topics include: **Shrink Breakdown:** Home Depot categorizes shrink into three environments — retail stores, supply chain, and online — each containing operational, financial, and malicious subcategories. Roughly 70% of total shrink is malicious (externally caused), while 30% is self-inflicted through operational or administrative errors. Focusing resources on malicious shrink yields the highest return on investigative effort.; **ORC Investigation Pipeline:** Retailers build cases by cultivating intelligence from individual store apprehensions, then cross-referencing vehicle, license, and identity data across multiple store incidents. Home Depot's internal team, staffed largely by former federal agents, targets cases where a single individual appears across 4+ stores, compressing a typical 70-day investigation cycle using video edge analytics and web-crawling tools..

How long is this episode of Odd Lots?

This episode is 52 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Odd Lots

The Rise of Organized Retail Crime at Big Box Stores

September 10, 2026

52 min episode · 2 min read

Scott Glenn

Episode

52 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Productivity, Sales & Revenue, Product & Tech Trends

AI-Generated Summary

Published Sep 10, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Shrink Breakdown: Home Depot categorizes shrink into three environments — retail stores, supply chain, and online — each containing operational, financial, and malicious subcategories. Roughly 70% of total shrink is malicious (externally caused), while 30% is self-inflicted through operational or administrative errors. Focusing resources on malicious shrink yields the highest return on investigative effort.
✓ORC Investigation Pipeline: Retailers build cases by cultivating intelligence from individual store apprehensions, then cross-referencing vehicle, license, and identity data across multiple store incidents. Home Depot's internal team, staffed largely by former federal agents, targets cases where a single individual appears across 4+ stores, compressing a typical 70-day investigation cycle using video edge analytics and web-crawling tools.
✓Fencing Economics: Stolen goods move through consolidators who strip identifying tags and price stickers before listing on peer-to-peer platforms like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. Technology-connected products sell at 70–80% of retail value; commodity items like deodorant or over-the-counter medicine sell at 30–40 cents on the dollar. Listings priced below a retailer's own cost at volume are a primary investigative trigger.
✓Lockup Paradox: Locking high-theft items behind cases does not necessarily reduce sales — in many categories, sales increase because product is consistently in stock rather than stolen. Home Depot identified one drill kit selling for $799 that was being repurchased 4.2 times for every legitimate sale, making lockup economically justified despite customer friction and added labor costs.
✓COORCA Legislation: The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, already passed by the House and attached to the NDAA, would dedicate federal prosecutors and coordination resources specifically to ORC, reclassifying multi-state theft rings as federal interstate commerce crimes under USC 18/2314. Thirty-five states already operate ORC task forces, and the bill has bipartisan sponsorship across both chambers.

What It Covers

Scott Glenn, VP of Asset Protection at Home Depot, breaks down organized retail crime from in-store boosters and fencing operations to supply chain diversion and fraudulent bill-of-lading schemes, explaining how retailers investigate cases, deploy technology, and push for federal legislation through the COORCA bill.

Key Questions Answered

•Shrink Breakdown: Home Depot categorizes shrink into three environments — retail stores, supply chain, and online — each containing operational, financial, and malicious subcategories. Roughly 70% of total shrink is malicious (externally caused), while 30% is self-inflicted through operational or administrative errors. Focusing resources on malicious shrink yields the highest return on investigative effort.
•ORC Investigation Pipeline: Retailers build cases by cultivating intelligence from individual store apprehensions, then cross-referencing vehicle, license, and identity data across multiple store incidents. Home Depot's internal team, staffed largely by former federal agents, targets cases where a single individual appears across 4+ stores, compressing a typical 70-day investigation cycle using video edge analytics and web-crawling tools.
•Fencing Economics: Stolen goods move through consolidators who strip identifying tags and price stickers before listing on peer-to-peer platforms like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. Technology-connected products sell at 70–80% of retail value; commodity items like deodorant or over-the-counter medicine sell at 30–40 cents on the dollar. Listings priced below a retailer's own cost at volume are a primary investigative trigger.
•Lockup Paradox: Locking high-theft items behind cases does not necessarily reduce sales — in many categories, sales increase because product is consistently in stock rather than stolen. Home Depot identified one drill kit selling for $799 that was being repurchased 4.2 times for every legitimate sale, making lockup economically justified despite customer friction and added labor costs.
•COORCA Legislation: The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, already passed by the House and attached to the NDAA, would dedicate federal prosecutors and coordination resources specifically to ORC, reclassifying multi-state theft rings as federal interstate commerce crimes under USC 18/2314. Thirty-five states already operate ORC task forces, and the bill has bipartisan sponsorship across both chambers.

Notable Moment

Glenn revealed that when he joined Home Depot in 2018, he was skeptical that organized retail crime was a significant problem. The post-COVID expansion of peer-to-peer resale platforms fundamentally changed his view, as these channels gave criminal networks a scalable, low-accountability outlet to monetize stolen inventory at volume.

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Episode Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker 1: Hello, Odd Lodge listeners. I'm Joe Wiesenthal. 00:00:06 Speaker 2: And I'm Tracy Alloway. 00:00:07 Speaker 1: We're the hosts of the Odd Lodge podcast, and we've got something exciting for you. 00:00:11 Speaker 2: That's right. So one of the best parts of hosting our podcast is we get to actually meet and interact with our listeners. And we know we have some listeners over in Los Angeles. 00:00:21 Speaker 3: That's right. 00:00:21 Speaker 1: So if you're in L.A., we're going to be recording a live show, some live recordings at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood on September 17th. 00:00:30 Speaker 2: We have some really exciting guests lined up, have some really great conversations planned. So go ahead and get your tickets. You can find those over at Bloomberg.com forward slash oddlots or click the link below in the show notes and come and say hi when you're there. 00:00:49 Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. 00:01:05 Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Traci Allaway. 00:01:09 Speaker 1: And I'm Joe Weisenthal. 00:01:10 Speaker 2: Joe, we did an episode recently with Reid Lustelo, the chief marketing officer over at the Truck Parking Club. 00:01:16 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:01:17 Speaker 2: And that was a great episode about the— Super fun. The rebound in trucking. But he mentioned one thing and he did it in a sort of offhand way. And it really piqued my interest. He basically said that cargo theft had become this huge deal. And it wasn't just, you know, some guys stealing boxes off the back of trucks, which is kind of what I have in my head. 00:01:38 Speaker 4: Same. 00:01:38 Speaker 2: It was people spoofing actual carriers or pretending to be a carrier and then picking up entire cargo loads of inventory. 00:01:47 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:01:47 Speaker 2: And presumably reselling it. 00:01:49 Speaker 1: No, that totally blew my mind. I mean, it makes sense, right? Like, okay, if we're talking in the U.S., there's tens of thousands of trucking companies. And so the degree to which any shipper could really know any carrier is probably kind of loose, et cetera. It's like, yeah, why not just sort of like spring up one day and you know, get some shipments and then take them on your own way. It makes a lot of sense, but definitely not what I would have had in mind, as you said, about what a cargo theft meant up until that point. 00:02:16 Speaker 2: Well, since then, I keep seeing these headlines popping up. There was a great Bloomberg story the other day actually called The Great Modern Train Robbery Thieves Steal $ 200 Million a Year Off of Railway Cars. And so you can see, like, This seems to be a big deal. We know, living in New York, that it feels like shoplifting has become …

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