Retailers today face an impossible-sounding mandate: reduce rising shrink, ensure employee and shopper safety, and do it all while preserving a frictionless, welcoming experience. But for many, the solutions that aim to stop theft have created a new kind of barrier—one that drives away customers, frustrates employees, and makes stores feel more like fortresses than places to shop.
At Gatekeeper Systems, we believe loss prevention and positive customer experience can—and must—coexist. Our suite of intelligent theft prevention technologies, led by our Purchek® pushout theft prevention solution, is designed to do just that: create safer stores that remain open, efficient, and welcoming to shoppers.
The Safety Challenge Is Real—and Growing
Retailers aren’t imagining the problem. According to the Motorola Solutions 2024 State of U.S. Retail Worker Safety Report, 83% of retail workers say they’ve felt unsafe at work in the past year. And nearly 20% say they’ve considered leaving their job specifically because of safety concerns.
The increase in theft—especially pushout theft, where full carts of unpaid merchandise are wheeled past registers and out the door—has not only hurt bottom lines, but also morale. It’s contributed to employee turnover and the implementation of high-friction loss prevention tactics that customers find frustrating.
In fact, a joint 2024 study by the NRF and RILA found that locked cases and restrictive product access are the top sources of shopper dissatisfaction in food retail, with 67% of customers reporting they’ve abandoned a purchase when an item was locked up or unavailable due to theft concerns.
And as Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth recently noted, “locking up products makes it harder for honest customers to shop and harder for team members to serve them.”
A Better Approach: Safe, Open, and Smart
At Gatekeeper Systems, we believe the solution isn’t to make stores harder to shop—but smarter to secure. Our Purchek® technology offers retailers a non-confrontational, intelligent way to stop pushout theft before it leaves the store.
Here’s how it works:
– Cart wheels lock quietly at the exit if merchandise hasn’t been paid for
– A video event is triggered instantly to support investigations and case building
– The system acts as a deterrent—without creating conflict or interfering with the shopping experience
Paired with FaceFirst’s AI-enabled face matching, our solution doesn’t just prevent the incident—it helps retailers uncover patterns, identify repeat offenders, and gain the upper hand against organized retail crime (ORC) trends. The combination provides retailers with a dual-layered defense that’s proactive, discreet, and intelligent.
The result?