I was hunting for something new to watch the other night. You know the drill. Scrolling through Netflix, trying to avoid another mindless reality series or a documentary of a documentary, masquerading as a documentary. That’s when I came across Black Mirror. I’d heard friends talk about it over the years but never gave it much thought. This time, I clicked the trailer. And that short clip? It hit different. It wasn’t just the high tech gadgets or sci-fi gloss. It was the way everything felt… familiar. Like watching our own world through a cracked, high-def mirror. Polished, yes. But also a little colder. A little more careless. I sat there, remote in hand, realizing the distance between that imagined script and our own industry might not be as far as we’d like to believe.
And it got me thinking…
Let’s stop pretending what’s happening in retail right now is just another “crime wave.” It isn’t. It’s the logical outcome of our very own black mirror – a system we engineered. We stripped away friction, automated the human touch, and crowned speed and labor savings as our new king and queen. And now, we act surprised when people take advantage. Maybe this isn’t a glitch in the system. Maybe it’s the system itself, finally showing us the cost of everything we glorified.
We told our customers, “No need for interaction,” and they listened. They took us at our word… and our inventory.
We told employees, “The system will catch it,” and now they stand on the sidelines, watching it happen.
We told our LP teams, “Here’s the data,” but never gave them the context, training, or influence to use it.
Convenience scaled as needed. Accountability just didn’t follow. What we mistook for theft was something colder – our very own architecture.
I keep wondering what it felt like in the boardrooms where these ideas were born. Probably a sense of pride and the excitement of progress that makes you believe you’re reshaping an industry. I’ve felt it before. That quick rush when you think, we’re onto something. But the truth always hits later. When you walk a store floor and see what that “innovation” really looks like in practice: unattended lanes, blinking self-checkouts, and teams too undertrained or overwhelmed to care.
Everyone’s racing to make things easier. Maybe it’s time we pump the brakes. Maybe it’s time to build some friction back in – carefully and deliberately. A self-checkout audit here. A refund “cooling off” period there. A human presence, just standing nearby, reminding people that someone is watching. Not in a Big Brother kind of way. More like the quiet power of being seen.
We’ve spent so much time building systems to detect dishonesty that we forgot how to recognize honesty. What if technology could do both? Imagine using AI to catch bad guys and the people who do it right. I’m talking about the ones who follow process, return change, and do what’s right when no one’s looking. What would happen if we started rewarding that instead of simply reacting to everything that goes wrong?
Loss Prevention shouldn’t be the clean-up crew for corporate decisions. It should be part of the design conversation. LP leaders belong in the same room as merchandising, operations, and IT – helping to shape the customer experience before it becomes a problem. Because what we call “loss” usually starts as a design flaw that nobody questioned early enough.
And here’s the part that might hurt a little: everyone’s copying the big retailers, but the big guys are bleeding too. Smaller organizations think the answer is to scale like giants, when their real strength is agility. They can pivot faster. They can train deeper. They can actually see their people. That’s an edge, not a limitation.
This moment we’re in, this “Black Mirror” moment, isn’t a mystery. It’s our reflection and it’s staring back at us. The question isn’t whether technology can save us. It’s whether we can make better choices with the tech we already have.
We don’t need another policy. We need sharper instincts. Better design. Braver leaders who are willing to question their own success metrics. The same mindset that created this mess won’t be the one to clean it up.
Going with the grain got us here. Only going against it will get us out.