The Rise of Organized Retail Crime at Big Box Stores

If you walk into a local pharmacy in New York City, more likely than not, lots of the merchandise is locked behind closed doors as a measure to mitigate shoplifting. So how big is the “retail shrink” problem really? And why are stores willing to sacrifice customer experience to protect their inventory? According to today’s guest, the Home Depot’s VP of Asset Protection Scott Glenn, shoplifting is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to retail theft. What is really bedeviling companies like the Home Depot is something called organized retail crime — heists by criminal outfits that seek to nab large quantities of merchandise that eventually ends up in the black market. Today, we speak with Glenn about the in-and-outs of organized retail crime, the retail shrink problem, and what stores are doing to bring down theft right now. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Joe Weisenthal?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next. About the time it takes to grab a coffee. So, search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So, all the source materials, briefs and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful, can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 1:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello, Odd Lots listeners. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 1:50Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 1:51Joe Weisenthal?

  We're the hosts of the Odd Lots Podcast, and we've got something exciting for you.

• 1:55Tracy Alloway?

  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.

• 2:04Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. So, if you're in LA, we are going to be recording a live show, some live recordings, at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood on September 17.

• 2:13Tracy Alloway?

  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 dot com forward slash Odd Lots, or click the link below in the show notes and come and say hi when you're there.

• 2:32Speaker 04

  Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:48Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:52Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:54Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, we did an episode recently with Reed Lusteloh, the Chief Marketing Officer over at the Truck Parking Club.

• 3:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 3:00Tracy Alloway?

  And that was a great episode about the

• 3:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Super fun.

• 3:02Tracy Alloway?

  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

• 3:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 3:14Tracy Alloway?

  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.

• 3:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Same.

• 3:22Tracy Alloway?

  It was people spoofing actual carriers or pretending to be a carrier and then picking up entire cargo loads

• 3:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Tracy Alloway?

  of inventory and presumably reselling it.

• 3:33Joe Weisenthal?

  No, that totally blew my mind. I mean, it makes sense, right? Like, okay, if we're talking in the US, 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, etc. 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.

• 4:00Tracy Alloway?

  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.

• 4:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 4:15Tracy Alloway?

  We know, living in New York, that it feels like shoplifting has become a bigger deal in recent years

• 4:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Tracy Alloway?

  after the pandemic. And we can debate whether or not the statistics bear that out. But certainly, if you walk down the street and you go into our local Duane Reade, everything is locked up, right?

• 4:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Right. That's the sort of core thing is like, I don't, you know, there's probably various ways to massage statistics and all kinds of stuff. But whatever, it's not good.

• 4:42Tracy Alloway?

  I see them locking the stuff up.

• 4:44Joe Weisenthal?

  They're locking it up. They must know that customers, by and large, hate it, right? They must know that it decreases labor productivity, having to have staffers in the store.

• 4:54Tracy Alloway?

  You have to ring the bell.

• 4:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, get a deodorant, etc. Like, they can't think that that's a great operation. So, if they're doing it, I presume there are some real issues there.

• 5:02Tracy Alloway?

  Well, we're going to get into all of it today. We'll do the sort of low-level locking stuff up on shelves, all the way to the high level pretending to be an entire trucking company and stealing someone's inventory that way. And I'm glad to say, we have the perfect guest to try to understand all of this. We're going to be speaking with Scott Glenn. He is the Vice President of Asset Protection over at The Home Depot, and an organized retail crime expert. So, truly the perfect person to speak to. Scott, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 5:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. Appreciate the, you know, the expert designation. I'm not so, I'm not so sure I can live up to that, but I'll do my best.

• 5:39Tracy Alloway?

  I love that you're wearing the Home Depot apron as well.

• 5:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. Look, it's, it's part of our culture. It's part of what we are. You can see our values over our heart is an intentional thing. Today's earnings day for Home Depot, and so, we're all supporting the cause.

• 5:53Tracy Alloway?

  All right. First question, and then we can get into maybe more serious topics. But what's the most stolen item from Home Depot?

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Volume or dollars?

• 6:03Tracy Alloway?

  Well, let's do both. Let's do both.

• 6:05Speaker 05

  So, I would say volume. It's typically something like a power drill. You see a lot of that. And then, when you start to get into dollars, believe it or not, copper and wire have a lot of the commodity value out there. And so, we see people come in, they'll take a lot of that stuff out of the building and try to resell it or use it on jobs, things like that. But yeah, so certainly, those are, those are certainly two of the bigger ones.

• 6:30Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, someone broke into, there's a museum close to where I am in Connecticut called the Nathan Hale Museum, an old colonial homestead. Someone broke into it recently and stole a bunch of copper pipes.

• 6:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Are you serious? Like, they ripped, like, old pipes that were

• 6:44Tracy Alloway?

  Apparently, it was in the house next to it, but it was still pretty upsetting for everyone, you know, a historic home getting hit for copper.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  It happens everywhere. When I joined Home Depot eight years ago, and I moved into my house, between the time I closed on my house and the time that I moved into the house, they took all the copper out of the HVAC units and all the, you know, pieces of it. So, it's just, it is definitely a commodity that fluctuates in price. And when the price goes up, it becomes really valuable to the bad guys.

• 7:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, that's actually a great thing. So, you mentioned you've been at The Home Depot for eight years. But why don't you give us a quick, like, sort of overview of your career, what your role is, why we're talking to you? Like, what's, what's been the main thing that have landed you in this chair?

• 7:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, I would tell you, surprised that I'm in this chair. I went to school to be an architect when I was, 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, and I got into the criminal justice side of the business. I was always fascinated by the law. I ended up going to law school after college and, and did that route. But started working with the Treasury Department right out of law school and worked for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Realized that I did not like government service. It just wasn't my gig. It wasn't what I wanted to do forever. And so, I had, during summers, during school, I had worked at Target and caught shoplifters. So, just kind of a side, you know, make some money gig.

• 8:10Speaker 05

  And luckily, I was able to get back my foot in the door with Target after I left the government and worked for them and just worked my way up through the ranks. So, been here, been at Kohl's Department Stores for 10 years. I was at Sears for 10 years as a CSO. And then, I came back here to Home Depot eight years ago.

• 8:27Tracy Alloway?

  So, before we go any further, why don't we define our terms? When we talk about retail theft, I imagine this covers a range of activities from, you know, someone innocently, perhaps forgetting to scan their deodorant at self-checkout, to really organized, seemingly very ambitious heist.

• 8:48Tracy Alloway?

  What are we talking about exactly here? How do you kind of categorize retail theft in your head?

• 8:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a spectrum to your point. There's definitely low level opportunistic. I'll even call it the need shoplifters that are out there. They just can't afford things and we know that happens. And that's not what I would say acceptable to us, but it's also not our focus. It's not the place where we spend a lot of our energy and our tactics up to the most sophisticated criminal organizations that are out there. And I mean sophisticated cartel related, transnational, gang related, international organizations whose sole existence is to monetize theft to do other bad things, whether that's money laundering, drug trafficking, human trafficking. And these are absolutely known things that are happening out there. So it's a, there's a lot of space in between that and it runs the gamut.

• 9:38Speaker 05

  But we tend to focus our time and our energy and our resources on the higher end.

• 9:43Joe Weisenthal?

  While we're in the business of defining terms here, I think this is helpful. A word like shrinkage is one that comes up. Would shrinkage only apply to, okay, the person who walks into a store and manages to walk out with a power drill or something like that? Or is it counted in shrinkage statistics if it's like a very complex heist of an entire truck that never makes it to the destination?

• 10:06Speaker 05

  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. There's a lot of different ways that could happen. That is not just the bad guys coming in and stealing stuff. So when we talk about things within our world here, when I talk with our leadership and I talk to our board, we break it out into what we call operational or controllable administrative types of shrink. And then what we call the malicious. And I, another way to look at that is might be like things we do to ourself versus things people do to us. And that's the way we tend to categorize that ratio. And for us, I'm not going to say this is for everybody at retail, but for us, we're pretty good at controlling the operational side of the business.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  So about 30% of our shrink is falls into that operational administrative, things we do to ourself type of category. And then the balance of it falls into more of the malicious side or things that people do to us.

• 11:02Joe Weisenthal?

  That's very helpful. And then one more question on this. In the broader category of retail theft, do you have a split on how much happens in store versus somewhere else, whether it's one of the distribution center, warehouse, et cetera, versus somewhere else on the supply chain?

• 11:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we actually break out our shrink in the supply chain separately. Then we break out our shrink in the retail environments versus the way, the way we break out our shrink in our online environment. So we actually have three different buckets of where the shrink can happen that roll up to our larger. Now, in the supply chain, you can have operational, financial and malicious shrink. In the stores, you can have operational, financial and malicious shrink. And online, you can have operational, financial and malicious shrink. So that all rolls up to the big number, but the biggest chunk of it, to your point, does exist in the 2,400 stores, retail stores that we have out there.

• 11:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Got it.

• 11:53Tracy Alloway?

  So give us a sense of the overall shrink problem versus how much of it is malicious? How much of it is operational across the industry? And is it true that retail theft has become more of an issue? Because again, you see these statistics, you see the headlines, Target closing two stores because of rising crime, or you see a company come out and say, oh, our shrink has gone up this year. But to your point, it could be because maybe they're just worse at keeping track of their inventory than they were the year before. So give us some context around how big a problem this is and whether or not it's been getting worse.

• 12:28Speaker 05

  You're, you're getting to the, probably the most debated question in retail, retail asset protection, loss prevention, which is, and you know, I wish I could give you a, a clean answer on that. I can't, I can tell you, maybe I'll start at the top and say, how big is it? It's in the billions, it's in the tens of billions, the shrink problem. There's a lot of different estimates out there. Our cohorts, my, my peers, my friends and peer retailers, we all talk about this. We work with Rilo, we work with N R F, we work with all the, try to get the best estimates on, you know, what this number is. But how people categorize shrink, what somebody calls operational shrink versus administrative versus malicious can vary by retailers.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  And so you've got the retail component of, there's, there's, we are a retail accounting operation. There are companies that are on cost accounting. And so making that transition between, you know, the dollars and how do you include markup and to get to a number, very, very complicated number. What I could tell you is, is that there's these numbers that have been around as long as I've been doing this in, in retail, which is like 40% of shrink on the malicious side is done by associates working for the company. They cause 40% of your loss. 35% are people walking into your store and causing it in 20, 25, whatever the balance is, is that self inflicted, operational, administrative types of shrink. And so those numbers ebb, flow, they go every year, there's surveys that are done.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  They might go up a couple of percentages, they might go down a couple of percentages. What I can speak to is when I got here at Home Depot in 2018, I wasn't even really a big believer in what you would call the organized retail crime problem. Also pre-COVID, also before, you know, Omni really took off and has blown up to what it is here. Places where you can resell very impersonally.

• 14:19Joe Weisenthal?

  But what's Omni?

• 14:20Speaker 05

  Online, online sales, Omni channel, sorry. But when you think about like the, the kinetics of all that and how that's changed over time. And I would tell you that 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 when it comes to how it impacts the customers and the associates in the stores. So while those numbers have generally, you know, estimated state in the kind of same buckets, I believe they're starting to drift up. And I also believe since COVID, they've been under reported. And so I think that there's a big piece of that, that, that it's just not necessarily reflecting in all the numbers that you see showing up in police reporting, FBI uniform crime reports, things of that nature.

• 15:20Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 16:28Speaker 06

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• 16:58Joe Weisenthal?

  So maybe this is a good opportunity to sort of dive into some details. But you said earlier in the episode that you're more interested in the sort of more sophisticated, organized drivers of shrink than perhaps a random person who maybe they can't afford an item, et cetera. Can you talk to us about in a given theft, et cetera, someone goes into a store and they walk out or they take something that they didn't pay for? What are the fingerprints that look like, okay, this, we have reason to believe was part of something sophisticated and organized versus this is like, yeah, we don't support that, but it's one random person and it's not going to be the main thing we prioritize?

• 17:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, you guys asked some great questions to get right into the, into the details of how, how some of this, uh, this becomes difficult. So in an individual instance, it's almost impossible. You know, if you talk to somebody, if the, you know, we have people in our stores, their whole job is to stop theft. That's what they do, that they, they detain people, they prosecute, they, they work with the law enforcement and they, and they deal with that. And then we have groups of people here in Atlanta, whose job is to handle the more sophisticated components of this piece of it. But it all starts locally, it all starts in the stores. And so some of that is, hey, I see somebody steal that drill. And you sit down and have a conversation with that person before they end up going to jail. And they were really using it to work on a project on their deck on their house.

• 18:25Speaker 05

  Whereas you might have that conversation with them and say, yeah, I was asked to come and steal this and I was going to go take it to another place and I was going to get money for that. Or I was going to get drugs for that, or I was going to get something. And I was going to get, get given a list to go to another store and go get something else. And so we cultivate that intelligence, we cultivate those resources and we report that back to our folks here who are organized retail crime experts and do this for a living, most of whom are former federal law enforcement agents or law enforcement agents at state and local agencies. And their job is to figure out which is the wheat and which is the chaff. And what are the things that are the most important thing for us to go? And so we have video analytics, we have other technologies that we work on to kind of say, okay, now I know this person, I know this car, I know this vehicle, I've seen them in store A, now I've seen them in store B.

• 19:10Speaker 05

  We've got a report from that building that says, you know, Johnny with driver's license, one, two, three, four, five, six, has been in now four stores apprehended for theft because they're going to get apprehended. They might be put in jail and they'll be out the next day. You know, they're going to make bail or there's going to be no cash bail or whatever the case may be. And they're just going to go back to doing what they're doing. And so that's how we try to like stitch these cases together and understand which ones are the ones that are more valuable to pull on versus the ones that are like, this is really a one time occurrence and this is not something that we need to spend a lot of resources on.

• 19:41Tracy Alloway?

  To what degree do you actually work with the police? Because when you talk about, well, we observe these people going to different stores and we try to see if we can identify patterns and stitch the sort of. Ring together. That sounds like something the police should be doing.

• 19:57Speaker 05

  Sometimes it's hard enough to get the police to show up. And I'm not blaming in this case. I mean, we know that police departments are under-resourced, stretched very thin. When you talk about retail theft versus, you know, robbery versus carjacking versus murder and the escalation hierarchy, where are they going to spend their time, right? So they're, they're not going to always be able to have the capability to come to our store and deal with this. So I would tell you, our, I'll call it our internal behind the scenes is we, our job is to do the work for them. Our job is to hand them a case file that is 80% complete that says, I've given you everything that I can possibly do for you to then walk into a judge, get a search warrant, get an arrest warrant, do everything that I can't do. And they're going to respect that. They're going to say, if, if I don't have

• 20:42Speaker 05

  to do all the hard work, I don't have to do all the behind the scenes labor, and all I've got to do is walk in front of a judge and say, this is a great case, then we believe, we believe everything that's here and put their hand up and swear on the, on the, on the Bible, then they're going to take those cases much more regularly than somebody that's kind of saying, hey, you just go figure it out for me.

• 21:00Tracy Alloway?

  Just one more question on this. Is it true that some retailers will not stop shoplifting until they observe the shoplifter getting to a certain threshold of goods stolen? Because then they can go for like an actual meaningful charge.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  You know, I would be hard pressed to speak to that for what the policies of some of my, my compatriots are there. But what I would say is, is we don't do that. When people say that, I feel like they're, they're kind of looking at things in a very narrow scope. And going back to our point earlier, this may be something where we're already working on this person. We know they've been in 50 stores over the last 30 days stealing from us. And if they walk out the door, it may be because we're going to go watch them go to where the fence is, or where they're going to resell the product, or where they're storing the product. That might be part of an operation versus a, hey, we're letting you go get to a threshold. And that's really what, you know, at least from our end, we're not trying to like, build up big charges on people. We're trying to

• 21:58Speaker 05

  say, I want to get the complete picture of what's happening. Because when I wrap this up, I want it to be completely wrapped up.

• 22:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Intuitively, it seems like it would probably be pretty hard to prevent someone from like, stealing a, a washer, like the little disc or something like that, you know, like put it in your jeans pockets or whatever. It seems like technology should make it very hard intuitively to steal a power drill, because I imagine you could put tags on it that would set off alarms, that you could have video surveillance that could simply set off something if a person was in one aisle, trigger, I have to imagine it's not that hard to train a model to identify someone, take it off the shelf, and then that person makes a route out the store without ever having

• 22:46Joe Weisenthal?

  gone to the register. This seems solvable by technology alone. Why isn't it? What is it make such that, A, it must still happen all the time, or B, it only gets stopped if a person at the end happens to notice it?

• 23:01Speaker 05

  I love your thought process. That is a really expensive thought process.

• 23:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 23:05Speaker 05

  And you think about a Home Depot store, 140,000 square feet of a working warehouse.

• 23:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 05

  To put the cameras that I would need to do that. And by the way, there are places where we do that. There are places, you know, in, in some aisles, we're able to do that. But we have a lot of valuable stuff at our stores in different parts of the store. The front end, we have AI, you know, base cameras. We have a lot of different, I would say, video analytics that are continuing to evolve and we're really leaning into. But it is expensive and it's a, it's a lot of processing power. It's a lot of hardware that you have to put into your stores. We have some advantages with our scale and our size to be able to do some of that. Not everybody does. And certainly not everybody has, you know, sometimes it's a little bit of a trade off, like how much are you willing to take in shrink versus how much you would have to invest in hardware, capital expense, operating expenses, to be able to put it to zero. I mean, the number

• 23:56Speaker 05

  we aspire to is zero.

• 23:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure.

• 23:58Speaker 05

  The number we'll get to is somewhere north of that.

• 24:01Joe Weisenthal?

  But just like, what about tags and stuff that are, I mean, there are clothing items in many stores that have tags that will set off an alarm. Why at a level of a power drill, is that an insufficient technology to get the number to zero?

• 24:16Speaker 05

  It's not, it's not insufficient. We've played around in the bricking of product space.

• 24:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 24:21Speaker 05

  When you think about, you know, the margins in some of these places, does it make sense to do it to go have to redefine your entire production line for a Milwaukee drill in order to insert a cap, a technology, a Bluetooth chip of some sort? We've tried that. It's very, very hard to scale up. And again, you still have to put hardware in your stores to be able to detect those tags. That that's the piece that typically is very expensive. Again, none of this is impossible. It's just like, there's always trade offs and you're working towards that. It's going to take some time. I mean, to be honest with you, RFID has a lot of promise in terms of tracking, not just the theft side of product, but like, where is this product in the store? Has it been sold? What's the replenishment look like? How do you get your on hands corrected?

• 25:06Speaker 05

  There's a ton of business opportunities on those pieces. But I think that RFID hardware costs have always been so expensive.

• 25:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow.

• 25:14Speaker 05

  It's almost impossible to put it in a store, in a Home Depot store. We have eight separate entrances in and out of our building.

• 25:19Tracy Alloway?

  How much of this is a liability issue in the sense that, okay, I can tag an item and I can hear an alarm ring if someone is going out with it without paying. But there's still an issue over whether or not you want your employees, even your security guards, going after people who might actually fight back and be dangerous. And I'm sure we've all seen, you especially Scott, the videos of some guy who just fills a massive shopping cart and walks out of the store with the security staff looking on.

• 25:50Speaker 05

  It's the bigger issue than the financial, right? Like, at the end of the day, there's a certain level of, we understand there's going to be some shrink in our stores. There's a certain cost of doing business. When you open up to the public, you're going to have some of this, this type of pieces of it. But this is the problem specifically with the organized retail crime folks, the professional criminals. A lot of times, they're using homeless folks, addicted folks, people that are maybe on the, you know, down, down low. And they are monetizing them to go in and do this. And their only thought process is, I'm leaving with this product because I need to get my money. I need to get my whatever. And they will do violent things. And they have done violent things. And not only, you know, has it happened in retail, it's happened specifically

• 26:35Speaker 05

  to us. And we've actually had people injured. We've had people killed in our stores in these types of incidents where that is just, we're not going to allow that. So our security folks, our asset protection people in stores, they're trained, they're trained not only on how to do what they do, but also how to de-escalate, how to observe and pull away from those situations when they start there. But we also have 400,000 store associates who are very passionate. They don't like to see stuff stolen. And we train them very clearly on like, you don't get involved in these things. You, you back away. And we do give them the same, you know, a slightly different, but diff, but still de-escalation type training, because that's the problem. I'll trade the shrink

• 27:16Speaker 05

  for the safety of the people every day of the week. And my leadership team and our board would back us on those decisions all day long. We're never, ever going to put people in jeopardy. Our associates and our customers are the number one priority.

• 27:28Joe Weisenthal?

  I've been hearing, we've been hearing about RFID tags for 25 years now. I would have assumed that the price of this hardware would have come down dramatically such that you slap a little tag on and if it like, you know, it's not very easy to remove. And then by the time you go through some gate or entrance, it sets off an alarm. Can you talk about why in 2026, that technology is still actually expensive and hard to scale?

• 27:57Speaker 05

  No, I can't. I don't understand it. It's your lips to God's ears, right? Like, it's, it's one of those things where I'm with you. And I will say, a Home Depot environment, little different. We are a hardware store with a basically a Faraday cage of steel throughout our stores. We do, a passive RFID does not work in our stores. You have to go to the, to an active pinging RFID technology. We've tested it. We, we know, we know it can work. Again, it's all about typically those.

• 28:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Can you just explain that, that it does not work in your stores? Actually, I don't know anything about this. Can you clarify that?

• 28:33Speaker 05

  It's difficult. The signals are blocked by the steel.

• 28:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh.

• 28:35Speaker 05

  That's, that's typically the way it works in our stores. For a passive technology like that, there, there is an active version of RFID that's out there. But again, it's typically bit, and, and it's not like they're not coming down. I mean, tag costs are nil at this point. That, that's not really the issue. It is truly the hardware capabilities to be able to put it everywhere you want, to be able to read the way you want it to. It's, it's still a very expensive technology to this point. Three years from now, who knows?

• 29:03Tracy Alloway?

  So why don't we talk about what happens after the goods get out of the retail environment? And maybe we should talk about the distribution environment at some point, too.

• 29:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Tracy Alloway?

  But what is fencing?

• 29:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:14Tracy Alloway?

  Not the sport.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  So again, I kind of mentioned the, what we call the boosters. And we're specifically now talking about organized retail crime. Boosters are the people that do the stealing. Typically, they are recruited, they are given a list, they are given money, they're given, in many cases, drugs or the promise of drugs to when they come back with the product, which is kind of the hook to make sure that they don't just walk away with the product and their money. And these folks are the ones that go out and they take the risk. They pull the product out of the stores and they do it, like I said, they can be very aggressive. They could be very violent in many cases. And all they're thinking about is how do I get out of this building and go to where I'm supposed to go? And they take it to what we call the fence. The fence is kind of

• 29:57Speaker 05

  the, the consolidator of the product. So this could be somebody's house in their garage. This could be a warehouse facility. This could be a flea market. This could be, you name it. I'll get back to, there's another interesting twist on this piece of it that I'll get back to what the, the boosters are doing and fences are doing here. But then these fences are the folks that actually clean the product and then offer the product for resale. So when I say clean it, to your point, some of these have electronic tags on them. They might have identifying, this is a product that sold at Home Depot. This is a product that sold at, you know, Target. This is a product that sold at CVS. Stickers, identifying price tags, things like that. They want to clean all that product. And then they'll offer it for sale somewhere. More and more since late teens, early twenties,

• 30:42Speaker 05

  that's online. In the past, I would say with some of the bigger online folks, the Amazons of the world, the Ebays of the world, the bigger places. Since the Informed Consumers Act was passed in 2023, I believe is when it came effective, we've seen less of that on the bigger places. And now it's moved to more of the peer-to-peer markets. So the Craigslist, the Facebook marketplaces of the world, that's where a lot of that product is then offered for sale. And so that's the fencing operation. And then the money is then kicked up to wherever, or at least a portion of it, just like your traditional organized retail crime, or organized crime. It's kicked up to some bosses that are managing this whole operation from the top. And whether that's a five guys that are sitting in an

• 31:24Speaker 05

  apartment or a house that just kind of decided that they want to be organized retail criminals, certainly fits the definition of all those types of things. And they're using the money to furnish a lifestyle, or a cartel, or a Chinese transnational gang, or a South American whatever. That could be any of those people that are the ones that are sitting at that top level, supervising the fences, making sure that the product's getting moved and making sure that the money's coming in.

• 31:50Joe Weisenthal?

  So I've heard, you know, there have been stories about Facebook Marketplace and frustration that Facebook hasn't done more. I'm not sure what the status of that. You know, if you see for sale on Facebook Marketplace, like a 10-pack of unopened Hanes t-shirts, or something like that, there might be legitimate reason to think that this was stolen. It could also be a legitimate sale. Someone bought a t-shirt and they never wore them, like it's plausible. What is the optimal role for owner of a peer-to-peer platform to play? And then what do you perceive right now is the gap between what would be a sort of like optimal role for them and contribution to fighting this versus what they're doing right now?

• 32:34Speaker 05

  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. In Form, the federal bill that was passed earlier, required the traditional marketplaces to actually do that, take that step. And make sure that they did, just like I have to know who my suppliers are here at Home Depot, they had to know who their suppliers are, the Amazons and the Ebays of the world. There was a loophole in that bill that did not cover the peer-to-peer resellers. Can't explain why it happened, just it happened. And so that loophole has continued to exist for it. And they're not going to put the governance in to do it unless they're forced to, just like the bigger boxes

• 33:19Speaker 05

  didn't have to before In Form. And so we spend a lot of time governing those marketplaces. So we have, you know, technologies that are looking at that and say, if Home Depot sells this combination drill kit for $499, how in the heck is, you know, Tommy 1234 selling it for 200 and at volume? You know, how can he sell new inbox product at a price lower than my cost? And so we will look for that type of stuff. And that's where a lot of our investigations also will start.

• 33:49Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  We'll actually start on the marketplace and work backwards to the person coming into the store, going back to kind of our earlier discussion. But it's whack-a-mole to a certain degree, right? I mean, we are really, we're really patrolling millions and millions of sellers that are out there. So we build criterias, we build models that kind of look and say, boy, this person sells a lot of drills. This person sells a lot of drills new in box. This person sells a lot of drills new in box, under our cost for the product. So that's kind of the way we tend to do that. But it's a, it's an uphill climb. It's a, it's a big battle.

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• 36:47Tracy Alloway?

  This might be a very niche question, but do you observe any interesting trends when it comes to the prices that fences are actually choosing for these items? Because they could, I mean, if you have something new in a box, you could maybe try to charge almost full price for a power drill or something. Or you see them with like massive discounts as well, and they're leaving money on the table.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  I wouldn't tell you that I've done a lot of research into like what the specifics are, what the general consensus is. The more technology laden the product is, the more it sells closer to retail. That, plus gift cards. Gift cards tend to sell very close to retail. So we see a lot of our products selling in the 70% to 80% of retail range. Whereas in some cases, you think about, you know, the deodorants and the t-shirts and the Tylenol and some of that tends to be in the 30 to 40 cents per, of retail market. So there's some broad strokes on that, but honestly, I don't spend a ton of time doing that. Just, it tends to be like, if it's internet connected, it sells very, very close to retail. If it's technology-driven, it's got some resale capability to it.

• 37:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Efficient markets, finding the right price of anything on any platform. So you talk about this loophole in the law that allowed the peer-to-peer sellers. What would be that additional step? Okay, if they were to close this loophole, what would they then be required to do? And are you either surprised or disappointed, given, I mean, a company like Meta is gigantic. Are you either, would you have been surprised or a little disappointed that they would not feel the impulse to do this voluntarily without being required by law?

• 38:26Speaker 05

  They'll tell you that they do a lot of policing of their site. And I'm not arguing that they don't have, I know they have departments that do that. We work with them. I mean, so they're not completely willfully blind. They're not, you know, completely out there just saying, no, it doesn't happen on our site. We think they could do more. And again, it comes back to, if they had information, if they had policing in place that said, how in the world does this guy undercut Home Depot or Target on pricing? That should be a flag for them to say, I'm going to pull you off the site. I'm going to suspend you from the site, versus us having to come to them and say, this guy is undercutting us on pricing. He's selling at volume. He's selling at scale. We've bought the product

• 39:08Speaker 05

  for it. We know what store it came from. We know that this guy's involved in crime. Now you go pull them off the site. And so to your, your short, your answer is both disappointed and surprised? Like that they, do I think they could be doing more? For sure. Do I think that I should be the one that has to come? 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 versus them knowing who their suppliers are, knowing that tax records exist and that there's, you know, filings that are out there that they should be held accountable to, the same way the Amazons and the Ebays of the world are?

• 39:39Tracy Alloway?

  Can you talk a little bit more about the balance between trying to shrink, the shrink in various ways, and customer experience? Because again,

• 39:49Tracy Alloway?

  We've all experienced the frustration of going into, usually it's a drugstore of some kind and hitting the plastic wall and then having to press the button and wait for someone to come. And then you're standing there for 10 minutes and then they don't have the right key. And sorry, this happened to me recently.

• 40:05Joe Weisenthal?

  No, keep going on. So seriously, they don't have the right key.

• 40:09Speaker 05

  Stores. I get a few of those emails every week from our, from our leadership. So I gotcha.

• 40:14Tracy Alloway?

  But stores, some stores have clearly made the decision that it's worth it to them economically to do this.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  We have. It is not an easy conversation with your merchants. It's not an easy conversation with your operators. It's a very arduous data-driven discussion. And so I can think back when I got here in 2018, middle of 2018, and we were on a trajectory of shrink that was not good. It was going way the wrong way at that point. And we started to have some of these conversations and, but, but I'm a data guy and I'm a, I'm a test and learn guy. I'm, I like to, you know, have my facts. And so we did some testing. We did this. We did a lot of looking into what products we were losing very, very specifically under the microscope. We found that, you know, one particular combination of kit that we

• 41:02Speaker 05

  were selling for $799, we would buy it 4.2 times for every time we sell it.

• 41:08Tracy Alloway?

  Wow.

• 41:08Speaker 05

  Now, go have that conversation with your finance folks. And they go, that's a gross margin mix. We don't like, that's a, that's a real business opportunity. If you can get me to break even, if you can get me to slightly positive on that, you know, from a gross margin perspective, then they go, okay, there's a little bit of a trade off. But it's also, we're in a unique business. We're in a, we're in a business that 50 ish percent of our revenue comes from pros and contractors. If they leave a job site because their drill broke and they go to the store because it said we had one and we don't, that's a problem too. And so, you know, as they kind of walked through and we worked through this, we got to a very curated list of products where we said, we're going to probably have to

• 41:50Speaker 05

  do something. And if we do it, we can do it the right way and try to minimize the friction. We know, we use QR codes on all of our lockups that summon somebody through our phone that they come and it takes on average about 90 seconds for that lockup to be unlocked by a person. I want to be in a place where customers can self-service. If they scan the QR code and I know that they're a pro that's in our loyalty program, why can't I give them access to that? So we're working through the friction. That's always going to be an opportunity for us. And we're trying to minimize it to the best we can, but it's not perfect. And it's, it's definitely a little bit of a balancing act that you walk on some of those particular products. You can't do everything. Like, that's just, just buy online. Like, if that, that exists, that's Amazon. If you don't want to go into a store and you don't want

• 42:33Speaker 05

  to be held up and you can wait three hours to get a product, go to Amazon. That's something we do. Now, thankfully, they don't necessarily operate in our space, like, you know, don't sell power drills and like we do.

• 42:42Tracy Alloway?

  Do you notice that sales actually go down for items that have been locked up?

• 42:47Speaker 05

  Not necessarily.

• 42:48Tracy Alloway?

  Okay.

• 42:48Speaker 05

  There are some categories where that is true. There's also many, many categories where actually sales go up because you're in stock.

• 42:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Hmm. Huh. That's interesting. I hadn't, I hadn't thought about that, but that makes a ton of sense. It's funny, when I go into pharmacies and it's all locked up, I always say to myself, I'm just gonna start shopping online for all this stuff. But I never actually do. I'm always back at the pharmacy, like every week. But I'm curious, you mentioned Omni. Like, what is the sort of modal mode, modal mode of shrink when we're talking about the e-commerce context?

• 43:22Speaker 05

  There's a couple of ways. I mean, a lot of this falls back to payments fraud, you know, credit card fraud, gift card fraud, you know, the, the payment process oftentimes is the way that they're defrauding the Omni space. There's a, to use your word, a niche piece of people buying product, taking the product out, using it, putting something back in and then doing returns. So they get, they get back on the return side. So they're getting credits for the product that they actually have and then send back to get their full refund price on. So that's a part of the business that we deal with in, in many cases that we're working through. But it's typically around the payment side and the, and the gift card and credit card fraud.

• 44:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Isn't there some like e-commerce, like incidents for people where they, they're like, I want to return this and they'll get the refund and they're like, don't bother sending it back. It's not worth it for the ingest.

• 44:09Speaker 05

  Oh, sure.

• 44:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 44:11Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 44:11Tracy Alloway?

  I realize we've been very focused on the retail side of theft, but can you talk a little bit more about what happens on the backend with distribution? Because of course, you know, you're shipping a bunch of stuff from its production center over to the store itself. I imagine there are many, many avenues along the way that a smart criminal could exploit.

• 44:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's growing. To be honest with you, I think there's, I would say three main modes. Go back to the modal piece of it, but like there is pure diversion. So whether that's in route from vendor into, if you're an importer that, you know, bring it into the US, you go into your transload facilities, your port facilities. There's people that divert full trailer loads back someplace else from that port, could be back onto a container ship to go right back over someplace else that's been stolen. There are break-ins in terms of, you know, actually just as, you know, truck drivers drive eight hours across country and they got to park their trailer somewhere. And during the time they're sleeping, they're breaking into the back of the trailer and, you know, just taking the boxes off the back. And then there's the one you mentioned a little bit earlier, which

• 45:17Speaker 05

  is the diversion on the supply chain side back out. So, right? We're seeing a lot of like, you know, fraudulent bill of lading, fraudulent pickup paperwork. AI is playing a space in this where they're able to kind of duplicate some of the capacities that allow a driver to walk, just drive straight in and say, I'm here to pick up trailer 12345. And they dribble right out because their paperwork looks really real. Now, we're moving away from that with the electronic billing and some of the, you know, the new ways that we're dealing with it. But it's not necessarily the scheme that's new. It's the volume that seems to be new because it's a very difficult thing to go after. Rail has become an issue. Rail has definitely become a bigger issue over the last probably five or six years

• 45:59Speaker 05

  where we're seeing, you know, as the cars are parked in yards, they're being broken into by mobs of people that just kind of just strip them down for, for what's in it. But they have really good intelligence, which is interesting. So, you know, we think they have people working inside the companies, the shipping companies, the trucking companies, because they don't hit every trailer or every car on the rail. They hit the car on the rail that has the product that they really want to go after. And so whether that's firearms, whether that's electronics, connected devices, you name it. There's a lot of, I would say, a kind of a new avenue opening up on the rail space. And a lot of dead track, by the way, out there too. So like, it's wide open.

• 46:40Joe Weisenthal?

  It's interesting you mentioned, you know, showing up with a fake invoice or a fake bill of lading. I wonder if you like put on an orange smock, et cetera, like how much, you know, you're just like, just blend right in and like fit it, fit in and no one, no, I'm sure people are trained to be suspicious. But you mentioned AI, like how much of like the tools, I'm sure there's, you know, we talked about cameras that could theoretically detect when someone has put something in a pocket, et cetera. But the tools that we call AI, like, have you found uses for them in, I guess, sort of offensive deployment? Whether the models can autonomously just scan through Facebook marketplaces and look

• 47:22Joe Weisenthal?

  for anything that we Home Depot had found suspicious? How much sort of have you found that the models can be sort of applied towards general tasks and find helpful info for you?

• 47:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, look, I'll, I'll say it this way. We have more cases than we can investigate. And so for us, it's an efficiency play, right? So the more we can shorten the duration of these cases, like our typical ORC case takes about 70 days from discovery to closure to handing off to the police department. And so if we can compress that timeframe, we can turn more. And so we believe that the video, we just replaced our entire video analytics, our video management system in all 2, 2,300 stores to an upgraded version that allows us to now put edge analytics on our cameras, the ones we have, you know, doesn't get necessarily to the point where you're talking about where this action or this set of actions now becomes suspicious and identifies somebody. We'll get to that.

• 48:17Speaker 05

  There's, there's a place for that. I just don't have enough cameras in all of my stores to do that. But the cameras that I do have, we are putting edge analytics around there that help us identify persons that were, you know, walking in this store and like they were, you know, lingering in this space too long or they were avoiding associates or they were in a place where they shouldn't have been. That's definitely out there. You mentioned the web crawling, you know, that's out there. That capability is out there. We have our own company that does web crawling and identifies these things that absolutely looks for all that. So anything we can do to kind of like compress that investigative cycle is how we're using AI to deploy against the bad actors that are out there today.

• 48:56Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, obviously like shoplifting theft, it affects all of us. It hurts your profit. It hurts my experience. It probably raises my prices, et cetera. There is a cost that we have to pay for taxes to increase the amount of police capacity, et cetera. This is a, you know, classic example of very bad externalities for almost everyone involved. And yet, you know, we see like this sort of like public backlash towards video cameras and so forth. There's been the last month, everyone's talking about the flock cameras, et cetera. What do you perceive as the sort of appetite among law enforcement or the politicians

• 49:36Joe Weisenthal?

  that would have to set laws to actually move the dial, et cetera, on some of this in today in 2026?

• 49:44Speaker 05

  Well, I, what I would tell you is I am super bullish on where, where this is going. You know, we talked about in form, you know, which was probably the first major ORC-driven act out there. We are now working on CORCA. CORCA is the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act. We are, Home Depot, retail in general has been a supporter. This is actually a very bipartisan act. It's passed the House. It has been attached to the NDAA. It's waiting on the Senate to sign it or to pass it. The president will sign it. He's already indicated that he will. This is like literally the first organized retail crime act at the federal level that provides resources, prosecutors, coordination centers, defines, you know,

• 50:25Speaker 05

  changes to USC 182314 that says, here's how you have dedicated federal resources to go after this. Because here's the issue. This is not a local crime. This is not a, it happens in the county of Cobb here in Georgia. It goes to Cobb and it goes outside the state of Georgia and it goes into South Carolina and it goes into North Carolina. That is now a federal crime. This is interstate trans, interstate commerce. This is interstate transportation of stolen goods, all these things. Yet there's no federal resources dedicated to this. So this gets ORC, this gets cargo theft, it's gift, gift card and payments fraud, all wrapped into one bill that is going to really change the way we as retailers can address this problem of organized crime. So.

• 51:08Speaker 05

  The short answer is absolutely, I think the tide is changing. It's not just one sided. There's, I want to say 100 and maybe 200 plus House sponsors, both the Democrat and Republican side. There are many, many bipartisan sponsors in the Senate for a corca. There are 35 ish states that have organized retail crime task forces led by their attorneys general, both in Democrat and Republican states. So seven years ago, I was doom and gloom on this. Like, nobody was taking this seriously. Nobody thought this was a big problem. This was petty shoplifting. This was not thing that anybody really wanted to go on. In fact, in many cases, I think you guys know it was decriminalization was happening. Lots of defunding, the police talk that was out there.

• 51:53Speaker 05

  I think that this has helped us move much more in the right direction over the last couple of years, particularly.

• 52:00Joe Weisenthal?

  What is the state of the art with facial recognition? What are the expectations that people should know when they're like walking into a major public space? The degree to which either the cameras in major retail establishments either are able to or are able to identify who they are and where, how long that data is stored and so forth?

• 52:23Speaker 05

  That's a conversation that could probably go for another two hours.

• 52:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 05

  I would say that at the end of the day, video analytics in general are getting really, really good about recognizing people. And we don't talk about specific technologies that are out there. I'm not an expert in facial recognition, so I don't know. What I would say is, is that I think it's fair to have conversations about privacy. It's fair to have conversations about, you know, misuse. It's fair to have conversations about balancing the good versus the bad that can come from any technology that's out there. But I'm probably not the person to, you know, really talk about facial recognition.

• 52:56Tracy Alloway?

  All right, Scott, Glenn, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts. Really appreciate it.

• 53:00Speaker 05

  No, thanks for the time. I appreciate you guys.

• 53:14Tracy Alloway?

  So Joe, that was a fascinating conversation. It definitely helped me understand the whole lockup issue. I hadn't considered that. I kind of assumed that sales would go down because so many people would be inconvenienced and you just walk away and say, whatever, I'm going to get my toothbrush from Amazon. But if the inventory isn't there anyway, because people are stealing it, then that's a lost opportunity for sale. The other thing that stood out for me is there were some slightly dystopian aspects in there. So the idea of, you know, videos with edge capabilities like might be looking at your behavior and saying, classifying this person as a risk, like, oh, this person has been standing over in that corner for a while, looks kind of suspicious, that doesn't sound great.

• 53:59Tracy Alloway?

  The other thing that was very briefly mentioned is this idea that, well, maybe there's a way around the lockup program where you could just scan a QR code from your, you know, I don't know, Walmart or Home Depot loyalty app and it would automatically open the shelf for you.

• 54:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Tracy Alloway?

  Which sounds very convenient, not very convenient, but more convenient if you're a shopper, a regular shopper at those stores. But on the other hand, you're kind of getting close to an almost identity system for shopping.

• 54:27Joe Weisenthal?

  All great points, but yes, you know, it does feel like we're probably going to increasingly be headed in that direction that whether we want to or not, the technology itself will be the driver. Like if edge AI works, if you could just have a model embedded onto the camera itself that could just say, identify suspicious behavior in real time, it will be implemented, right? Like there is, people might complain, but if the technology exists, it will eventually be implemented. I'm very anti-shoplifting, so I think like, you know, and like, I don't really, I think, you know, things would be better if there were less of it, et cetera. And I'm not particularly worried about like, well, if I'm in a public space.

• 55:12Tracy Alloway?

  But what if you just want to stand around for a couple of hours admiring the power tools without being harassed?

• 55:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Then the person comes by, no, look, there are obviously clear issues that are going to arise and they're going to be like very uncomfortable and unsettling, but I believe that like the technology will lead the way rather than anything that we like prioritize.

• 55:31Tracy Alloway?

  Well, I guess, here's the thing, I think the question you have to ask of the technology is whether it leads to good outcomes in the forms of more people being caught. Because part of this is like, okay, you can install surveillance in the store, you can stick tags on every individual item, but if security can't actually stop people from exiting the store with stolen goods because of liability issues, then it's not really doing that much, right? Maybe it'll help in the investigation, but then you're still dependent on a potentially strained police force actually taking up the case and using the evidence that you've gathered.

• 56:07Joe Weisenthal?

  It does feel, you know, you use the term whack a mole and I feel like one of the meta phenomenons that has happened is over time, shoplifting or theft has switched on these various online frauds, et cetera. But you would think like, oh, well, if you just get rid of the retail stores, then that takes care of the problem. But the crime finds a way and new forms of crime will emerge. And one day we'll probably have robot security guards who don't have like a personal safety issue because it's a robot and they'll like reach out and comprehend the person. But then there will be a theft on the robot's supply chain and so forth. And like, it'll probably never go away, but it was interesting to learn about.

• 56:45Tracy Alloway?

  Maybe the robots will need liability insurance. You don't know.

• 56:47Joe Weisenthal?

  They very well, they very well might.

• 56:49Tracy Alloway?

  All right.

• 56:49Joe Weisenthal?

  But the robots will be shoplifters.

• 56:51Tracy Alloway?

  That's right.

• 56:52Joe Weisenthal?

  The misaligned, misaligned robot security guard.

• 56:56Tracy Alloway?

  That bolt over there is really shiny.

• 56:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 56:59Tracy Alloway?

  All right, shall we leave it there?

• 57:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 57:01Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 57:06Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Erman, Dashil Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more All Thoughts content, go to Bloomberg.com/AllThoughts, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/AllThoughts.

• 57:30Tracy Alloway?

  And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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