It’s never fun to talk about the ugly side of running a business, but this year, retail theft came into focus in a new way that reached national heights.

• Companies, their CEOs, and special interest groups were extremely vocal about retail theft and how they said it was affecting store operations.
• The National Retail Federation said in a September survey that shrink—the retail term for any loss of inventory, both inside factors or external factors—accounted for $112.1 billion in losses in 2022, a significant increase from $93.9 billion in 2021.

But as claims about retail crime made headlines this year, so has scrutiny over the scale of corporations’ response—and more recently, questions about how big a problem it really is.

Keep reading here.—KM

Attention marketers : It’s that time of year again. You probably know it well by now. From balancing pressures to produce A+ performance outcomes to setting up the company for success in the new year, the Q4 finish line can be a toughie.

Luckily, the good people over at MNTN did a lot of the work for you. Their new suite of enhancements, MNTN Next Gen TV, can help you transform television into an even more powerful growth engine.

This lifesaving set of tools will optimize your performance and enhance audience building. No, really. Advertisers are already earning, on average, 27% savings on cost per acquisition and 38% more site traffic.

Say goodbye to the EOY struggle.

We asked our reporters, who play so well with others, to choose a favorite story from 2022 by a Retail Brew colleague.

It’s always fun when someone can turn their disgusting habit into a viral marketing opportunity, and Tennessee Titans Will Levis was able to do just that.

Retail Brew’s Andrew Adam Newman reported on the “lifetime supply” of Hellmann’s mayonnaise Levis scored in August after the Titans quarterback went viral on TikTok in 2021 for adding mayonnaise to his coffee. The video subsequently resurfaced this year before the NFL draft.

But what could have been a simple story about a weird quirk that led to a marketing deal evolved into a broader look at how Unilever-owned Hellmann’s—a household name that is by many accounts Americans’ favorite brand—approaches its marketing strategy.

Keep reading here.—KM

We’re resharing some of our favorite stories of the year. Today, we’re taking you back to October, when Alex Vuocolo looked into Target’s store closures.

Earlier this fall, Target announced plans to shutter nine locations across four states due to “theft and organized retail crime,” and the news has fueled a fresh round of speculation around whether crime is the sole cause behind the closures.

Target’s own numbers show that the cost of shrink—which encompasses any loss of inventory, not just theft—has increased just 0.2% year over year in 2023. Shrink was responsible for a 0.9% hit to Target’s gross margin rate in the second quarter, up from 0.7% for all of 2022, according to the company’s SEC filings. As a percentage of sales, that’s $219.5 million higher than the same quarter a year ago. For comparison, the company lost ~$3.7 billion just from merchandising in 2022.

The company did not respond to a request for store-level crime or shrink data, but there is a clear pattern among the locations that are slated to close: Nearly all of them are small-format stores in urban areas that had opened within the past five years.

Read the whole story here.—AV