For most retailers, the surveillance camera mounted on a parking lot pole has done a single job for a long time. It captures evidence after the fact: a theft, a slip-and-fall or a fender-bender. The work is investigative, tactical and useful in court. But for an industry that runs on margin and lives on data, it has been a remarkable underuse of one of the largest sensor networks any retailer owns. That is starting to change. The shift is less about security and more about what happens when retailers stop treating their cameras as a cost center and start treating them as an operations intelligence platform.
The Reframe that Changes the Budget Conversation
The pressure to make that shift is increasing. The National Retail Federation’s 2025 Impact of Retail Theft and Violence report, produced with the Loss Prevention Research Council, found that the average number of shoplifting incidents rose 18% in 2024. Threats or acts of violence during theft events rose 17% during the same period. Responding to those trends will require investment that shrink alone cannot justify.
Security has historically been treated as a line that protects revenue but does not generate it. When the only output of a camera was video evidence, the only return on the investment was the avoidance of loss. Avoided loss is harder to measure than realized revenue. So, security budgets got justified, year after year, against shrink numbers, slip-and-fall claims and the occasional high-profile incident. The conversation rarely moved past that.
The capability now exists to move it considerably further. The same camera that captures a theft also captures parking patterns, traffic flow, dwell time, queue length and the customer interactions that happen between the lot and the front door. This is data, generated continuously, by infrastructure most large-format retailers already own. The question is whether the organization is set up to use it.
When that data starts feeding operations decisions instead of just security ones, the budget conversation changes. Security stops being a cost line defended against shrink. It becomes an investment line justified against operational efficiency, conversion and customer experience. The ROI math gets larger. The stakeholders get broader. The case for further investment gets easier, not because the technology suddenly improved, but because the organization finally caught up to what the technology was already doing.
What the Data Actually Unlocks
Consider the parking lot, which until recently has been one of the least-examined environments in retail. Cameras out there were historically for incident response, and even that was limited. More than a decade ago, big-box retailers design standards required more than 400 linear feet of parking before perimeter pole cameras were considered. Longer-range coverage from the building itself produced unusable footage. Most stores did not meet that threshold, and the pattern repeated across the home improvement retail sector.
Solar power, wireless access points and point-to-point networking have collapsed the cost of putting cameras out there. The interesting consequence is not that retailers now have better evidence of parking lot incidents. They have data on the part of the customer journey that begins well before the front door.
That data answers questions retailers historically could not ask. How long does it take a customer to find a spot during peak hours, and what does that do to their willingness to shop? At what traffic level does the queue at the front register start to build, and how much earlier could the store manager have known to pull associates? Each of those questions has a direct line to revenue and to customer experience. None has a direct line to shrink. All get answered by infrastructure that was sold to the company as security.
Why the AP Team Can no Longer Have this Conversation Alone
The organizational implication is that asset protection cannot be the only department in the room when these systems get specified. A camera network that serves operations belongs partly to operations. A network that runs over the same backbone as the point-of-sale system belongs partly to IT. The intelligence layer that turns video into insight requires investment; no single department justifies alone. The industry calls it AI now, but it is largely the maturing of analytics that have existed for years.
Retailers making real progress have started bringing IT, operations and merchandising into the conversations that used to belong to AP alone. The result is not that the security team loses authority. The result is that the budget gets bigger because three departments can each tie value back to their own KPIs. The deployments become more useful because the data is designed for multiple purposes from the start.
From Tactical to Strategic
Black Friday is the cleanest example of how the discipline itself has shifted. A decade ago, Black Friday was a single-day operation. Barriers up, all hands on deck, law enforcement on call and a security team working a long shift to review incident after incident as they unfolded. The entire posture was tactical and reactive. Now, Black Friday is a two- to three-week event for most large retailers, with deals starting earlier each year. That spread has thinned out the single-day surge that defined the old model. It has replaced it with a longer window where infrastructure and analytics carry most of the surveillance load.
The same shift is visible across the rest of the calendar. License plate recognition is spreading, and these systems let stores identify known offenders before they enter the building, rather than reviewing footage after they leave. The NRF found that 66% of retailers experienced transnational ORC involvement in thefts since 2024, the kind of cross-border activity single-retailer investigations were never designed to address. Cross-retailer collaboration on case-building, enabled by integrated LPR data, is starting to change the economics of organized retail crime. None of this replaces the tactical work. It makes the tactical work the floor of the program rather than the ceiling.
The Shift Worth Making
The retailers that get this right will not be the ones who spent the most on cameras. They will be the ones who stopped thinking about security cameras as security cameras. The infrastructure was always more capable than how it was used. What changes now is whether the organization decides to use it differently.
Security has been a tactical discipline for a long time. The people who built it deserve credit for the loss prevention programs and investigative casework that have protected retailers through difficult years. The next chapter is strategic. The data is in place. The technology is in place. What remains is the decision to treat the perimeter not as the last line of defense but as the first line of insight.
Keith Dye is Director of Retail at Security 101, a national commercial security systems integrator. He brings more than 15 years of experience in retail security technology, including seven years at Walmart managing CCTV and security systems design across stores, distribution centers, and the home office, and five years at Johnson Controls as a national account manager covering Fortune 100 retail customers. Based in Bentonville, Arkansas, he works with big box, home improvement and enterprise retail clients on the operational and strategic shifts reshaping how the industry thinks about exterior security and integrated systems.
