Walmart, TJX Giving Body Cameras to Store Personnel: For Safety, Loss Prevention, or Both?

Marking a shift in how retail operations are managed at brick-and-mortar stores, at least two major retailers — Walmart and TJX — are testing the waters by equipping certain staff members with body cameras.

Walmart's Body Cam Test for Staff Hinges Around Safety

Starting as a pilot program in the Dallas area, Walmart is deploying Axon body cameras to certain front-line employees, per Fortune. The blue-and-yellow brand was tight-lipped about the deployment, offering only brief remarks on the topic.

"While we don’t talk about the specifics of our security measures, we are always looking at new and innovative technology used across the retail industry,” a Walmart spokesperson told CNBC. “This is a pilot we are testing in one market, and we will evaluate the results before making any longer-term decisions.”

CNBC cited a person familiar with the new program as saying that Walmart's primary concern is ensuring employee safety rather than loss prevention.

This sentiment was reinforced by findings put forth by the National Retail Federation's (NRF) latest retail theft and violence report. Data from that survey found that 91% of retailers polled said shoplifters were significantly more aggressive and violent than they were in 2019.

More recently, between 2022 and 2023 alone, retailers surveyed reported a 42% uptick in shoplifting incidents that involved threats or acts of violence and a 39% hike in incidents involving the threat, display, or use of a weapon.

TJX Deploys Body Cams to Loss Prevention Associates

Earlier this year, TJX — the parent company responsible for the T.J. Maxx, Marshall's, and HomeGoods brands — began equipping its loss prevention associates with body cameras. On a May 2024 call with analysts, TJX CFO John Joseph Klinger indicated that the move had been successful in trimming back shrink and had also proven to deescalate certain situations that could have proven dangerous otherwise.

“One of the things that we’ve added — we started to do last year, late towards the year, wear body cameras on our [loss prevention] associates,” said Klinger. “And when somebody comes in, it’s sort of — it’s almost like a deescalation where people are less likely to do something when they’re being videotaped. So we definitely feel that that’s playing a role also.”

Store Associates Are Not Law Enforcement Officers

As Danny Karon, consumer attorney at Karon LLC, told Fortune, it's important to remember that retail employees are not police officers — not regarding training, job description, or legal authority.

“Though some people would blame store employees for insufficiently intervening in acts of in-store violence, store employees are not police officers,” Karon said.

“It’s not their job to put out fires; it’s their job to sell merchandise. Anyone who blames store employees for customer violence and, accordingly, discourages the use of body cameras is looking at this problem all wrong," he continued.

With organized retail theft becoming an increasingly pressing issue in the retail industry, equipping frontline staff with body cameras may be at least one piece of the puzzle in terms of solving — or at least somewhat mitigating — this troubling trend. Whether these pilot programs will spin off into broader adoption across the retail business remains to be seen, as do the potential unforeseen consequences of filming customer and staff interactions more generally.