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Target was one of the first retailers to sound the alarm about retail theft and the huge drag it was on profits or had on profits back in 2023, leading the company to close several stores across the US. Our very own Brian Sozzy got the chance to speak with Target CEO, Brian Cornell, about this issue as part of our Lead This Way series, and he joins us now. Brian, what did we learn?

Yeah, well, thanks Shona. This is an issue not just solely dependent or revolving around Target. This is a company seeing its margins under pressure in part because of retail theft. Walmart has seen it, dollar stores have seen it. But we finally got maybe what might be a breakthrough and improving trends on the theft issue. Here's what Target CEO Brian Cornell told me in Lead This Way.

Brian, I feel so much better today than I did a year ago. And I think it comes back to support at the federal level, at the state level, and at the local level, national level. Great support from Homeland Security. You're seeing some actions at the state level. California just signed an important bill to really focus on curtailing retail crime. We're starting to see some progress. So it's encouraging. It's going to take several years. To be clear, we do not like locking up product. But we like running stores, and we want to keep our stores open. We want to make sure they're safe. We want to make sure if you come in and you need certain items, we've got a team member there with a key. They can unlock it and make sure you can get what you need. We've taken the steps to control the things we can control.

So, the images you're seeing on the screen, we taped this with Brian inside of their Jersey City store, and I told Brian, look, I've never seen underwear and socks locked up in in cases. Uh, you know, I've seen a lot of the daily necessities like mouthwash, toothpaste, shaving necessities locked up at Target and other retailers, but to see that, which I guess are daily necessities, socks and underwear. See that locked up, I think underscores some of the challenges that the retail industry has had as people on tight budgets have battled inflation the past two, three years after the pandemic that they would go into these stores and they take items and they take them in large quantities. But Madison, you've been reporting on theft. Brooke DePalma has reporting on theft, and maybe we're finally starting to see a breakthrough where this is becoming less of an issue as prices come down and efforts like Target with body cams, I think retailers are looking at, they're working with local law enforcement. So maybe it's deterring some of this criminal activity.

And to his point about work from the federal and local level, that's really what I heard from folks at the Department of Homeland Security, that they were trying to make it a broad, uh, kind of effort from top to bottom to combat the theft that they're seeing at these stores. So really appreciate you bringing that to us, Sozzy.