Free The Steal by Rachel Shteir

Assaf, who would supersede Minasy as a businessman, did not meet his rival until 1968, when Knogo’s EAS system was already installed in stores. But two years earlier, just as Minasy was applying for his first patent, Assaf was working on his own antishoplifting device. Of Lebanese and Irish origin, Assaf had attended the University of Akron for three years, then dropped out to manage a half dozen supermarkets in Ohio for the Kroger Company, a midwestern chain. All the stores had shoplifting problems, but the Case Avenue store in downtown Akron, which Assaf described as a “mixed” neighborhood, was the worst.
    The store had already fired three managers. Assaf tried all the security methods then in vogue: mirrors, detectives, TV cameras. He moved the cigarette rack into the clerk’s line of vision; he stopped selling shoes, which shoplifters could wear out of the store, and hosiery, which they tucked into their pockets. He placed mannequins above the meat department so detectives could look down through their eyes and catch shoplifters stealing tenderloin.
    Nothing worked. Then Assaf’s cousin, Jack Welsch, an amateur inventor who, according to Assaf, had designed a novel pizza cutter, began to experiment with a device similar to Minasy’s—an antishoplifting gizmo with a sensitized label that could be attached to products and that pedestals placed at store exits would detect. One day, a big, burly guy came into Assaf’s Kroger store, picked up two bottles of wine, looked Assaf in the eye, and walked out. Assaf chased the thief to the railroad tracks but lost him. Fifteen minutes later, Jack Welsch came in to cash a check, and Assaf said, “Jack, if we can invent something to stop shoplifting, we’re gonna make a lot of money.”
    The team hired two University of Michigan engineers to help. In 1966, they borrowed $10,000 and formed JKR—named after Welsch’s three children: Jack, Karen, and Randy. But like Minasy, Assaf couldn’t get financing at first. So he developed a franchise program to sell the marketing rights in each state; his salesmen formed the lab prototype into handmade units. Assaf’s first tag was a piece of paper and an aluminum antenna. The second, a small diode hand-soldered onto the antenna, cost a dollar.
    Assaf paid Stephanie’s, a small retail clothing store in Akron, $400 a month to pilot the tag. In 1967, JKR produced and installed twenty-five pairs of pedestals on a free trial basis in Akron, Cleveland, and other midwestern cities. Assaf said, “Even more than today, there was no accurate way of calculating shrink; stores generally did inventory twice a year and couldn’t measure how much missing stuff had been shoplifted and how much just lost via other means. It was difficult to come up with numbers that could show the product’s effectiveness.”
    Gradually stores began to install the systems. In 1969, now called Sensormatic, Assaf’s company went public and raised $12 million. Like Minasy’s, Assaf’s tags modernized stores’ methods of catching shoplifters. Before, the store detective had to see a person shoplifting with his own eyes. Once stores installed tags, catching shoplifters became more objective. Or that was the theory. The detectives were able to rush to the door after the alarm went off when the shoplifter was attempting to leave with the stolen goods. But she could still defend herself by saying that she had forgotten to pay. As more and more stores relied on tags and pedestals, the number of false-arrest lawsuits for shoplifting skyrocketed. Thus Sensormatic and state retail lobby associations worked to broaden existing retail laws or pass new ones allowing stores to stop people if they had probable cause.
    Assaf’s first tags operated on microwave frequency—as opposed to Knogo’s radio frequency tag—and could be detected at a greater distance. Thus, they worked better in the new malls with wide entrances for each store. Called “alligator tags” because