How Retail’s Blind Spot Drives Shrink, Fraud, and Bad Decisions

Join Brand L. Elverston for a conversation with Jacob Gulbransen, VP of U.S. Sales & Operations at DiSa Digital Safety, about one of retail’s most persistent problems: inventory visibility at the item level.

Shrink shows up as a hard financial number. What’s often missing is clarity underneath it. When retailers can’t see what’s happening to specific items—whether they were stolen, returned fraudulently, or lost through process failure—teams end up operating on assumptions. That gap doesn’t just inflate loss. It drives bad decisions: the wrong categories get locked up, the wrong controls get funded, and the wrong conclusions become policy.

Brand and Jacob talk through DiSa’s evolution from Point-of-Sale Activation (POSA) to single-scan serialization, and why serialization changes how retailers understand returns fraud, phantom inventory, and item-level shrink. The conversation focuses on visibility—what retailers know today, what they don’t, and what changes when every item carries its own identity without adding hardware at checkout.

In This Conversation, You’ll Hear About:

• Why inventory visibility remains retail’s Achilles heel
• How fraudulent returns create phantom inventory
• The shift from theft deterrence to item-level truth
• What single-scan serialization actually does at the register
• How serialization connects inventory and POS activity
• Why most retailers still can’t quantify item-level shrink
• How better visibility leads to better decisions

Learn more about DiSa Digital Safety: digital-safety.com

About Jacob Gulbransen
Jacob Gulbransen is VP of U.S. Sales & Operations at DiSa Digital Safety. He works with retailers and suppliers on item-level identification, returns validation, and inventory visibility.

About Brand L. Elverston
Following a distinguished military career and more than two decades leading asset protection and risk mitigation for Walmart, Brand L. Elverston now leads Elverston Consulting.

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