Retailers love people counters and make good use of them. Heatmaps are trickier (in terms of usefulness) due to camera angles--the ideal heatmap is one that overlays a floorplan of the store, rather than showing traffic patterns only within the camera’s field of view. In that regard we’ve still got work to do.
When I talk about operating the business more efficiently I’m mostly talking about targeting not just the LP guy but also the store managers, regional and district managers, and corporate operations/marketing type managers. These people can benefit from video if they can easily and quickly access it remotely to check on operational things like staffing, customer service, and zero in on periods of routine interest like opening and closing, or certain procedures they want to make sure are being followed. It has the ability to augment programs like secret shopper or store audits as well.
When I look at usage patterns I see LP guys accessing their systems in response to an incident, but I see operational staff scanning their stores nearly every day.
As far as general adoption of this model I don’t know what it looks like among retail overall but I think a lot has to do with it being at the right price. The high-end systems may not be worth the cost if we’re talking about efficiency (although, the LP savings are still there). And the very low-end systems are difficult to install, manage and access if you’ve got hundreds of stores—so in practicality they don’t tend to provide the efficiency gains. Obviously if cameras (and recorders) are a commodity, pressure will increase to provide whatever value Retail gets out of video at a much lower equipment cost, so the margins need to come from somewhere other than the hardware.