“Companies say these incidents have led to a spike in merchandise losses, known as shrink. The metric incorporates inventory losses caused by external theft, including organized retail crime, employee theft, human errors, vendor fraud, damaged or mismarked items and other losses.

But the retail industry’s own figures on shrink cast doubt on their claim that the problem is ballooning. Researchers say retailers may be blaming theft for losses when they don’t actually know the cause.

Shrink is an “issue where you’ve got a problem, but there’s no way to know exactly where the losses are coming from,” said Richard Hollinger, a retired professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Florida, who studies retail losses and launched the retail industry’s first annual security survey in the early 1990s.

According to the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) annual survey of around 60 retail member companies, shrink is a “rapidly ballooning issue.” In 2021, retail shrink hit $94.5 billion, up only 4% from 2020 but a 53% jump from 2019.

But, in fact, the average shrink rate as a percentage of sales dropped to 1.4% in 2021 from 1.6% in 2020, according to the latest NRF survey. That number has hovered around 1.4% for more than a decade.“

Ok ok so the concern for shoplifting from Random’s doesn’t even warrant tracking as a separate stat (it is no more important than workers occasionally misplacing boxes in the supply chain??), we are talking about <1% of sales. Sorry not going to lose sleep over that?

How about those organized shoplifting sprees that we keep hearing about? What does the national Retail Foundation, the group that is going to be the most concerned about this out of any?

“The NRF estimates that organized retail crime costs companies an average of just 7 cents for every $100 in sales.”

sigh y’all are full of shit and I am tired of it

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifting-shrink-walgreens/index.html