How much shoplifting actually happens at the average Walmart superstore (with the supermarket section of the store included)
Figuring that there must be SOME shoplifting, especially at Walmart, with its largely low-income clientel, what percentage of the overall gross sales are lost due to shoplifting?
I have no idea how much gross a walmart superstore would have, but how much of that is lost due to larceny? And how much do they catch? I’ve never seen anyone get caught, but it must happen.
I can only say anecdotally that when our local paper prints the police blotter each week, there is always someone arrested at the local Wal-Mart for attempted shoplifting, bad check passing or something similar.
In fairness though, there’s a pretty consistent number of arrests at the local supermarkets and liquor stores, as well.
I don’t know Walmart’s numbers.
Typically, it’s in the order of 1% of revenue.
When I worked at Suncoast, which was at the time owned by Best Buy, the average store shrink for Best Buy, Sam Goody’s, Suncoast, and Media Play was 4%, which is a lot. Our understanding was that it was mostly Best Buy employee shrink.
“48.5% of shrinkage is due to employee theft and 31.7% due to shoplifting.”
"Our understanding was that it was mostly Best Buy employee shrink. "
This explains why BestBuy checks bags at the door, just a couple of feet away from the checkout. They want to make sure that their cashiers are not just baggng up free or heavily discounted purchases. In other words, they are inconveniencing you to protect themselves against their own employees.
Not to sound prejudiced, but I think a lot of shoplifters are teenagers. So you’re going to see things like CD’s and video games being shoplifted at a disproportionate rate. It’s the same way that make-up gets disproportionately stolen in department stores and supermarkets.
As a security professional, I can tell you that retailers HATE shoplifting, but they actually FEAR slip/fall/accident liability.
I once saw a major retail brand dump a few hundred million into adding cameras specifically intended to combat bogus slip-falls.
We once saw footage of an old lady intentionally smashing a jar of pickles, then intentionally slipping and falling on the brinewater…
Speaking of employee theft, I once had a loss prevention associate DISCONNECT the cameras associated with the meat section and the side emergency exit from his recorder, then reconnect those same cameras 10 minutes later. The next day, he did the same thing with beer & wine… must have had a barbecue scheduled that weekend…
Re: bogus slip-falls, remember that you can steal a few thousand dollars worth of stuff, but a good civil judgment or settlement can easily run into the hundred-thousands…
Most computer and electronics stores do this, and in some neighborhoods a lot of other stores do this as well.
Stores do this because people steal, period. Most shrinkage is not from employees. Shrinkage is the reason why every small item is packaged with environment-killing amounts of hugeness so that they don’t fit into pockets and why the plastic coating on packages can’t be easily cut or removed.
It’s people. There are far more customers than employees. Blame the shoplifters first and then everybody else second.
And everybody: Stop doing pit threads about this blaming the stores and manufacturers!
Exapno,
Are you disputing the wikipedia cite above, or is there something else you’re responding to?
Actually, we were told that they caught some Best Buy employees backing trucks up to the loading dock and loading them up with TVs and other high dollar merchandise before they even got out to the floor. Some (a small minority, of course) shrink is large in scale.
Of course, most of our store shrink was of the “great, I found another DVD wrapper on the floor in the Family section” kind. Occasionally we’d get something more organized, where thieves would wait until there was only one of us on the floor and have one person distract the salesperson while another shoved dozens of DVDs into a bag and made a run for it.
The funny thing is, we had four (sigh, I still remember all the acronyms and this was years ago - let me tell you about TS DOC sometime) BHAGS (big hairy audacious goals, as our district manager was offended that they’d say “ass”) - one of which was “to get shrink down below 4%”. Which was ridiculous, since our shrink and that of all the small footprint stores (Suncoast and Sam Goody) was around 1%. It’s Best Buy that was having the problem.
Do you have a contrry cite to the one already provided?
My wife used to manage a clothing store, and she was far more concerned about her employees stealing than she was the customers (although that was a huge problem.) She ended up basing her hiring decisions almost wholly on how honest a person seemed to be.
Here’s the article I was [mis]remembering.
It has a mixture of numbers that can be cited to back up everyones’ opinion. Employee theft percentage is higher than shoplifting in North America, though not everywhere in the world. It’s less than 50% so I was technically correct in saying that most shrinkage is not from employees, but I’ll concede that dollarwise and as a percent, employee theft is higher. Shoplifting is much closer to equal in the U.S. than in Europe where employees steal $30 for every $1 customers do, which is astounding. Apparently organized retail crime shoplifting is much more prevalent in the U.S. than elsewhere.
Slip and fall cases are the hardest to prove and the easiest to defend though. I’ve worked in the insurance industry for over 20 years and can’t even recall a retail slip and fall going to trial.
Employee theft is huge though. I have a friend who’s a regional LP manager and she’s always grilling employees.
I have a feeling employee theft seems high, percentage-wise, simply because employees get caught. An awful lot of stuff walks out the doors without anybody noticing, or being allowed to do anything about it if they do notice, but the stores are allowed to actually do something about it when an employee is stealing.
It would seem to me that there are 3 types of shrinkage. Employee theft, shoplifting, and damaged goods. Damaged goods and caught employee theft are attributed to their respective categories, the rest is blamed on “customers”. If inventory in is not equal to inventory out (the definition of shrinkage), something had to have happened to it.
Right, but by assuming that it was shoplifted by customers you’re not accounting for the hobgoblins. Never underestimate the hobgoblins.
Marinating them first makes them taste better.
When I worked at WM they kept telling us that employee theft was by far the biggest cause of shrinkage. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now, knowing how much stuff went out the doors. I have no problem believing that there’s employee theft, but I refuse to believe that the employees steal more overall than the other shoplifters.
You’re forgetting those nomes in Stationeri…