[coleca]

After having worked in retail for 20+ yrs, both in the field and in IT, what I saw as the largest cause of shrink was always just simple accounting errors.

For example, I saw all the time a store would receive a case of merchandise from a vendor containing 100 toothbrushes, the computer says it's a qty of 100 for $2.99, but the receiver scans in the barcode for the whole case instead of the individual toothbrush and puts in a qty of 100 received. Now the retailer thinks they should have 10k instead of 100 brushes on hand, which gets picked up as a loss. I've seen similar things where the case pack sizes or prices were fat fingered by the corporate buyer and wrong in the system causing massive perceived shortages.

[xethos]

But that would only explain the ~20 billion dollar increase in shrink if stores had very high turnover due to low hourly pay (and a recent push for employees attempting to demand more), a strict immigration policy (or the afteraffects of low immigration during a recent pandemic) and poor working conditions (for floor employees), resulting in poorly trained employees that may not realize their mistake!

...which actually adds up.