Theft

[libertango]

Back from our road trip around the state of Washington.

Reading a good issue of The New Yorker, I came across the claim from John Colapinto that US retail business lost about $40 billion in 2006 from theft. Which sounds impressive, until one learns from the US Census Bureau that retail sales, total (excl. motor vehicle and parts dealers) for 2006 (NB: Adobe .PDF file) was very close to $3 trillion. So theft accounts for an amount only 1.34% of US retail sales, which is probably within the margin of error of their accounting practices.

Bottom line: They have no idea how much theft is actually taking place. It's not enough to measure accurately.

Comments

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

Bottom line: They have no idea how much theft is actually taking place. It's not enough to measure accurately.

Not necessarily. In some market segments (like C-stores), shrink can be a signifigantly higher percentage, measurable with arbitrary accuracy. The real barrier is fear of revealing proprietary information and looking bad in general (or too good to certain people).

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"...like C-stores..."

For those following along at home, that appears to be short for "convenience stores" (given a Google ratio of 200K to 12 million hits, a reader might not know that).

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

Sorry, it's industry speak. I worked in the maintenance end of the family convenience store business for 5+ years. I believe you are substantially correct about more conventional walk-in retail, where a _lot_ of fraud anecdotes indicate any amount of theft could be happening under the guise of bogus returns and price matches that are waved through by indifferent CSMs (customer service managers).