Inventory Shrinkage

In his third-quarter earnings call Tuesday, Dollar Tree’s CEO Gary Philbin announced that the company hired Robert Oberosler as senior vice president of loss...

From an LP perspective, a strong understanding of how retail inventory is managed is crucial to resolving shrink-related issues. One basic but important component is knowing the inventory control techniques and accounting methods used by your company. The two most common are the “retail” method and the “cost” method of accounting.

A recent report from the ECR Community Shrinkage and On-shelf Availability Group charts the scale and extent of the losses retailers are experiencing from a range of self-scan and checkout technologies. The research also provides a detailed review of the ways in which these losses might best be controlled.

The Retail Industry Leaders Association recently published "Total Retail Loss 2.0: From Theory to Practice," a report that analyzes the global retail industry’s adoption of the Total Retail Loss concept first introduced in 2016.

“It’s quickly becoming the most precise tool in our arsenal to meet an individual consumer specific need at the exact right moment...I think this will help us create the capability to grow profitably across the breadth of the portfolio and ultimately, again it’s putting ourselves in position to serve consumers in a way that gets them the product that they need when they want it and where they want it.” - Mark Parker, Nike CEO

In the highly competitive retail sector, ensuring that the right product is on the right shelf at the right time is critical. Yet the problem of shelf out-of-stocks (OOS) remains as stubborn as ever. Could the LP team be the key to unlocking this new sales opportunity?

There is little consensus on what constitutes “loss” within the retail world nor how it should be measured. The terms “shrinkage” and “shortage” have been loosely applied to encapsulate some of the areas that generate loss, but they are not terms enjoying a clear and agreed-upon definition across the sector.

Throughout my career, I've investigated numerous significant increases in shortage on a multi-store level. In each case, the cause was traced to the distribution process.

The bedrock upon which healthy retailers are built is the supply chain that provides the goods to be sold. A retailer’s competitiveness, then, or lack thereof, is in measurable part a reflection of the extent to which these avenues of supply are cost effective and efficient.

Few things are as frustrating for a loss prevention leader than discovering a bad packaging design they know will promote retail shrink— a feature which could easily have been prevented.