A Blind Spot in Reporting Solutions?

By Adam Creamer

When it comes to inventory shrink there are many factors that can contribute. Often the first thing that comes to mind is shoplifting or organized retail crime, and why wouldn’t it? Shoplifting shows up in the news more often, it’s what we see most. But when it comes down to it, this is only the second biggest contributor to shrink. The largest contributor is employee theft, which accounts for about 44.2% of all shrink according to the National Retail Security Survey.

This may not come as a surprise to some. It has been fairly common knowledge that employee theft has been a large contributor to shrink for awhile now, so why bring it up again? Because employee theft is the LARGEST contributor to inventory shrink, yet many tools still ignore this and focus on shoplifting. It’s not unheard of for reporting tools to tolerate smaller levels of employee fraud either.

It’s safe to say that reporting solutions, and retail as a whole, has shoplifting prevention down to a science. Yes it may still be a big issue, but look at how its effect on overall loss has shrunk over the years. That’s thanks mostly to the constant stream of systems and devices designed specifically to prevent shoplifting. So what’s the problem? Very few tools that exist today help with employee theft, and the ones that do don’t make it a priority.

What retail needs now is a tool that focuses on employee theft first, while keeping shoplifters at bay. The amazing thing is that some tools like this already exist, one of them being our own Retail 20/20. These tools have to potential to change the asset protection field as we know it. You would be amazed at the shrink you’re not seeing just because your current tool oversees it. The National Retail Security Survey and others like it continue to show that employee theft is a big problem, proving that solutions like Retail 20/20 are needed to turn around the trend.