Is retail theft getting worse?

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lately, retailers have been complaining to their investors about thieves coming to their stores and stealing stuff and blaming them for falling profits. It's the biggest part of a well-known industry problem called "shrink," but is this trend as pervasive as stores are making it out to be? Today on the show, retail theft and what stores are doing about it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:12.2	This is the indicator from Planet Money.
0:13.7	I'm Whalen Wong.
0:15.0	And I'm Paddy Hirsch.
0:16.2	Every quarter, publicly traded companies hold what's called an earnings call, where they
0:20.8	tell investors what's been happening with the company over the last three months, how
0:24.2	much they've made, what kind of issues they've been having, you know, performance stuff.
0:28.0	Our first priority is investing in our business, including our existing store base, and...
0:33.2	Oh, oh, I must have nodded off.
0:35.8	Did they say anything important?
0:37.2	Riveting stuff, right?
0:38.4	And in the retail sector, especially for big retailers, one word has been coming up
0:42.9	a lot lately on these calls.
0:44.6	I think Dana, you know Shrink is definitely a retail industry.
0:48.2	In addition, the Shrink environment has...
0:50.2	The first is Shrink.
0:51.4	And how that is expected.
0:52.4	With sales and Shrink, and Shrink is an industry-level problem.
0:56.8	Shrink.
0:57.8	Also called Shrinkage or Shortage, it costs retail companies more than $94 billion in 2021.
1:06.0	The technical definition of Shrink is the difference between recorded inventory on a
1:10.1	company's balance sheet, and it's actual inventory.
	...

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