Welcome to Wall Street Breakfast Afternoon Edition. I'm your host Kim Kahn. Joining me is

editor Kevin Curran and we're going to be talking about a latest problem that retailers are facing shrinkage.

Kevin, why don't you just define that for us to start with?

Retail theft, so no references to George Kostanza.

But yeah, we're seeing an increasing level of retail theft

as of late with it being more organized.

And you'll see oftentimes in Ernie's call,

which we have transcripts available for everybody,

this constant refrain of shrink, and it just

basically means inventory that's gone without being paid for.

And we've seen some big names talking about it, right?

Target, Walmart, Walgreens get some of the biggest retailers with footprints all over the US right?

Yeah actually it's it's interesting because you know as a reporter you're always

skeptical of people using excuses like shrink or weather or

uh... different impacts if it's not reported in other earnings calls for example

you know coals isn't more impacted by weather than target is when they have a similar

geographical spread but we have seen a lot of companies use the same excuse

which basically means it's probably not an excuse. We saw BJ's for example

recently say this is a real thing you know whether or not people believe it is a

real thing it was the exact quote. We also saw Walmart talk about it and you know target with the

largest impact but you know 500 million dollars in a profitability hit they're

not they're not making excuses at that point they have to really be seeing a high level of

...