How supermarkets know if items have been stolen?

[Libertyscribbles]

I am writing an essay on compulsive behaviours specialising in non typical low level shoplifting so have been reading lots about how we are a nation of shoplifters and how a staggering amount is stolen from uk supermarkets on a daily basis. However, aside from those they catch in the supermarket, how do these supermarkets actually know exactly which groceries and items have been stolen? I worked in asda over the summer and don't recall inventories being taken?! Does anyone know how for example they know if 1 yoghurt was stolen in a day? I am trying to link this with the idea of people viewing this as an undetectable crime and looking at the impact of this on triggering compulsive anti social behaviours. Any heads up appreciated! I am writing this as part of my degree but struggling as never written one before and I'm not good at this side of things! Thank you!

When I worked in retail we would do stock checks in quiet periods, counting up everything in the stock room and on the shop floor. It can also be highlighted when you can see that a shelf item has all gone, yet the automatic ordering has not kicked in because the computer thinks you've got twenty left (the stolen ones).

Thank you! That's really helpful! How do you tally that with what's sold so you know missing items are sold versus stolen? I'm going to see if I can get any policies from the big 4 supermarkets to look at inconsistencies but I'm not sure how to approach this. My theory is that people assume stealing food of low value will gp unnoticed and unpunished and either carry on or begin stealing higher value items because it can become a compulsion but I don't know how to get it down in words. I'm just rubbish at this.

I’m not an expert but surely they have a record of what they’re buying and what they’re selling since everything done is electronically? You don’t need human being stock checking to figure it out. The computer will just tell you the amount of and specific items being nicked

Because when they reopen the shelves the barcodes scanning state how many are in stock and how many should be on shelf, the slip is thebrecorded.
It is a STAGGERING sum
Mainly careerist thieves, and then a shocking amount of entitlement- think self checkouts, I give them enough money already kind of thing...

Sorry maybe I was a dick. I didn’t address the specific question regarding the 1 yogurt but is easy to figure out a pattern

I would guess like a previous poster has sais, EPOS ( electronic point of sale) records wouldn't match with the stock that's left on shelves and in the stock room

At the ending of every day, our manager does a gap-check, where she (or he) goes round with a stock gun. Any empty spaces, they fire the gun, which reads the bar code and tells us how many of the item we currently should have in stock. Often the item is somewhere in the warehouse (usually somewhere it shouldn't be!) but sometimes we can't find any trace. We check to see when the last delivery was (if it was recent then often the item is still boxed up and put somewhere with the recent delivery in cages in the warehouse). If we can't find any trace of it, it is zeroed off. Sometimes the item has been stolen, sometimes it was just incorrectly counted, sometimes it's been lost in the system or recorded as delivered when we never got it at all.

So it's not always theft, there is also a staggering amount of ineptitude that goes on. But that is how we know that we don't have something that we should have.

Thank you very much, that's helpful. My focus is on low level but compulsive stealing so I am excluding career ones who steal to order and are involved in crimes not including shoplifting.

I don't have an indepth knowledge of the system but there will be a record of how many items were delivered, how many have been sold and will do regular stock counts to see how many remain in store. They would normally assume that any unaccounted for items had been stolen although there is also a possibility that items were missed in tbe stock count as they were in the wrong place etc. The store will also have a process of recording damaged or out of date stock so that it doesn't come under the missing stock figures. I doubt the shop floor staff are involved in the process. When I worked in retail the stock take was outsourced and an external company took care of it. Where I worked it was done once per year, i can imagine supermarkets do it more often but I don't think its something that would be done daily. The supermarkets may do the same or could have a dedicated stock management/loss prevention team to take care of it and I doubt the retail staff would be very well informed about the ins and outs of the process.

Have you tried approaching the managers at your local supermarkets and explaining what you are doing and asking what stock control system they have in place. I imagine the managers would be able to give you more insight or even tell you who to contact for more information.

Everything is computerised, and has been since the nineties (I expect earlier it was done with ledgers). Everything coming into the store is scanned in, so you know you've got 100 deodorants. Every item sold goes through the till, which deducts that from your original total. If there are no deodorants in the store, but the computer thinks you've got 20, then you know you've got a problem.

For us, the main things that went missing were Lynx and Nurofen, because they're easy to sell on. You're probably looking more at individual items, so someone slipping an extra item in without scanning it. Are there any academic papers on the subject?

I work in retail - non food. When an item is scanned they can tell from the barcode what it is - ie, red gloves. They know how many red gloves they sent to that store and how many get sold. Therefore the outstanding amount has been stolen. Not sure how it works in a food store with sell by dates etc.

Thanks so much everyone! Yes, I will definitely approach some managers and now I have a much clearer understanding! I want to link this with the assumption of not being detected as presumably cctv is in place but realistically by the time a yoghurt is discovered missing they aren't going to trawl back through weeks of cctv to find the person who pocketed it. Or maybe they do?! I will ask the managers at my local ones. I think I will email and call initially and see if I can at least arrange a quick meeting or ask some specific questions. I need to find some peer reviewed research as well.

Look up shrinkage: basically the gap between what is purchased and what is sold, after all wastage is accounted for, e.g. damaged stock, out of date stock. Stocktaking could be done anything from annually to weekly or even daily. Higher value items could be counted daily or even more frequently.

How are you going to identify a cohort who are exclusively involved in low level shoplifting but no other criminal activity? That in itself is tricky.

As others have said, shrinkage. Some items are acknowledged as those that people target, a few are acknowledged to make a company zero profit as the loss from theft is so large, however they will still be stocked as people (who are paying for their shopping!) will want them and will go elsewhere for their shop if they are not stocked so lead to a greater loss than that from the theft.

Our shop works the same as @dayswithaY.

You're right that we can't always tell when a particular item is stolen but we can narrow it down to a particular time-frame. So, if a delivery of seven pairs of size 10 jeans arrives on a Monday, we sell 2, and by Friday we only have 4 pairs, we know one pair has gone missing, presumed stolen. So we can narrow it down to that time period, if that makes sense.

We do mini stock checks everyday, focusing on a different area of the store. I know we have certain items that are more likely to get stolen, so those are checked more often than others, but every item is checked about once a month on average.

We don't have a lot of thefts - we have a small shop and enough assistants on the shop floor to keep watch. We do things like count items in/out of changing rooms, take things off customers when they come out of changing rooms, make sure we fold items at the till so things can't be sneaked through inside other things etc.

I think the key is good customer service, enough assistants to monitor the shop floor and obviously good security. This is generally much easier in small but open-plan shops!

Supermarkets use bar codes but in reality they are not counting individual yogurts but do stock take higher item goods daily or weekly, many of DD's friends work overnights shelf stacking and it seems to be stock taking the booze etc is a job for sixth formers. Perishables like yogurts and bread are frequently thrown away so no point wasting money on labour stock checking. I read once that supermarkets think up to 10% of goods aren't paid for but not all are deliberately stolen, I've realised that I forgot to pay for a rotisserie chicken hanging on the hook (tried to offer to pay apologetically and they told me not to worry), people accidentally missing a swipe on self checkouts, wrong veggie code accidentally, then there's deliberately putting in the wrong code!

I'm a manager for Aldi, we do quarterly inventories. We also do spot check counts on various items on a weekly basis to check inventory. We have no idea on a day to day basis exactly what is stolen, to be honest a lot of inventory loss is more a case of cashiers using the wrong codes for items and not scanning correctly

We don't have a great deal of theft either, small local supermarket, 90% local custom. Some small item theft - to be honest our biggest problem is the bastards who take yoghurt out of the fridge, decide half way round that they don't want it any more and leave it on a shelf of unrelated items to reach room temperature, so it has to be wasted off.

Thanks for all the replies, so helpful. I need to focus and narrow down I think so a long night ahead....!

We have daily wastage too which can be a considerable amount, people leaving chilled/Frozen dumped, people dropping eggs/jars/yoghurts/wine etc

They order 1000 tins of soup, sell 950 and run out. 50 are unaccounted for.

With electronic ordering and sales tracking it’s surely quite simple?

The grocery retailers have EPOS data (electronic point of sale).

They know exactly what stock is in the store / warehouse, what’s been sold and what stock is remaining.

There was a recent article about the problems with self checkouts especially he ones where you record the shopping as you go. One of the main means of theft was people taking a product and recording it as something else. The example was something like bagging avocados and recording them as carrots. The supermarket was selling several times more carrots than they ever stocked and running out of avocados despite not selling many.

Yes, I've read so many articles about the type of theft I am focused on. I want to go a little further and explore the compulsive nature of this. To do that I need analyse risk taking and perceived risk. So helpful to have such great insights from those who worked at supermarkets. I left my purse at a self checkout and it wasn't handed in. I asked if they could check cctv and they said no, they don't have people to do that! What's the point of it then?! I never got it back!

CCTV is in place for big crime. Sadly not enough resource in place to look for a customer's purse - but an armed robbery, or large sums missing from the safe? Sure.

Shrinkage is usually accepted to be about 3%. This allows for human error (stock booked in incorrectly) as well as petty theft.

Self checkout is a major cause of shrinkage. As is internal theft...