> Stores bake that into the cost of doing business
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37711091
> "I return half of what I buy," says 30-year-old Alex Demetri, who spends £500 to £700 on clothes each month.
> She also admits to wearing some of her clothes first before returning them.
> It is customers like Ms Demetri who are causing problems for shops, which are "struggling to cope" with the number of items returned, new research suggests.
> So-called "serial returners" are bringing back items which have been used, are marked or have parts missing, making a quarter of it unfit to resell.
Occasional mistakes happen, but some people deliberately do this kind of stuff.
I don't have a source for that.
"sir, you ate 4 grapes in store. Our grapes average 2seeds/grape, so we've calculated lost sales in the range of $800.
You see, those seeds could each grow into a vine that will produce an estimated $100 worth of grapes over the lifetime of the plant. You're basically stealing that money from us!"
https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/shopping/refunds-and-returns...
This could change from day to day (e.g. fruits, veggies), vary based on quantity ordered, etc.
Then you get into private label (store brand) products, where the "cost" was usually either $0 or some ridiculously low number.
This was a national chain. At the store level at least, we wouldn't have been able to find the value of an item "at cost" with any confidence.
Most large stores take out nearly everything off the shelves at night even if it's still within it's "use before" date which on it's own is utterly nonsensical to begin with as most items don't expire for days, if not weeks, months and even years from the "use/best before" date.
People drop stuff, people mishandle goods, how many people squeeze a vegetable or a fruit to check if it's ripe damaging it? how many apples get a mushy spot because they banged around in the crate?
You are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel of inventory attrition when you are talking about perishable misplaced items, compared to everything else they are a rounding error.
There is a lot of loss baked into every supply chain, unless you are going to change it in it's entirety really don't bother with the end, the loss at the point of sale is minimal compared to everything else.
Heck I've dropped jars or similar things during bagging after paying for them several times and every time I was offered a replacement.
Mistakes happen, it's often considerably more expensive to deal with customer complaints especially in the age of social media than it is to replace an item.
It's also important to note that this is baked into the cost of doing business all along the supply chain, if items are not sold they will be often returned by the store to the distributor which would chuck them as a loss, or more often than not sell them for other uses other than human consumption.
Some perishables are thrown away others are then sold to other industries e.g. the roast that was left over might end up as dog food...
For a dog food company it's cheaper to buy discarded meat produce the dog food take samples and while it's being shipped do the cultures to ensure that there are no contaminants or bacteria and if something fishy is found just do a recall upstream for specific batch than it is to buy "fresh" meat and ingredients which are fit for human consumption.
Supply chains are huge and complex and all these little annoyances don't really count for much, it only really bothered very small stores that have to buy everything almost up front and they aren't leasing effectively shelf space for distributors.