I would guess that theft is a pretty minimal factor her. Costco sizes and checking receipts, must severely limit this compared to other stores.

From my observations of working in retail, a lot of people will just blatantly walk out with things knowing the average employee can't touch them. People that steal from stores as a career do not care in the slightest. They're confident in their craft, knowing employees are watching and aware of them. They just walk on out.

The average teenager that just steals because they think being a klepto is cool would probably be deterred by the door watchers though, yeah.

But working in retail, probably a factor bigger than shrinkage is just people picking things up, and throwing it at the back of a shelf in a different aisle. Either they're saving it for a return visit, or they don't want it anymore and are too lazy to bring it back to its shelf.

These are just my observations. I think we're down a rabbit hole of assuming the problem anyway. The main problem with Costco is probably just that they don't have a system for counting individual items, since most things in the store are just wheeled out on pallets and dropped somewhere.

Orrrrr, one of the reasons Costco is able to pay its employees better than industry standard is because they don't have a system for counting individual items that requires a significantly larger number of employees.

Totally agree with you on the rabbit hole.

Yes this is by design. The company is being reimbursed through insurance or given a tax write-off[1] for documented stolen items. As long as they are showing that they put reasonable efforts in to deter theft. This could be a loss prevention department, the electronic sensors, locked cabinets, storing items at the very top of shelving units. The risk of law suits, employee injury or death, bad PR, etc is much more costly than documenting some stolen items.

The big push of retailers closing stores due to theft is an exaggeration when in mosts cases its just reduced in-store traffic and online ordering which doesn't require the stores to be as big for holding as much inventory.[2][3]

Most of the major retailers stats are old and if the numbers were really of concern I'm sure they would release the data but my assumption is their complaint doesn't seem as reactionary when you compare it to their profits. I cite this generic article as an example[4]. It appears to want you to think that theft is such a major part of the retailers problem but no specifics provided with phrasing like "has historically been" or $400 million in theft when the company has made $109 billion with 3% growth[5].

[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p584b.pdf

[2] https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/04/target-to-close-store...

[3] https://blog.gitnux.com/walmart-theft-statistics/

[4] https://www.wsaz.com/2022/12/09/walmart-may-close-stores-inc...

[5] https://corporate.target.com/annual-reports/2022/financials/...

Thanks for the additional information but to be clear I wasn’t arguing that shrinkage effects a store’s bottom line much, or that employees should be able to tackle thefts in progress. I was arguing that people probably do still steal from Costco and that it could be a factor that makes it difficult to keep accurate stock counts at times. And then went on to say there are probably other, larger factors.

"Costco loses only 0.1% of revenue to theft annually. For context, that's 90% lower than Walmart's shrink rate."

Probably not as big as you’d think. I’d say “high confidence” is a good enough bar for this feature vs. perfection. I’ve never been upset when Target says 1 in stock but the aisle is empty - that’s just the reality of it. If the app has more, I’m usually going to be able to get one.

Whatever Target,l and Home Depot are doing works like 99% of the time for me.

Saying you have a few and then have none, is kinda expected and not really annoying.

Having it say you have none, and then you go to the store anyway to get an alternate and you find what you originally wanted sitting on the shelf, that's annoying.