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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

A Home Depot has somewhere around 40,000 different products per store.

The count is always wrong.

It's continually updated, but it's still always wrong. Because the amount of labor cost to ensure it's accurate at all times would be a silly use of scarce resources.

Sometimes it's as simple as a customer picking up an item, wandering around, and dropping it somewhere else. Sometimes it's theft. Sometimes it's an incorrect count in receiving.

All of this is an average day at a warehouse store. Walmart deals with the same thing.

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> Because the amount of labor cost to ensure it's accurate at all times would be a silly use of scarce resources.

I'm no MBA, but if a single store is losing $800,000 of merchandise a year from a single aisle, you could have it guarded 24/7 by guys on $50 an hour and you'd still come out $300k ahead.

Far more likely IMHO is that when the rep said "over $800k of merchandise had disappeared from that aisle" that was actually the loss from all the yard equipment aisles in all stores nationwide.

Well those chainsaws were worth $300 ... that's $2400 in one model of chainsaw alone. I'd guess that's about average for prices of equipment in that aisle, with several hundred different items (mowers, weed eaters, blowers, etc.)

If they are having $2400 worth of a single model walk in a year, over 350 different items, they'd get to over $800k in the one store in a heartbeat. My money would be on this was in fact just the one store, if not just the one aisle.

Eight chainsaws? I dont think they are lying in the wrong aisle. Powertools and other high value items should be stock checked.

Odds are good that they are physically in the store somewhere, but nobody knows where, because they are on a pallet on a shelf sixteen feet up in the air.

How often? Daily?

So ~15 minutes / 60 x ~360 days x ~2000 stores (US) x ~$30/hr ($20+benefits) = $5.4 M in labor costs

... and that's just to check chainsaws.

Assume high value items are the majority of the thefts by value:

$800'000 in thefts from that aisle * 51% for a (slim) majority * 2000 stores = $816M in shrinkage.

If your store is seeing six figure losses due to theft you hire out some Loomis guys or rent-a-cops and park them at both entrances.

That 800k number does seem to get quoted alot in the comments here, I wonder if it's an actual figure or just some part of a training video that sticks with people

Knock the 30 dollars and benefits down to part time 15 an hour employees.

We're down to 2 million.. let's select the 10% worst stores.. we are down to $200,000.

They can check other inventory items and check out customers.

Cheaper than a one second ad during the superbowl

> Knock the 30 dollars and benefits down to part time 15 an hour employees.

So, you're encouraging a business to hire minimum wage labor and schedule so as to avoid paying benefits? And these people (you've just screwed) are the ones you're proposing be granted the responsibility to detect theft?

> let's select the 10% worst stores

Infeasible, as most theft by dollar is organized, which targets a somewhat random scattering of stores, intermittently. Highest shrink retail stores already have additional theft mitigation tech deployed.

> They can check other inventory items and check out customers

Not if they can't be in two places at once. 15 minutes is a fairly middle of the road estimate for: walking to the area, checking the on-shelf number, checking above the rack, and possibly checking the back. If anything, it's already under-estimating the time required.

Yes.. or hire students not phds to do the inventory

> a silly use of scarce resources.

When your losses are so bad, it's time to invest more in security.

Accounting together with video evidence can more timely detect thieves, and might be worth it.

Two points:

1. Unless store security catches the thief at the door, many police departments don’t have the resources to track them down. So finding out that you were burgled within a couple days isn’t much better than finding out at a quarterly or even annual inventory.

2. It’s not that big of a problem. From the article: “Organized retail crime costs retailers an average of $719,548 per $1 billion in sales”. Putting that in a more accessible scale, that’s 72¢ per $1,000 of sales.

One point about 1. Even if Store Security DOES catch them at the door. What do you do when the person says "I dont care im taking this and going" and refuses to stop for the security person. The security person is not a cop, and is probably not the very expensive armed security that banks have. If the person calls their bluff not much can be done at that point. And thieves know this.

They then head to their car and leave. You try to take their license plate number. Oh wait it says "tag applied for".

Criminals regularly take the plates off when they do their work, if a cop pulls them over, they can say some story about how they needed to get it reattached, and no cop pulls over a car just because of a "tag applied for" sign because they know it will likely be just that 9 times out of 10, so if they did pull over that car its some other ticket-able offense, but no registration wont be likely part of that ticket.

Maybe you got a picture of their face? Except everyone wears masks now....

I see so many missing plates these days in SoCal. Also no plate on the front. I point them out to my wife sometimes when I am bored, we'll see dozens on a 10 minute trip. I'm told by a friend who is a DA (in California) that police here are not legally allowed to stop you today for plate violations. Instead, they are only allowed to issue fines for plate violations as part of another routine stop. I also have a neighbor has a temporary paper plate on one of his vehicles that expired over 14 months ago. If there's no incentive to care then people won't care, I guess.

When I lived in Los Angeles a long time ago I didn't drive much so I never got around to renewing my plates (from another state). For nearly two years, it was never a problem.

In some states (e.g. MA, NY I'm pretty sure) security cannot legally prevent anyone from leaving. The best they can do is stand in the way to slow someone down. Source: heard from an independent jeweler in New York City.

What is a "tag-applied for" sign? Some sort of temporary licence plate? In Ontario, temporary registration is a normal licence plate with a "T" registration sticker, instead of an annual sticker.

Its a piece of paper that literally says "tag applied for". If you buy a car from an individual/non dealer you get a certain amount of time (couple of weeks to 30 days depending on state) to get a new tag for it. Until that point you can drive it basically unregistered.

All the ambiguity involving that means you can basically just take off your license plate whenever you want and police dont look at as a particularly unusual or noteworthy thing to run across. Even if you dont put "tag applied for" at all most cops just assume thats the situation and wont pull you over for just that unless you are having some other violation going on.

I had a coworker who was robbed earlier this year and the person left in a car with a you guessed it "tag applied for" paper on the license plate section of their car.

Where I live (Massachusetts) it's a barely legible piece of paper you tape in your rear window.

It's all part of retail business. Whether it's employee theft, customer theft, broken items on shelves, or returns of faulty items, it's all a part of doing business and it factors into the sticker price.

This isn't just a Home Depot exception. All retail has shrink around this level. And has for essentially all of its existence.

Which is one reason online prices can be cheaper.

How many of them are over $500.00? Check those first.

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