Andrew Kelly/Reuters
- It's increasingly clear that the use of self-checkout machines leads to an increase in shoplifting.
- Now, new data reveals more precisely how big a hit retailers take from skipped scans.
- An earlier survey found nearly one in seven shoppers have intentionally stolen from self-checkout.
There are several reasons retailers are fans of self-checkout, chief among them — higher sales.
The additional revenue, however, comes with a particular cost: higher rates of missing inventory, or shrink, in industry parlance.
Traditionally, there have been just two types of people carrying products out of a store — shoppers who paid for all of their stuff, and shoplifters who paid for none of it.
Self-checkout has given rise to a hybrid of the two: shoppers who pay for some or most of their purchase, but not all of it.
Partial shrink, as it's called, is now the most common — and costly — type of shoplifting, according to Grabango, a startup that provides checkout-free tech for retailers.
In a recent analysis, the company tracked nearly 5,000 transactions with computer vision to see what shoppers ultimately ended up paying for.
Unsurprisingly, the study found that shoplifters are more likely to get goods past a machine than a human. What is surprising is that they were 21 times more likely.
In some cases, this means simply not scanning an item, but it also includes keying in the code for a cheaper item instead of the proper one.
The data show that just 0.3% of staffed check-lane transactions had instances of partial shrink, while that rate soared to 6.7% at the self-checkout kiosks.
In revenue terms, these losses represent 3.5% of sales, which could account for more than half of a store's bottom-line profit, Grabango said.
Of course, not all partial shrink is intentional. It's not uncommon for someone to make an honest mistake using self-checkout machines.
In fact, one in five shoppers say they've accidentally taken an item from self-checkout without paying for it, according to an earlier survey from LendingTree. Less than a third of those respondents said they brought the item back to the store.
Remarkably, nearly one in seven shoppers admitted to having purposely stolen items at self-checkout, and nearly half of those said they would do it again, LendingTree found.
Gen Z was the most sticky-fingered generation surveyed, shoplifting at twice the rate of the overall group. Additionally, individuals with household incomes over $100,000 per year were the most likely to steal from self-checkout compared with lower income brackets.
"We believe technology can have a meaningful impact on reducing theft," Grabango CEO Will Glazer told The Street, explaining that his system creates a virtual basket as customers shop. "Automated systems don't lie, steal or discriminate. Shoppers are charged exactly what they owe, no more and no less."