MT102 Unit 9 Seminar Reflection on Shrink Example

Locked Test Kits and an Empty Evening Floor: A Unit 9 Seminar Reflection on Shrink

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT102: Principles of Retailing

Unit 9 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Glassmere Aquatics, its staffing and its losses are composite and illustrative, and classmates are not named; the survey and sources cited are real.

The Seminar Question

The instructor posed the question in these terms: when a retailer locks razors, cosmetics or electronics behind plexiglass, does the reduction in theft outweigh the sales lost when shoppers must wait for an associate with a key?

The Discussion

Two positions dominated. A classmate who works in loss prevention for a drugstore chain argued that locked cases are a last resort that works, citing cases where theft of a single category fell sharply after locking. A classmate who manages a grocery store argued that locked cases punish honest shoppers and that the wait time sends them to competitors or online. She noted that her store had unlocked one category after sales fell faster than theft did.

Both arguments rested on the same unknown: how many shoppers walk away from a locked case without asking for help. The loss prevention classmate admitted that her chain counts thefts carefully but has no way of counting the sales that never happen. The grocery manager admitted that her sales decline might have had other causes, since a competitor opened nearby in the same quarter. The instructor pointed out that this asymmetry, where losses from theft are measured and losses from inconvenience are guessed, tends to push retailers toward locking more than they should.

The group split over self-checkout. Some saw it as a labor saving that pays for itself; others argued it raises losses. Taylor (2016) found that self-checkouts in the United Kingdom created new opportunities for theft and for losses that blur the line between deliberate theft and honest error, such as a shopper keying in the code for a cheap item while bagging a dearer one. The instructor added that the National Retail Federation's 2023 survey put average shrink at about 1.6 percent of sales in fiscal 2022 (National Retail Federation, 2023), which means losses matter most in categories with thin margins and high prices per unit.

Applying the Discussion to Glassmere

Levy et al. (2019) describe shrink as coming from four main sources: external theft, employee theft, administrative errors and vendor fraud. At Glassmere a fifth source dominates: livestock that dies in the store's tanks before it is sold. My Unit 2 profile noted that livestock makes up about 40 percent of sales, and every fish or coral that dies in a display tank is inventory lost.

Glassmere's dry-goods theft concentrates in small, expensive items: digital test kits, small LED lights and coral foods, most priced between $30 and $90. The Beavercreek store moved digital test kits into a locked case near the register last spring. In the same year the chain cut one evening associate per store and added a self-checkout kiosk.

The seminar made me see that these changes interact. With one fewer associate in the evening, the locked case waits longer for someone with a key, and the livestock wall, which needs constant care, gets less attention. My Unit 8 audit found an 18-minute wait at the livestock counter on a busy Saturday; an evening with fewer staff could be worse. And the kiosk is beside the locked case, so an associate called to open it leaves the kiosk unwatched.

Where My Thinking Moved

I came into the seminar thinking locked cases were simply bad for customers. I now think they are a reasonable tool for a few small, expensive items, but only when the store staffs them. At Glassmere the larger risk is not theft but the staffing cut, which raises livestock losses, slows service at the counter that defines the brand and makes the locked case slower to open.

For a fish store, the most expensive shrink is not what walks out the door; it is what dies in the tanks while the evening associate is opening a locked case.

Looking Ahead

My Unit 10 strategy plan will need to address evening staffing directly, comparing the labor saved by the cut with livestock losses and the service cost my audit recorded. It will also consider moving the self-checkout kiosk away from the locked case.

I also want to test the seminar's asymmetry at Glassmere. The chain counts stolen test kits through its inventory counts, but it does not count shoppers who leave when no associate is free to open the case. For one month, the register associate at Beavercreek could log each time a shopper asks for the case and each time a shopper waits more than three minutes or leaves. A month of that log would show whether the locked case is costing more sales than it saves, which is the question the seminar could not answer for anyone in the room.

References

Levy, M., Weitz, B. A., & Grewal, D. (2019). Retailing management (10th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

National Retail Federation. (2023). National retail security survey 2023. https://nrf.com/research/national-retail-security-survey-2023

Taylor, E. (2016). Supermarket self-checkouts and retail theft: The curious case of the SWIPERS. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 16(5), 552-567. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895816643353