The Billion Dollar Problem Not Enough Brands Are Addressing: Shoplifting

I’m going to cut to the chase: US retailers lose an estimated $121 billion per year from shoplifting. Between pilfering pre-teens and kleptomaniac employees, brands consistently lose out on significant sales due to theft.

More startling news: only 2% of thefts are ever caught. 

But as an organization, you’re not powerless against shoplifting. Retailers with clear visibility into their inventory gain an advantage over companies with blurry inventory numbers. Implementing item-level tracking and an accurate inventory management system has actually been proven to eliminate inventory shrinkage by up to 50%.

The impact of item-level tracking with RFID

When your organization faces a shoplifting crisis, it’s easy to feel like there’s not much you can do. And when you’re not sure whether your garments were stolen from the stock room or the sales floor, you’re even more overwhelmed. 

But there’s a simple solution: RFID. 

What is RFID?

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a powerful tool for inventory management that enables you to keep track of each item’s journey down your supply chain and onto your sales floor. RFID tags are attached to individual products, scanned with savvy hardware, and create a library of rich data for your organization.

Rather than tracking your inventory by SKU, batch, or pallet, RFID gives you insights into the journey of each individual item in your stockroom. 

How RFID can help loss prevention efforts

RFID tracking comes with a long list of benefits: it’s faster than traditional tracking methods while creating the most detailed, item-level inventory data. But when it comes to loss prevention, RFID offers some big advantages.

Inventory accuracy

Line-by-line inventory counting — or worse, manual counting — come with accuracy compromises that leave some gray area in your final inventory counts. When you use RFID to count your inventory, accuracy rises to nearly 100%. 

When inventory is accurate, you can identify shrinkage much quicker. Additionally, accurate inventory disincentivizes internal theft, because team members know that higher-ups can identify that goods were stolen.

Precision location

That means that, in cases where theft or shrinkage occurs, organizations have the information they need to pinpoint the location where the shrinkage occurred. If the inventory dropped by 10% between two locations, leadership has a clear idea what went wrong.

Data-driven insights

Finally, RFID does more than just count. RFID scanners provide detailed information to RFID software, allowing organizations to understand with depth what’s occurring when their inventory drops suddenly. RFID takes out the guesswork by providing times, dates, locations, and exact products that have been removed from inventory.

With these insights, teams can add security in-store, shift from one manufacturer to another, or incentivize internal theft reporting. Rather than haphazardly taking measures to solve a theft problem, teams have clear data to work from and find a solution.

Charming Trim can help you reduce theft

If RFID sounds like a compelling solution to your theft problem, you’re right! And bringing RFID to life in your organization is easier than you think.

To learn more about how RFID can revolutionize your inventory tracking, reach out to our team. We’ll get you on the path to reducing theft and increasing accuracy and efficiency.