Operational Failure as a Driver of Shrinkage

The previous chapters have sought to outline the context of shrinkage and its management in retailing, focusing particularly upon the impact of changes within the overall retailing landscape, the scale, nature and extent of the problem and some of the barriers currently facing loss prevention practitioners. This next chapter seeks to outline the broad contours of what we see as New Loss Prevention and its underlying theory. Central to our approach is understanding the role of operational failures as a root cause of shrinkage and how these need to be fully understood before any remedial actions can be taken to deal with the problem. As detailed previously many of our concerns about the existing ways in which loss prevention practitioners have gone about responding to shrinkage have been centred on an inability to move beyond seeking solutions which are targeted more at the symptoms of the problems than the root causes. This can often be seen in ad hoc and piecemeal interventions designed to deal with external theft and the marginalisation of significant shrinkage generators such as internal theft and process failures.