Moving beyond shrinkage: developing a definition and typology of total retail loss

While the term ‘shrinkage’ has been in use for over 100 years to describe retail losses, there continues to be little consensus on what it actually means and how it should be measured. As retailing becomes ever more complex and demanding, and a greater range of data sources become available, the traditional approaches to understanding and measuring loss in retailing seem increasingly anachronistic. Based upon extensive interviews and roundtable discussions with senior retail executives from Europe and the US, this article puts forward a framework for developing a more inclusive and broad-ranging definition and typology of retail losses, using the umbrella term Total Retail Loss.