What is shrinkage?
Shrinkage is the gap between recorded stock and actual stock. Its four sources: external theft, internal (employee) theft, supplier/admin error, and process loss. With UK theft at a record £2.2bn (BRC), it’s the metric every UK retailer should track.
Before benchmarking your own rate against anything you read, check what the national figure actually counts. Our UK retail theft statistics page sets out the recorded-crime total against the industry incident estimate — 510k versus 20.4m — which is the gap that makes most headline comparisons misleading.
How to measure it
Shrink rate = (recorded stock value − physical stock value) ÷ sales, expressed as a %. Benchmark by category and by store, then track the trend — not just the headline number.
The cut-shrink playbook
- Instrument tills and exits with HD cameras.
- Add vision-AI to match items to transactions.
- Route exceptions to staff via real-time alerts.
- Review analytics weekly; act on the worst hours/lines.
- Tighten inventory processes to remove admin error.
Cut Shrink in Your UK Stores
See how De Flow AI's computer-vision loss prevention surfaces theft, fraud and risky behaviour on the cameras you already have — and what it does and does not establish before anyone acts on an alert.
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