There's good news for retailers: you are getting better at
preventing shrink from employees. In 2005, a University of Florida
study found that employee theft accounted for 47 percent of shrink.
In a follow-up study in 2016, the university found that the
percentage of shrink caused by employee theft was "only"
30 percent. The bad news: this is still a fairly significant
number, accounting for approximately $15 billion in losses on an
annual basis.
Retailers use a variety of tactics to battle this epidemic, from
low-tech options such as offering rewards to employees who turn in
thieves, to high-tech systems that can, for instance, monitor
transactions to reveal issues that managers would normally be
unable to detect. Yet unscrupulous employees remain undeterred, and
will forever try to beat the system.
