Walmart Suffers Shrinkage

Shrinkage?  That's a problem, but there are more basic problems at Walmart.

Any casual shopper of Walmart, who pays any kind of attention, understands that the stores are poorly run.

Go through a Walmart store and play a game of Where's the Manager?  Good luck scoring points.

There is a low level of customer service in Walmart stores.   I shop there.

The other week I began to ask a Walmart employee where an item was in the store and she answered, with pride, she is on her break right now.

I couldn't tell she was on break. Think about that.  The first part of good training is that your breaks never begin when customers are in your presence.

Walmart has many good workers.  But support for the good workers is complicated because managers are few and not readily available.  Plus, bad workers crowd out the effect of good workers.

Why did Walmart raise the minimum wage?  Instead, they could have raised the wages of the better, longer term employees.

Reward virtuous behavior and point out to the newer employees that the path to higher wages is improved performance on the job.

Why did Walmart follow the advice of progressive, liberal Democrat complainers?

Walmart should listen to their customers and improve the basic shopping experience.

Study what Kroger is doing.

Their management led, customer focused change has been apparent for quite a while.  I experience an improvement in customer service from Kroger employees.  Not all.  But it has been obvious.   PB
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From Bloomberg.com:

Walmart has a shrinkage problem, and it's not the Seinfeld variety.

It's the kind that, in retail industry jargon, refers to stealing and losing stock to damage or poor inventory management.

In explaining a fairly dismal quarterly result on Tuesday morning, the massive retailer called out shrinkage again and again.

In the press release, it was mentioned three times. In the conference call, it came up 13 times.

That's a lot of shrinkage.

Walmart sales, in fact, were pretty decent, but expenses weighed on the company’s profit.

Part of those expenses entailed writedowns for inventory that just disappeared.

Store employees say they have seen everything from customers stealing meat in their pants to thieves bursting out a back door with a shopping cart full of electronics to be loaded into a waiting car.

What’s more, Walmart's chief financial officer, Charles Holley, said he expects the problem to persist.

Walmart is restarting a program to teach employees how to spot thieves, be they coworkers or would-be consumers.

Meanwhile, it is auditing its entire supply chain to "close gaps" while it adds staff to parts of stores in which items tend to vanish.

Many stores now station an employee at the exit to check customers' receipts...

How big of a problem is shrinkage?

For the typical vendor, it amounts to about 1.4 percent of sales, according to a 2014 survey by the National Retail Federation.

About 38 percent of that is caused by shoplifting, an additional 35 percent via theft by employees, and the rest reflects damaged goods, cashier errors, and other administrative slip-ups.

Walmart hasn’t said how much stuff is being nicked, but at that rate, it would be losing roughly $7 billion a year to thieves. In short, the return on any kind of shrinkage-prevention program is probably pretty good...
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Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-18/wal-mart-is-getting-hit-hard-by-thieves