D. Tighe
Research expert covering consumer behavior, sporting goods retail, and the global toy industry.
Retail theft in the United States - statistics & facts
The United States, one of the largest economies in the world with a high average purchasing power among its consumers, also suffers from a considerable amount of retail theft. Retail stores like Walmart, Target, as well as small retail businesses, suffer from inventory shrinkage every single year. Inventory shrinkage, measured as retail revenue loss, is typically caused by internal and external theft, as well as human and systemic errors. Over the past five years, retailers in the United States reported, on average, an inventory shrink of one and a half percent.
Retail theft
Depending on the state, small business retailers with brick-and-mortar stores experience theft quite frequently. In 2023, a whopping 13 percent of small business owners said they experienced retail theft every single day. One in five surveyed business owners claimed merchandise typically gets stolen a few times per week. Only five percent of U.S. respondents said they do not experience theft in their stores at all. When asked about the financial damage this causes, roughly a quarter of these retailers estimated that they lose anywhere between 1,500 and 2,000 U.S. dollars a month.Return fraud
A related crime commonly seen in retail and online is that of return fraud. A typical example of return fraud is wardrobing. This is a type of return fraud in which consumers will buy a new item, for instance, an expensive piece of clothing, with the intention of returning it quickly after use to get a full refund. In other words, the consumer did not truly intend to buy the product. According to a survey conducted in 2023, roughly half of major retailers in the United States experienced wardrobing in the last year. Just under 45 percent had to deal with consumers trying to return shoplifted or stolen merchandise.What can be done?
It is challenging to determine whether retail crime has grown in the United States over time, as it is a crime that frequently goes unreported or even undetected. Be that as it may, there is a heightened interest in making retail theft a priority in 2024. The governors of New York and California, for example, announced plans to fight retail crime at the beginning of the year, by way of increasing penalties for (organized) retail theft offenses and providing more funding for police departments and district attorneys for such cases.
