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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Is this why prices are so high all of you are stealing?![/quote]

Shrinkage probably does contribute to higher prices on some items. But for the most part no, because if you raise prices too much, customers will stop buying. So you can't just keep raising prices on frequently stolen items because eventually paying customers will balk and then you won't make a profit anyway. Also, raising prices on certain items can induce theft. Shoplifting has increased thanks to inflation because when the cost of food and other necessities go up, more people on the bubble financially will decide the risk of getting caught shoplifting is worth it, because the thing they are taking is more valuable. If laundry detergent costs $8, it might not be worth it to try and sneak that out. But if it costs $20, that starts to look more worth it. So you can't just use pricing to absorb the costs of shrinkage.

Consider also that some amount of shrinkage from self checkout is accidental. Customers are not trained as checkers. People often miss small items in their carts when they checkout, or may be scanning a series of similar items and not realize that one or two didn't scan. This is still theft, but it's driven by customer negligence, not greed. And if everyone had a human checker employed by the store, you could eliminate this type of theft altogether. But many stores calculate that it's cheaper to allow this sort of theft to occur than pay more employees to prevent it from happening. So it has no real relationship to prices at all because these customers are not making conscious choices to steal -- the small item they miss might cost $1 or $30. And in the case of something getting left in a cart, the person who checked out is often likely not even the thief -- I assume often this person neglects to see the item in their cart altogether and it is ultimately stolen by someone in the parking lot who "finds" the item (and doesn't bother to return it to the store, which would be the ethical thing).

So no, on the vast majority of items, this sort of shrinkage is not the cause of price hikes. There are discrete items where frequent theft of those items can lead to price increases, but in these cases, retailers are more likely to take deterrent steps, like locking those items up and requiring customers to purchase directly from a person before they are unlocked. And then the cost increase will actually be due to the cost of deterrent measures, not the theft itself.[/quote]

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