New Research: How much loss can be attributed to SCO?

Date and Time:

April 16th - 1pm UK

Location:

Virtual

16 Apr 1:00 PM

Organisers:

Professor Adrian Beck, Dr Matt Hopkins, University of Leicester

Description

New Research: How much loss can be attributed to SCO?

In this meeting, we will share and discuss a new research study that will update the current data points on the scale and nature of the losses that can be attributed to self checkouts.

The last study. published over six years ago in 2018, revealed the following data points:

  • Losses generated in stores with fixed SCO machines can be 33% to 147% higher than in stores without SCO technology.
  • Stores with both higher numbers of SCO machines and a higher proportion of transactions going through SCO machines had higher rates of losses.
  • Non scanning at fixed SCO machines accounted for 0.44% of SCO sales, but amounted to 9.5% of all store-recorded losses
  • Each 1% of fixed scan utilisation (transaction value) caused shrinkage losses to increase by 1 basis point (not accounting for other losses, such as lost margin or lost sales).
  • Analysis of full re-scan audits of Scan and Go, identified error rates of 43.4% - accounting for as much as 4.68% of Scan and Go Sales.   
  • SCO was estimated to cause between 21-50% of all unknown store losses

The new study will aim to collect and aggregate data from retailers in the working group (over 100) with a view to updating these data points, while augmenting with new data points, including those from the new AI tools retailers have invested behind.

In the meeting, we will start with a quick review of the existing data and then share with the group the new research plan and the support needed from retailers. This will then be followed by a group discussion on the research, the willingness from the retailers to support and timelines.

This meeting is for retailers, CPG's and academics only.