Retail Shrinkage at an All Time High

Retail Shrinkage is at its peak and store staff are increasingly losing trust on the shoppers who visit their stores. Even though security personnel are deployed in the store to prevent theft, the number of theft incidents and the losses associated with it are mounting with each passing day. Incidents of targeted organized crime, repeat offenders, and poorly monitored self-checkout counters are all adding to the woes of retail chains.

The situation begs the question – how can retail stores reduce loss or shrinkage? Let’s take a closer look at the various types of incidents which are reported from retail stores and how these challenges can be tackled.

Concealment: Customers conceal items by dropping them into their pockets or bags, and do not present them for scanning at the counter.
Stacking of Items: The customer stacks similar items one over the other, scanning only the top one in the heap.
Partial Payment: The customer fails to make the full amount due for the items in the cart.
Product Switching: The customer switches products and deliberately weighs lower priced products at the counter
Non-Payment: The customer walks out without bothering to scan or finalize the payment for the items that have been scanned.
Self-Checkout (SCO) Counters: SCO is now hugely popular and outnumber manned counters at most of the stores in urban areas. However, the rising number of missed scans and incorrect scans done by switching low-value items instead of the ones priced higher is increasing the losses at the retail stores.

Tech to the Rescue

SAI Group’s Visual AI solution identifies suspicious customer behavior and sends alerts to the store staff in a discreet manner on their mobile devices in the store so that they can try to resolve the issue with customers in point before they leave the store.

The SAI’s Visual AI platform also provides a dashboard, listing relevant video footage of the incidents detected, and trending patterns such as aisles where incidents are frequent, and categories of incidents. Such legally admissible evidence will serve as a lifeline for retail stores which are grappling with the challenges of shrinkage and theft. The solution provides store managers the ability to submit the incident footage to law enforcement agencies to take further action.

SAI Group’s streamlined Visual AI solution is cost effective and scalable – and trusted by the best retailers. Deploying SAI Group’s solution costs only a fraction of the overall retail shrinkage, which has now crossed billions of pounds.

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About SAI

As a leader in computer vision technology, SAI Group delivers cutting-edge, multi-modal AI solutions into retail environments. Using a unique platform approach, its technology uses existing camera systems to target losses, increase store safety, and underpin operational efficiencies.

All solutions are built from the ground up to ensure the highest levels of security and data protection, respecting the privacy expectations of the public and operating to stringent ethical standards while delivering substantial value to our clients. Globally, SAI monitors millions of transactions per day, protecting the revenues from tens of millions of product sales and hundreds of millions of customer interactions. Its models also accurately identify anti-social behaviour, aggression and violence, helping to de-escalate situations with real-time interfaces to security officers and operations centres.