Re: Wal Mart Remove Self Checkouts
Posted: April 1st, 2024, 9:11 am
Inventory workers are extremely prone to errors. They may under count many items. Scanning items at such a speed misses much.
With the turns of a high volume Walmart, inventory errors are not going to amount to a significant overall skew of the results. If they were supposed to count 6 widgets on the shelf and only entered 3 it won't matter much if the store lost 300 over the inventory accounting period. If anything the store is almost better off with a slight under count because it will get larger after inventory trucks and really fill up the shelves, boosting sales and potentially washing the count errors.
Same here, I have run or supervised hundreds of inventories. It doesn't change the fact that when the losses are accounted for, a store like Walmart has turned the same SKU hundreds of times. This means that as long as the store operated on some sort of cycle count or other such routine the vast majority of the losses were found before inventory day. The inventory itself is more a measurement of the store's operational integrity than the shrink itself. If the store was showing year to date losses of $100,000 and after the count it ballooned to $200,000 then the store obviously has poor operations as their inventory predictability/accuracy is only 50%. For a store like Walmart, losses are probably in the millions these days. So again as orders are made and on hand counts are corrected throughout the year it is very likely that 95% or more of the losses are already known before the count. If it's a bad count day then the crew will be wrong in the thousands of dollars or maybe even tens of thousands. But the years losses are in the millions anyway, you're talking about the predicted loss only changing a few percent.