Wal Mart Remove Self Checkouts

[Alpha8472]

Inventory workers are extremely prone to errors. They may under count many items. Scanning items at such a speed misses much.

[ClownLoach]

Inventory workers are extremely prone to errors. They may under count many items. Scanning an 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.

[veteran+]

Inventory workers are extremely prone to errors. They may under count many items. Scanning an items at such a speed misses much.

Yup, I have had discrepancies in the thousands (negative).

Recounts always found the money.

[ClownLoach]

Inventory workers are extremely prone to errors. They may under count many items. Scanning an items at such a speed misses much.

Yup, I have had discrepancies in the thousands (negative).

Recounts always found the money.

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.

The higher the volume of the store, the less important the actual inventory day count is. But that doesn't excuse the manager who must pursue researching and doing recounts as you're correct there is always thousands of dollars to find there. Almost every time I've taken over a "broken high shrink" store I found that the previous managers blew off the recounts and just accepted the inventory service's first count. Just doing an inventory fixed everything and usually found tens of thousands of dollars.