Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

I do not think you'll have much luck finding actual data on this. (But I'd be surprised to learn that it's as high as 10%. I guess anything is possible, though.)

I think your best approach here is to go to ten stores and talk to ten different produce managers. They know better than anyone, and it's first-hand research.

"Overbrowsing" is one reason that you see a lot of produce pre-packaged or wrapped.

I don’t think that the tamper / tasting rate can be as high as 10%, simply because of the implications to the bottom line. Net profitability in a store or supermarket is often around 20-50%, with food at 50% and hardware at about 20%. So shrinkage due to tampering of 10% would wipe out the profits, and that’s before you add in shrinkage due to pilfering. There are figure in this IBM paper for retail shrinkage in total estimating it to be 3-4%. That includes all losses from picnicking on the goods through to inside fraud. Even this has a significant impact on the bottom line (Work out how much you have to sell at the gross figure to replace the profit from the stuff you have lost)

https://www-03.ibm.com/industries/retail/doc/content/bin/pov_Loss_preventio...

Out of interest, you will find extensive references to spoilage and retail on the web and an interesting study carried out by www.thehindubisinessline.com puts global shrinkage at 1.36% with a gross value of 93 Billion Dollars. The Indian overall total is 2.9% and specifically in the food trade is between 0.3 and 1.5%

In the light of this, that 10% figure looks a bit suspect. Maybe it is sincerely mistaken but round percentages tend to be figures plucked out of thin air. Maybe Roxana could cite a reference for this figure?

Also, swapping damaged goods is not tampering – it is a practical way to assert your consumer-rights. Better to tell the manger what you are doing though!

Best of luck

You may want to Google terms like "produce shrinkage" and produce shrink" and see what comes up.

One article I found when I did this was:
https://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-2304423_ITM

Here is a paragraph from that:
According to The National Supermarket Research Group's (NSRG) "2001 Supermarket Shrink Survey," 59% of all store shrink comes from perishables departments. While meat had the largest dollar loss due to shrink, produce came in second, with retail respondents reporting an average of 4.37% shrink and losing $61,876. Some industry observers believe the average percentage of produce shrink may even be closer to 10%. In the 12th annual survey, NSRG, whose research is published by Trax Software & Consulting Inc., based in Scottsdale, Ariz., found that inefficient ordering, improper handling and cashier errors were the top three contributors to shrink in the produce department (see chart).