Your store loses 1.6% of sales and you don’t know until January inventory.
It’s not an “I can’t count” problem. It’s a problem of what you measure and when you measure it.
( in Mexico, ANTAD reports 1.08% shrink on sales — 2021. In USA, NRF reports 1.6% in FY2022, trending up. In Brazil, ABRAS reports 5.83% in supermarket average — 2024 )
When typical retail net margin is 2-5%, a 1.6% shrink eats between 32% and 80% of your profit. That’s before external theft, inventory errors, and miscategorized operational waste.
The January monthly inventory doesn’t solve this. It tells you how much you lost over the last 90 days. It doesn’t tell you what caused it, when, or who.
( per industry reports, up to 65% of LATAM retail shrink is internal: employee theft + process errors. What monthly inventory categorizes as “unidentified shrink” )
What traditional CCTV doesn’t solve either: you have the recording of the exact moment of the theft, but nobody’s going to watch it. A human operator watching 8 hours of footage per day catches 2-4% of relevant events.
The operational question isn’t “do I add more cameras?”. It’s “how long does it take to find the incident I already know happened?”. If the answer is “more than 30 minutes”, your video system is recording evidence for a 2027 trial, not preventing anything today.
What retailers like Cinemex, OXXO, and convenience chains in LATAM are moving toward is real-time event detection: AI that flags the exact moment of the incident (or the suspicious pattern), not 90 days later. The metric that matters: search minutes per incident, not hours.
P.D. How many minutes does your team take to find a specific incident in last week’s footage? If the answer is “more than 10” or “depends on the day”, today’s a good day to question whether your video system is detecting or just recording.
📰 Sources: ANTAD National Shrinkage Census (Mexico, 2021) + NRF National Retail Security Survey (USA, FY2022) + ABRAS (Brazil, 2024) + Jedi internal analysis.