Most thrift operators put it at 5–6% — borrowed from industry averages, never counted inside their own stores. Enter your numbers below and your estimate against what a peer chapter actually measured.
That's what your assumption works out to on your own sales — but it's a guess borrowed from industry averages, never counted inside your stores. A peer chapter assumed too, until it measured every item, every week (chart below). The only way to know yours is to measure it.
Once that peer chapter measured weekly, the number became something it could act on — nearly halving from about 16% (late 2024) toward 7% over the measured window.
Measured shrink, % of units handled. The dashed line is what most operators assume.
Inside that one chapter, shrink ran from about 3% at the best store to 15%+ at the worst — a 5× spread. The worst stores were the same ones month after month. An average never reveals them.
Same chapter, same month. Each bar is a store (anonymized). You can't tell which is which from the average.
Every item is RFID-tagged at production. The system continuously reconciles what was tagged against what's actually sold or counted on the floor — the gap is the measured net unaccounted shrink (theft, miscounts, and process loss together, not theft alone). Figures here are from an anonymized thrift chapter of more than 20 stores, measured weekly from Dec 2024 to Mar 2026. Nothing on this page is an industry estimate — it's a count. Your own number can only come from measuring your own stores.
Neither did they — until they measured every item, in every store. The estimate you started with is a guess. The only way to replace it with a fact is to count.
See what your stores are actually losingThese numbers come from a live resale deployment. For the full picture of RFID in resale retail — how it works, what it costs, and how shrink gets measured — read how RFID for resale works and what it costs.