askchapo

My understanding is that for most grocery stores, you're stealing from the grocery store. They're responsible for theft and stuff like food going bad. However, if enough people steal a certain brand, the store might stop carrying it.

I think the notable exception to this is Costco, where Costco never actually owns the stock in the store; it's the brand's until you buy it.

You'd have some shit hummus

it just deducts from the deli manager's inventory count. it was already bought by the warehouse and shipped based on a algorithm (with varying levels of manual control)

fun fact: most shrink (at least where im at) comes from the transfer of product between warehouse and store. warehouses love to short to make their own inventories (ths includes warehouses sending damaged, expired, and unwanted products)

also if i product is stolen enough it eventually just gets dropped forever and replaced with an alternative item

I can’t say for certain, but I imagine this would, when accounting for scale, just cause the store to replenish its inventory as if the stock had been bought.

Edit: I guess if enough were being stolen they might stop selling it, but I think realistically the effect is just you are depleting their supply along with people buying it.

Inventory accounting does factor in 'shrink', which is for stuff which gets stolen. To put it simply, when stuff gets stolen, it's recorded as an expense and a decrease in inventory, simultaneously; that expense is reported with typical Cost of Goods sold, so it usually still reduces a company's bottom line by the amount stolen.

What happens after that varies company to company, but usually there isn't much they can do. It's not like bad debt expense, where it (the bad debt) can be packaged and sold to some company that hopes to collect on some of the debt at a big discount, companies just have to eat the cost of shrink.