Sell more and lose less - with ECR Retail Loss

Hosted by Colin Peacock

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Oct 2026

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About the show

Retailers are always searching for new ways to reduce retail losses such as lost sales because of empty shelves, losses at self-checkout, returns fraud and food waste. Every year, store operations and loss prevention experts from over 300 different retail businesses from around the world participate in the meetings and research organised by ECR Retail Loss. This podcast series brings you the latest insights from our research and best practice meetings. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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56 recent

October 15, 202614 min

Item not on file

An item will not scan at self-checkout because it is not on the master data file. It is one of the most familiar irritations in retail, and on the evidence it is also one of the smallest loss generators. ECR's own figures put it at roughly 34 cents per thousand transactions. That is near the bottom of the list, well below missed scans and walkaways. Professor Matt Hopkins says the obvious thing about that: as a retailer, you put your resource where your risk is greatest, and this is not where your risk is greatest. So why does it get so much attention? Because the loss it causes is indirect. A shopper who cannot get an item to scan gets frustrated, and a frustrated shopper is the one who decides they are entitled to bag it without scanning. The case for fixing it is a customer experience case that happens to reduce loss. Matt and Colin Peacock go through where it actually comes from, which is nearly always locally sourced produce whose packaging varies by store and changes over time, and where retailers are heading: bottom-up systems that learn an unrecognised item locally and update the master file fast, with AI and computer vision doing the detection rather than a busy self-checkout host filling in a form. The research behind it More on self-checkout What retailers are doing about non-scanning items Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

October 1, 202619 min

Slower interventions at self-checkout

Two numbers came out of ECR's 2026 self-checkout summits, and the second one is the interesting one. The first is how long a self-checkout host takes to reach a customer who needs help, or who has not scanned something. That runs from fifteen to forty five seconds, and sometimes a good deal longer. The second is how long the host takes to clear the intervention once they arrive. Under five seconds means nothing actually happened. Nobody spoke to the customer, nobody rescanned anything, somebody just cleared the screen. One Australian retailer took the share of interventions cleared in under five seconds down from 40% to 10%, on purpose, and their net promoter score improved. Professor Matt Hopkins joins Colin Peacock to pull the highlights out of both summits, hosted by Walmart in Dallas and Waitrose in the UK. They cover what good self-checkout design actually does, why training hosts across hundreds of stores never finishes, the machine to host ratio nobody has solved yet, and what changes when self-checkout arrives in hardware and health and beauty stores. The research behind it More on self-checkout Where the design thinking comes from On training hosts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

September 17, 202618 min

Loss prevention personas

Most retailers can tell you which stores are the difficult ones. Far fewer can show you why, on paper, in a way that stands up. New ECR research by Professor Emmeline Taylor of City St George's, University of London looked at how retailers model crime risk, and found maturity across the sector to be uneven. Retailers model health and safety. They model business continuity. For crime, a great deal of the industry still runs on experience and instinct. Emmeline joins Colin Peacock to explain why that is now a problem beyond resourcing. Foreseeability is turning up in litigation, and a retailer that cannot show the reasoning behind where it deployed people and technology has little to point at. A model makes the decision defensible either way, including the decision to take cover out of a low risk store. The episode walks through the five red flags that suggest a crime risk model needs attention, and the self assessment that places a business on a spectrum of loss prevention personas, from the firefighter who only ever reacts to the intelligence-led strategist who has the ear of the C suite. Read the research, and take the self-assessment that comes with it to find your persona The five red flags in detail More on retail loss, safety and security The fortress stores research this follows on from Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

September 3, 202624 min

Self-checkout participation and loss

Push more transactions through self-checkout and you will lose more stock. That much was already suspected. What nobody could put a number on, until now, was how much more. Professor Matt Hopkins of the University of Leicester joins Colin Peacock to talk through the Self-Checkout Loss Report 2026, the largest study of fixed self-checkout loss yet attempted, built on data from thirty-nine retailers. Matt explains the finding retailers have been waiting for: for every one percent rise in the share of transactions going through self-checkout, shrink rises by between 0.03 and 0.048. Average participation across the study was fifty-four percent. If your business wants seventy, that is now a number you can budget for rather than a fight your stores quietly lose. The conversation also covers why risk is not spread evenly across an estate, what the loss pyramid says about missed scans versus walkaways and what each actually costs, and which interventions have evidence behind them rather than enthusiasm. Download the Self-Checkout Loss Report 2026, free More on self-checkout loss The 2022 global study this report updates Related episode on high-risk stores Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

August 20, 202619 min

Body-Worn Cameras

Body-worn cameras are now one of retail's most talked-about safety tools. The question is no longer whether they work, but how to get colleagues to wear them. In this episode of Sell More Lose Less, Colin Peacock talks to Professor Emmeline Taylor about what a recent ECR call with around 40 retailers revealed about body-worn cameras on the shop floor. They cover the three things a camera does (deter an incident, de-escalate a confrontation through its "civilising effect", and capture evidence when all else fails), and the numbers behind them: a 30% reduction in violence and aggression for security officers, 40% once frontline colleagues wore them, and 38% of colleagues saying the cameras make them feel safer. They also dig into why adoption is really a hearts-and-minds problem, the worry about surveillance creep, why up to 10% of devices go missing, and how to build a business case that is about safety, not return on investment. More on protecting colleagues and stores The research on whether body-worn cameras work in retail More on video in retail Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

August 6, 202615 min

Remote Monitoring

Not long ago, retail CCTV was a comfort blanket: there because the store specification said so, and looked at only after something went wrong. That has changed. In this episode of Sell More Lose Less, Colin Peacock talks to Professor Emmeline Taylor about the rise of remote monitoring in retail, fresh from a two-day ECR meeting with 50 to 60 retailers. They unpack how remote monitoring centres, sometimes called security operations centres, crime centres or intelligence hubs, are pulling together video, alarms and panic buttons into one place, with 24-hour oversight of stores spread across the country. They cover the split between proactive monitoring and reactive evidence gathering, why communicating back into store is still the weak link, and the case for these centres becoming tools for the whole business, not just security, from self-checkout monitoring to virtual store audits. This is a follow-up to our earlier conversation on security operations centres More on video in retail The ECR research on retail CCTV strategy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

July 23, 202612 min

Bananas

Bananas are one of retail's best sellers. They are also one of its biggest waste lines. In this episode of Sell More Lose Less, Colin Peacock talks to food waste expert Richard Thalemann about why so many bananas are thrown away, and what retailers can do about it. They unpack a recent ECR meeting and a visit to a ripening factory in Dublin: why 36% of banana waste comes down to fruit that is too yellow, how ripening upstream sets shelf life in store, and a simple box-packing "magic trick" that prevents damage but almost nobody uses. They also look at banana hammocks, the behavioural psychology of which bananas shoppers pick, and how single-price bananas may be creating more waste, not less. The takeaway: cutting banana waste means joining up handling, merchandising, pricing and new uses for imperfect fruit. More on reducing food waste in retail The true cost of unsold food in retail 66 practical ways to reduce retail food waste Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

July 9, 202614 min

Winning Hearts and Minds

The stores that waste the least food often have one thing in common: engaged colleagues. In this episode of Sell More Lose Less, Colin Peacock talks to food waste expert Richard Thalemann about why engagement matters so much, and why it is so hard to sustain. They explore why people treat food differently at home and at work, the cognitive dissonance of caring about waste while being measured on sales, and why the emotional pull of charity donation rarely reaches the markdown gun. They also question league tables of donated meals, the risk of normalising surplus, and why champions of food waste fade like wallpaper unless the role keeps reinventing itself. The takeaway for retailers: make it easy, move the effort upstream, and measure what matters. More on reducing food waste in retail Engaging store associates to fight food waste Using store donations to reduce food waste Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

June 25, 202612 min

The Egg Waste Problem

Eggs don't look like a big loss problem. Look closely at the numbers and the picture changes. In this episode of Sell More Lose Less, Colin Peacock is joined by food waste expert Richard Thalemann to ask why so much egg waste goes unrecorded, and what retailers can do about it. They cover the rule that forces a whole box to be binned when a single egg breaks, the £2 million a year one retailer puts against it, and the merchandising habits, top shelves and floor-standing shippers, that quietly drive breakages. They also look at why markdowns and confusing date codes push shoppers to waste eggs that are still perfectly good, and why eggs past their sell by date can still be donated. The message for retailers is simple: measure the problem properly before you try to fix it. More on reducing food waste in retail The true cost of unsold food in retail Using store donations to reduce food waste Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

June 11, 202616 min

Live Facial Recognition in Retail

Professor Emmeline Taylor joins Colin Peacock to explore how retailers around the world are deploying live facial recognition and what it takes to get it right when it comes to reducing losses while maintaining privacy. They break the conversation into three areas. Firstly, organisational readiness: why deploying facial recognition in retail is not about flicking a switch, and why it can take years to align policies, training, data protection and governance across as many as twelve different principles. Secondly, the business case: one retailer reported a 20% reduction in shrink, but regulators are pushing back on some use cases and insisting the technology is proportionate to legitimate purposes such as violence reduction and in-store safety, not just financial ROI. Thirdly, sustainable deployment: how retailers can maintain public trust through transparency, clear signage, and holding the line on minimum standards. They also discuss watch list management, the risk of surveillance creep, the distinction between live and retrospective facial recognition, and why the parallels with early CCTV adoption suggest this technology will become the norm within a generation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.