Written for the person who has to make the case internally
-
A method for building your own cost per incident and annual exposure, line by line, from figures finance can check
-
Five criteria for evaluating any checkout security system, each mapped to a cost it removes
-
The eight questions asset protection teams ask before they buy — and the answers to demand from any vendor, including this one
Proof and limits
Cosentino's Food Stores installed Rocateq's Check Out Security system and recovered the investment within the first twelve months; loss per incident fell from roughly $200–$300 to about $50. In the University of Leicester's 2026 study of 39 retailers, one retailer recorded a 28 percent drop in walkaways after control was introduced at the exit.
What this paper does not do
There is no independent, methodologically transparent benchmark for the value of a single pushout cart, and we will not borrow one to make a page look authoritative. Where a published figure exists, it is cited with its source and year. Where it does not, the paper shows the method and labels every input illustrative, so you replace it with your own. We would rather hand you a number you can defend in front of finance than one that only impresses until it is checked.
Your shrink report will look fine.
That is exactly the problem.
A pushout never arrives as a line item. It arrives as a fraction of a percentage point, buried in shrink and store execution, while the event itself — a full cart of meat, spirits, formula and cosmetics leaving through the front door in plain sight, with nobody permitted to stop it — appears nowhere as its own category. Not in the shrink report, not in the incident log, and not in the budget round where you have to defend the front end.
The loss is real, but the number isn't. And without a number, you cannot compare the cost of the loss with the cost of preventing it. FMI's 2026 research found that 93 percent of food retailers measure shrink and 86 percent measure external theft, yet pushout still has no specific metric. Ask what pushouts cost your estate and the honest answer is usually some version of: “we think we saw it happen.” That is not a business case.
So the argument you have to win internally is not about cameras or tags. It is about three costs you are already paying every week — costs your reporting was simply never built to show.
Three costs your shrink report will never show you
01
02
03
Detection doesn't prevent confrontation.
Cameras and alarms identify theft, but they do not stop it before it happens.
There is a fourth cost, and it is the only one on this list you can remove. The paper is about what removing it takes — and what it should cost you to own afterward.