Sell more and lose less - with ECR Retail Loss

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 itMore on self-checkoutWhat retailers are doing about non-scanning items

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 itMore on self-checkoutWhere the design thinking comes fromOn training hosts

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 personaThe five red flags in detailMore on retail loss, safety and securityThe fortress stores research this follows on from

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, freeMore on self-checkout lossThe 2022 global study this report updatesRelated episode on high-risk stores

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 storesThe research on whether body-worn cameras work in retailMore on video in retail

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 centresMore on video in retailThe ECR research on retail CCTV strategy