Subject: Re: DG: Theft
Shrink (theft) continues to get worse:

Q1 2024 Earnings Transcript:

"Shrink continues to be our most significant headwind and with 59 basis points worse in the first quarter compared to prior year. As Todd noted, we are taking multiple actions aimed at reducing shrink, and I'll discuss our expectation for this headwind for the remainder of the year in just a bit.

Before I turn the call over to Kelly, I want to provide a brief update on our shrink reduction efforts, including the changes to our self-checkout strategy that we announced in March. Shrink continues to be the most significant headwind in our business, and we are deploying an end-to-end approach to shrink reduction across the organization, including efforts in our supply chain merchandising and within our stores to help combat issues around shrink.

Our supply chain teams are primarily focused on ensuring deliveries are on time and in full, and our merchants on reducing the amount of inventory we carry. Within our stores, we are focusing on delivering a more consistent front end presence, broaden in the reach of our high shrink planograms, which include the removal of high shrink SKUs and the elimination of self-checkout in the vast majority of stores.

As we discussed on last quarter's call, we converted approximately 9,000 stores away from self-checkout during the quarter following the quick and successful conversion of these stores in Q1, and given the ongoing challenge from shrink, we converted approximately 3,000 additional stores away from self-checkout in May, bringing us to approximately 12,000 conversions completed in total.

While this represents a significant change in our stores, we believe this is the right course of action to drive increased customer engagement, while also better positioning us to begin reducing shrink in the back half of ‘24 with a more material positive impact expected in 2025.

Moving forward, we plan to have self-checkout options available in a limited number of stores, most of which are higher volume and low shrink locations. Overall, we are pleased with the results and progress across the business during the first quarter, which I will discuss in more detail later."

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