About Sell more and lose less - with ECR Retail Loss
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.
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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 (https://ecrloss.com/research-paper/self-checkout-loss-report-2026/)
More on self-checkout (https://ecrloss.com/focus-area/self-checkout/)
Where the design thinking comes from (https://ecrloss.com/research-paper/self-checkout-design-to-reduce-loss/)
On training hosts (https://ecrloss.com/rethinking-self-checkout-host-training-2026/)
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17 Sept 2026
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 (https://ecrloss.com/research-paper/retail-crime-risk-models/)
The five red flags in detail (https://ecrloss.com/retail-crime-risk-model/)
More on retail loss, safety and security (https://ecrloss.com/focus-area/retail-loss-safety-and-security/)
The fortress stores research this follows on from (https://ecrloss.com/research-paper/keeping-the-most-at-risk-stores-trading/)
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3 Sept 2026
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 (https://ecrloss.com/research-paper/self-checkout-loss-report-2026/)
More on self-checkout loss (https://ecrloss.com/focus-area/self-checkout/)
The 2022 global study this report updates (https://ecrloss.com/research-paper/self-checkout-retail-loss-global-study/)
Related episode on high-risk stores (https://ecrloss.com/podcast/supporting-high-risk-retail-stores/)
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Who has been a guest on Sell more and lose less - with ECR Retail Loss
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Professor Emmeline Taylor
Colin Peacock
Michael Townsley
Richard Thaleman
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