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Glite Dictionary
📏 Becoming smaller 🛒 Loss from theft
shrinkage

shrinkage

1 6.1
Loss of goods from a store, often due to theft by employees or customers
  • noun
  • /ˈʃrɪŋkɪdʒ/
  • Jargon
translation icon : pérdida
  • So he talks about, you know, what we nowadays call shrinkage in retail industry, which is things getting stolen or things getting broken, right?

Examples

  • The manager reported high levels of shrinkage from both employee theft and customer shoplifting.

  • I'm now fully aware of how quite dumb I was to muse about that point in the way I did, since I should have known from the get-go that shrinkage rates (due to theft by both shoppers and employees) tend to be very high in certain neighborhoods.

    Blog text (13)

  • Lady physicist, lady of lightning and collision, and the empty cold spite of the diminished heavens, imploding toward that point of shrinkage in the neutron star.

    Fiction book (1995)

  • Shrinkage due to shoplifting can significantly impact a store's profits.

  • Many stores implement security measures to prevent shrinkage caused by theft.

Synonyms

shoplifting
vsshrinkage
43 2.5

Stealing things from a shop while pretending to be a customer

covers all store goods losses including employee theft and other causes

Antonyms

gain
  • Specialized
559 2.3

An advantage that gives you more money or success

How Much

shrinkage
  • Jargon
1 6.1
shrinkage
5 5.1

Surface Forms

shrinkage singular
shrinkages plural

Morphology

shrinkage = shrink (semi-transparent) = shrink + age

The retail sense is a specialized, metaphorical extension from items 'shrinking' in inventory, so the relation is not fully literal and requires domain knowledge.

Etymology

Shrinkage comes from the verb shrink 'to become smaller' and the ending -age 'an act or result', as in breakage. Shops use it because their stock can 'shrink' through theft, damage, or loss, so shrinkage means the loss of goods from a store.