It’s Tuesday, fifteen minutes before you unlock the door. Coffee’s on, the lights are up, and this is actually the best window all day to catch shrink before it becomes a habit. Walk the loop you already walk every morning—counter, snack aisle, cooler, back stock—and just pay attention a little differently.

At the Counter

Start where the cash is. Check the drawer against last night’s close, and glance at the locked case—tobacco, vapes, alcohol all belong here, not on an open shelf. If there’s a notebook by the register, flip through it: this is where the overnight or closing staff should have jotted down anything damaged, missing, or running low. No notebook yet? That’s worth starting today. It costs nothing and it closes the biggest gap in most stores—the one between shifts, when nobody’s clearly responsible for what went wrong.

Down the Snack Aisle

You’re not counting the whole store—just the ten or fifteen SKUs that actually move the needle: chips, chocolate, energy drinks, whatever sells fastest here. Once a week, count what’s on the shelf and compare it to what the POS says sold. Under 3% off is just normal handling. Much more than that, and something’s worth a closer look—maybe it’s shrink, maybe it’s a pricing error, but you won’t know until you check.

While you’re here, notice what’s facing out at eye level. The small, higher-value stuff—the kind someone could pocket in a second—does better close to the register where it’s easy to keep half an eye on, rather than tucked at the end of the aisle.

At the Cooler

This is where waste hides more than theft does. Anything within two weeks of its date gets a sticker and a spot where people will actually see it—not shoved to the back. Step the price down as the date gets closer: 20% off with ten days left, 50% with three. A markdown taken early always costs less than pulling a case of spoiled stock at the end of the month.

In the Back

Last stop, and it’s easy to skip this one. If you brought in a new fall or winter item to test—the kind of small trial batch we talked about in our post on running a 7-day test before overbuying—fold it into the same count you just did in the snack aisle. Trial stock is exactly what goes missing quietly, because it’s new enough that nobody’s tracking it the way they track the regulars. Same rule as everywhere else: if it hasn’t moved in 30–45 days, it comes off the shelf.

That’s the whole loop—counter, aisle, cooler, back room. Fifteen minutes, and most weeks you won’t find much. But the weeks you do, you’ll have caught it before it turned into a real loss.