Shrink

The alert

A store, a department, and a window that is still investigable

The physical count gives loss prevention one number per store per year with no date attached. This gives a location and a date range while the schedules, the receiving logs, and the CCTV retention window for that period all still exist.

What this is not

It is not an accusation and it is not evidence about any person. The output is a location, a department, a date range, and the measures that moved. Who was working, what happened, and whether anything improper occurred are questions for an investigation run by people under the chain’s own policy. Treating an alert as a conclusion about an employee is a misuse of it.

S
ShrinkAPP#eng-alerts
🔴 Unexplained unit variance jumped +193%store=1147, dept=Health & Beauty
Baseline
12.51
Now
36.68
Confidence
99.9%
Started
Aug 9
Store
1147
Department
Health & Beauty
Window
Aug 8 onward
Next count
Jan 2027
Likely cause · Four independent measures on one store-department pair moved together on Aug 8 and 9: unexplained unit variance at cycle count, void rate, no-sale drawer opens, and the gap between units that left the shelf and units that were sold. Sales volume and foot traffic at that store are unchanged, so this is not a demand story. Chain-wide shrink rate never moved, because one department in one store is a fraction of a percent of chain units. This flags a location and a date range for investigation. It identifies no individual and assigns no cause.
  1. 1.Pull exception reports for store 1147 health and beauty from Aug 8 onward.
  2. 2.Schedule an off-cycle count on the affected categories rather than waiting for January.
  3. 3.Review CCTV retention for the window before it ages out, following the chain investigation policy.
AcknowledgeFalse positiveCUSUM · q < 0.0001 · BH-corrected
S
ShrinkAPP#eng-alerts
🔴 Void transaction rate jumped +174%store=1147, dept=Health & Beauty
Baseline
1.20%
Now
3.28%
Confidence
99.9%
Started
Aug 8
Store
1147
Department
Health & Beauty
Window
Aug 8 onward
Next count
Jan 2027
Likely cause · Four independent measures on one store-department pair moved together on Aug 8 and 9: unexplained unit variance at cycle count, void rate, no-sale drawer opens, and the gap between units that left the shelf and units that were sold. Sales volume and foot traffic at that store are unchanged, so this is not a demand story. Chain-wide shrink rate never moved, because one department in one store is a fraction of a percent of chain units. This flags a location and a date range for investigation. It identifies no individual and assigns no cause.
  1. 1.Pull exception reports for store 1147 health and beauty from Aug 8 onward.
  2. 2.Schedule an off-cycle count on the affected categories rather than waiting for January.
  3. 3.Review CCTV retention for the window before it ages out, following the chain investigation policy.
AcknowledgeFalse positiveCUSUM · q < 0.0001 · BH-corrected
Why the correction is not optional

A five hundred store chain with twelve departments and five measures is thirty thousand tests every night. At a five percent false positive rate and no correction that is fifteen hundred alerts a night, every one of them sending somebody to the wrong building. Benjamini-Hochberg is what makes the grid testable at all, and it is why this page shows four alerts rather than a queue.