Quote:
Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
I wouldn't call it "very" misleading, nor would I say it's meaningless. Retail stores are spending more on security. What hasn't changed is that they need to make a certain markup on goods to make a certain profit. If your costs go up, prices go up too.
This figure isn't what products are already costing; it's what is costing more.
We could also pull out the dollar figure of what the typical family pays for marketing promotion (branding, advertising, packaging, etc.). It might make an interesting story to know how much money you spend on that sort of thing. But the story in the above article is "this is why you're paying more."
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All of these figures would be meaningless as presented, though, since there isn't really any such thing as a typical family. It's entirely possible that very few or none of the families who'd contribute to such a statistic would actually end up paying the "typical" amount of extra $ per year. On top of that, most households aren't "typical" at least when "typical" is used as synonym for "average".
I suspect that those numbers are really more of a way of indexing the data to put it in an easier-to-relate-to scale for mass consumption. It's perhaps easier to understand the amount of money lost to shrinkage on a per household basis than it is the whole lump sum across all of retail. Either way, at no point should these numbers be interpreted as what a "typical" family will spend. I haven't looked at how they were derived, though, so I could be wrong.