Your Inventory Data is Lying to You

Retail is losing well over a trillion dollars a year to bad inventory data, and this week's episode of The Retail Reality Check puts an exact price tag on every piece of it. Host Claire walks through IHL Group's own research showing $690.9 billion lost annually to out-of-stocks and $379 billion lost to theft and shrink, then explains why the price optimization software market is racing from $4.1 billion to $7.7 billion by 2030 as retailers scramble to fix what forecasting alone can't.

This isn't just a problem episode. Two retailers already closing the gap get the spotlight: Sandman Group, a Baltic electronics retailer that cut inventory 11% and grew turnover 16% with RELEX before expanding into automated pricing and root-cause detection, and Amart Furniture, Australia's leading furniture retailer, which is replacing legacy planning tools with RELEX's AI-native forecasting across 66 stores and four distribution centers. From there, a fast-moving lightning round covers twelve more retail tech stories, from Burger King UK's pricing rollout to Walmart's 3D-printed stores.

Brought to you by IHL Group, The Retail Reality Check is a weekly breakdown of the technology installs actually shaping retail and consumer packaged goods, grounded in IHL's own research rather than vendor marketing.

01:06 - Setting up the week's theme: the trillion-dollar inventory data problem

01:29 - Deep dive: out-of-stocks cost retail $690.9 billion a year

01:52 - The RFID adoption gap between Sales Winners and laggards

02:21 - Deep dive: theft and shrink cost retailers $379 billion worldwide

02:45 - Computer vision ROI and shrink as an EBITDA lever0

3:08 - Deep dive: the price optimization software market nearly doubles by 2030

03:32 - AI and machine learning performance gains

03:54 - Case study: Sandman Group's results with RELEX

04:17 - The research behind root-cause detection

04:39 - Case study: Amart Furniture's forecasting overhaul with RELEX

05:33 - Lightning round begins

05:55 - Where retail tech investments impact margins, and Burger King UK's Openr rollout

06:31 - Officeworks activates Snapchat advertising through Zitcha

06:52 - Walmart's 3D-printed stores and Little Caesars' autonomous delivery

07:20 - Kimberly-Clark's AI manufacturing agents and Amazon's drone expansion

07:48 - ShopRite's Caper Carts and Henkel's agentic AI research tool

08:14 - Schreiber Foods' AI deployment and Walmart/Sam's Club tap-to-pay

08:41 - Kroger's Bitcoin gift card expansion and the closing question

09:06 - Where to find more research and sign-off

IHL Group Research (all sourced directly in this episode):

• The 2026 Inventory Distortion Study — https://www.ihlservices.com/product/inventory-distortion-study-2026/

• How Top Retailers Are Winning on Shrink — https://www.ihlservices.com/product/top-retailers-winning-on-shrink/

• Intelligent Commerce: Integrating AI, Analytics and Unified Systems — https://www.ihlservices.com/product/intelligent-commerce-integrating-ai-analytics-and-unified-systems/

• Closing the Execution Gap — https://www.ihlservices.com/product/closing-the-execution-gap/

• Adapt or Be Outpaced: Tech Imperative for Retail's Midmarket — https://www.ihlservices.com/product/adapt-or-be-outpaced-tech-imperative-for-retails-midmarket/

Webinar Replay:

• AI Reality Check: What Retailers Need to Get Right Before Scaling AI — https://www.ihlservices.com/ai-reality-check-what-retailers-need-to-get-right-before-scaling-ai/?utm_source=connection2&utm_medium=email

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