An original compilation of inventory shrink disclosures from 31 public retailers' SEC filings: the few audited shrink dollar figures that exist, the reserve-sensitivity numbers that trace shrink's rise and fall, basis-point margin attributions, and the exact language retailers use under legal liability. Every quote was extracted from a Form 10-K on SEC EDGAR (sec.gov) and re-verified verbatim against the filing before publishing. The compiled record shows something the survey-based coverage misses: by the companies' own audited accounts, shrink peaked in fiscal 2022-2023 and has receded since.
Key findings
6 highlights from the filings
Key findings
Key takeaways
The audited record disagrees with the crisis narrative. In their own sworn filings, the retailers who quantify shrink show it peaking in fiscal 2022-2023 and receding since, while the loudest names in shrink journalism disclose no numbers at all.
Dollar General's audited shrink line: $929M in FY2024, down to $634M in FY2025.
Its shrink rate ran 1.27% of sales in FY2022, 2.35% at the peak, 1.48% now.
Target's own filing reports shrink rates "reaching pre-pandemic levels."
Home Depot's disclosed shrink exposure is down about 30% from its FY2022 peak.
Lowe's crossed $1 billion of annual shrink expense in FY2022.
Ross, Macy's, and Gap never say "shrink" in their filings; they say "inventory shortage."
How we built this report
This is a primary-document compilation: roughly 390 Form 10-K filings from about 80 US retailers, fiscal years 2019-2025, pulled from SEC EDGAR and parsed for every sentence discussing shrink, shrinkage, inventory shortage, and inventory loss, in August 2026.
- Filings, not surveys
Every figure comes from an annual report filed with the SEC, where misstatements carry legal liability, rather than from anonymized self-reported survey aggregates.
- Verbatim extraction
Each excerpt was re-verified by re-downloading the filing and confirming the quoted text appears exactly, after whitespace normalization. 59 of 59 quotes passed.
- Terminology-aware search
We searched shrink, shrinkage, shortage, theft, and inventory loss, which is how Ross, Macy's, and Gap (who never say "shrink") made it into the compilation at all.
- Independent review
Written by one co-founder, reviewed by the other, including spot re-pulls of the underlying filings.
Scope caveats: retail fiscal years lag the calendar (a year ending January 2026 is fiscal 2025). Disclosure practices differ by company, so absent numbers mean "not disclosed," never "zero." Dollar General's fiscal 2022 shrink figure comes from a comparative column first reported under a 2024 accounting standard, so its year-over-year jump partly reflects a first-time-disclosure baseline. Walgreens' famous shrink commentary lived in earnings calls, not filings, and it went private in 2025.
The audited shrink record, company by company
30 findings in six groups. Every quote is verbatim from a Form 10-K filed on SEC EDGAR; fiscal years are as stated by each company.
The only real shrink line item: Dollar General
A 2023 accounting standard (ASU 2023-07) forced segment-level expense breakouts, and Dollar General (via its filings on sec.gov) became the only major US retailer whose income statement carries a literal shrink line. Combined across its fiscal 2024 and 2025 Form 10-K filings, it gives the only audited four-year shrink series in American retail.
Dollar General: shrink included in cost of goods sold
From the segment-expense disclosures in its FY2024 and FY2025 Form 10-K filings; shrink rate computed against disclosed net sales
Rates are RapidEye Research computations: disclosed shrink divided by disclosed net sales ($37.84B, $38.69B, $40.61B, $42.72B).
Dollar GeneralForm 10-K, FY2023 MD&A"The gross profit rate decreased by 94 basis points due primarily to increased shrink and inventory markdowns and lower inventory markups."
What this means: the only company legally required to publish the number shows shrink nearly doubling as a share of sales in one year, then giving back most of the increase within two. That arc, not a straight line up, is the audited shape of the "shrink crisis."
The reversal, measured in reserve sensitivity
Most large retailers disclose shrink only as a sensitivity: what a 10% change in their shrink reserve or rate would do to cost of sales. Tracked across years, it is a clean audited proxy for shrink direction, and at the two chains most cited in theft coverage it peaked in fiscal 2022 and has fallen since.
"A 10% change in shrink would cost us..."
Disclosed sensitivity figures by fiscal year, from each company's Form 10-K filings
TargetForm 10-K, FY2025"Realized significant improvements in inventory shrink throughout the year, with shrink rates reaching pre-pandemic levels."
Home DepotForm 10-K, FY2025"A 10% increase in the shrink rate used to estimate our inventory shrink reserve would have increased cost of sales by approximately $79 million for fiscal 2025."
What this means: the two most-cited retailers in shrink journalism both show the problem receding in audited figures, and one of them says "pre-pandemic levels" outright. Almost no coverage reports this, because almost no coverage reads the filings.
The dollar figures that exist
Beyond Dollar General, only a handful of retailers have ever disclosed absolute shrink dollars, mostly in the Schedule II valuation-allowance tables of their filings on sec.gov.
Lowe'sForm 10-K, FY2022 Schedule II + FY2025Shrinkage charged to costs and expenses: $907M (FY2020), $845M (FY2021), $1,011M (FY2022). "During fiscal 2025, the inventory shrink reserve increased approximately $9 million to $436 million as of January 30, 2026."
Academy Sports & OutdoorsForm 10-K Schedule II, FY2019-FY2025Shrink expense by fiscal year: $63.0M, $77.0M, $74.4M, $79.2M, $99.4M (FY2023 peak), $82.2M, $89.4M.
Finding
Big Lots disclosed its shrink allowance balance directly ($40.7M, $53.7M, $40.9M, $47.0M across FY2020-FY2023) before filing for bankruptcy in 2024.
Big Lots Form 10-K filings, SEC EDGAR (2021-2024)
What this means: across every retailer that publishes dollars, fiscal 2022-2023 is the peak year, and the magnitudes are material: a big-box chain can lose more to shrink in a year than it spends on advertising.
Margin attributions, in basis points
A second disclosure style attributes gross-margin moves to shrink in basis points. These are the most granular audited attributions on record, including the single most direct theft attribution in any filing.
"Merchandise margins decreased 61 basis points due to a 53 basis point increase in inventory shrink from increased theft." One year later: "inventory shrink as a percentage of net sales decreased 25 basis points during the current year compared to 2023."
Finding
Dollar Tree disclosed the most granular basis-point series: -40 bps (FY2021), +45/+20/+30 bps across FY2022 segments, +55 and +60 bps (FY2023), and, unusually, still "higher shrink" in FY2025 while peers improved.
Dollar Tree Form 10-K filings, SEC EDGAR (2022-2026)
Finding
Ulta Beauty's arc is the textbook cycle: 70 bps of shrink deleverage (FY2022), 40 bps (FY2023), then 20 bps of leverage back (FY2024); by FY2025 it declined to quantify, calling the impact immaterial.
Ulta Beauty Form 10-K filings, SEC EDGAR (2023-2026)
Finding
Academy Sports attributed "41 basis points of unfavorability" to increased inventory shrink in fiscal 2023, its peak shrink year in dollars too.
Academy Sports Form 10-K, SEC EDGAR (2024)
What this means: where shrink is quantified in margin terms, the damage runs 40-70 basis points at its worst: real money, but a fraction of what freight, markdowns, or wage inflation did to the same margins in the same filings.
What everyone else says, and does not say
Most of the 31 retailers disclose shrink only qualitatively, and the spread of positions is itself the data. Costco uses low shrink as a competitive flex; BJ's flags self-checkout as a shrink risk; Walmart's fiscal 2026 filing folds shrink into a reputational-risk sentence about AI; and the two chains most featured in shrink journalism, Best Buy and CVS, disclose nothing at all: zero mentions across five years of filings each.
CostcoForm 10-K, FY2025"By strictly controlling the entrances and exits and using a membership format, we believe our inventory losses (shrinkage) are well below those of typical retail operations."
Finding
BJ's Wholesale states its shrinkage "has not been material, or fluctuated significantly in recent years" while warning that "increased use of self-checkout technologies" could change that; the most direct self-checkout risk disclosure in any filing.
BJ's Wholesale Form 10-K, SEC EDGAR (2026)
Finding
Nordstrom is the rare filing to credit a technology intervention with a shrink outcome: "We also expanded the penetration of our RFID technology across our locations... and our inventory shrinkage improved over last year."
Nordstrom Form 10-K, SEC EDGAR (2025)
Finding
Kohl's added organized-retail-crime language for the first time in FY2025 ("we have observed an increase in external theft incidents") while simultaneously reporting "moderating shrink levels"; risk language and measured reality now point in opposite directions.
Kohl's Form 10-K, SEC EDGAR (2026)
Finding
Improving in their latest filings: Target, Home Depot, Dick's, Ulta, Kroger, Sprouts, TJX, Kohl's, Nordstrom, Five Below, and Dollar General. Still deteriorating: Dollar Tree and Academy Sports. Silent: Best Buy and CVS (zero shrink mentions in five years each).
RapidEye Research compilation of Form 10-K filings, SEC EDGAR (2026)
What this means: disclosure is a choice. The chains that quantify show improvement; the chains that dominate theft headlines mostly say nothing under oath.
The words matter: shrink, shortage, and the audit trail
Two structural findings surfaced only because we read the documents instead of keyword-counting them.
"shrink" / "shrinkage"
The standard term at 28 of 31 companies. But Macy's uses "shrinkage" once in an entirely unrelated sense, about store square footage in its comparable-sales definition, which quietly poisons naive keyword counts.
"inventory shortage"
The term Ross Stores, Macy's, and Gap use instead; "shrink" appears zero times in their FY2025 filings. Ross: "we may have damaged, lost, or stolen inventory (called 'shortage')..." Any shrink analysis that searched one word missed all three.
Finding
Auditors escalated and then de-escalated shrink: "estimation of store shrink" was a named Critical Audit Matter at Home Depot for FY2021-FY2023, then dropped; Ollie's auditor moved the opposite way, adding store shrink as a CAM from FY2023 onward.
KPMG audit reports within Form 10-K filings, SEC EDGAR (2022-2026)
Finding
Risk-factor language diffuses between companies nearly verbatim: the sentence "risk of loss or theft of assets, including inventory shrinkage, is inherent in the retail business" appears in TJX, Nordstrom, Foot Locker, and Williams-Sonoma filings alike.
RapidEye Research compilation of Form 10-K filings, SEC EDGAR (2026)
Finding
Grocery Outlet's model makes shrink someone else's expense: "excessive levels of shrink are deducted from commissions paid to IOs" (its independent store operators), the only such arrangement disclosed in US retail.
Grocery Outlet Form 10-K, SEC EDGAR (2026)
What this means: shrink measurement runs through physical inventory counts, reserves, and audit judgment; the same verification-by-sampling machinery that governs everything else in a store. The companies improving fastest (Target, Nordstrom) are the ones that changed how they observe their stores, not just how they guard them.
Cite this study
Academic or press use: copy a ready-made reference. RapidEye is the publisher.
Quick FAQ
How much does retail shrink cost, according to the filings?
Company by company where audited numbers exist: Dollar General recorded $634.3 million of shrink in cost of goods sold in fiscal 2025 (1.48% of sales), down from $928.9 million (2.29%). Lowe's charged $1.011 billion to expense in fiscal 2022 and holds a $436 million reserve. Academy Sports recorded $89.4 million in fiscal 2025. Most other retailers disclose only sensitivities or qualitative statements.
Is shrink still getting worse?
Not by the audited record. Target's fiscal 2025 filing reports shrink "reaching pre-pandemic levels"; Home Depot's disclosed exposure is down about 30% from its fiscal 2022 peak; Dick's reversed 25 basis points; Dollar General's rate fell from 2.35% to 1.48% of sales. Dollar Tree and Academy Sports are the main exceptions still deteriorating.
How does this differ from the NRF's shrink numbers?
The National Retail Federation's National Retail Security Survey (nrf.com) is self-reported, anonymized, and aggregated, and its widely cited $112 billion figure dates to the 2022 survey year. This page compiles the opposite kind of evidence: company-level, audited, legally liable disclosures with names attached. The two are complementary; only one of them can be checked.
Why do some retailers' filings never mention shrink?
Ross Stores, Macy's, and Gap use "inventory shortage" instead, so single-keyword analyses miss them. Best Buy and CVS genuinely disclose nothing: zero mentions of shrink in five years of annual reports each, despite being fixtures of retail-theft journalism.
Data sources
Every quote and figure traces to an annual report (Form 10-K) filed on SEC EDGAR by the company named beside it, re-verified verbatim against the filing before publishing. Fiscal years are as each company defines them.
US Securities and Exchange CommissionEDGAR full-text filing archive, ~390 Form 10-K filings parsedsec.govDollar GeneralSegment-expense shrink disclosures, FY2024-FY2025 annual reportssec.govTargetShrink reserve sensitivity and MD&A disclosuressec.govHome DepotShrink sensitivity series and audit-matter disclosuressec.govLowe'sSchedule II shrinkage charges and reserve disclosuressec.govAcademy Sports & OutdoorsSeven-year Schedule II shrink expense seriessec.govCostco, plus 24 further retailersWalmart, Kroger, TJX, Dick's, Ulta, Dollar Tree, Kohl's, Nordstrom, BJ's, Five Below, and others: annual report disclosuressec.gov