U.S. retail loses 1.68% of revenue to shrink — about $112B a year[2]. Seventy-three percent of that is preventable with the right camera placement and POS procedure[3].

( spoiler: more megapixels is not the answer )

The 7 cameras that actually prevent shrink (verified against cctvplanner.io + NRS[1][4]):

  1. Main entrance — mounted 2.5–3 m high, facial ID at ≥250 px/m
  2. Every POS register — minimum 4MP, angled over the cashier’s shoulder
  3. Back/receiving door — the #1 route for organized internal theft
  4. Loading dock — where inventory enters with no audit trail
  5. High-value aisles (electronics, cosmetics, spirits) — one camera per 30–50 m²
  6. Self-checkout zone — where undetected scan-avoidance is highest
  7. Parking lot — IR bullet rated for 30 m, plates readable

The 3 that only decorate the wall:

  • A ceiling-mounted cam pointing straight down a center aisle (covers “everything at once” = identifies no one)
  • An entrance cam pointed into backlight (face becomes a silhouette, footage unusable)
  • A corner covert cam with no defined angle (filtered out before the next inventory variance report)

The uncomfortable truth: typical shrink stays buried in your monthly inventory count. January tells you how much you lost. Never what, when, or who.

In every retail deployment I review for tv4agent, the two placements that get skipped most are the back door and POS-over-the-shoulder. They feel “redundant” until the first inventory variance points nowhere.

P.D. Does your store have a camera on the back door and one over each register? If the answer is “no”, today is a good day to move those two spots to the top of the layout list.

📰 Source: cctvplanner.io retail layout guide (2026)[1] + NRF 1.68% shrink benchmark[2] + Appriss Retail 2026 Total Loss Report[3] + NRS 5-zone LP guide[4], accessed 2026-09-01.

Sources

[1] cctvplanner.io retail layout guide — https://cctvplanner.io/blog/retail-store-cctv-layout [2] NRF 1.68% shrink benchmark — https://www.dohassist.com/resources-glossary-shrinkage [3] Appriss 2026 shrink breakdown — https://invue.com/resource-center/blog/6-retail-shrinkage-statistics [4] NRS 5 high-risk zones c-stores — https://nrsplus.com/blog/step-by-step-how-to-configure/