Retail’s $162.7B Blind Spot—And Why It’s Getting Bigger

The Overlooked Margin Killer Hiding in Plain Sight

As retailers face margin pressure from tariffs, wage inflation, volatile demand and rising shopper expectations, one challenge continues to grow, quietly eroding revenue and shopper trust from the inside out.

In-store inefficiency.

According to The State of In-Store Retailing 2025, a new study by Coresight Research and Simbe, retailers are now losing 5.5% of gross sales to operational breakdowns inside their physical stores. That’s up from 4.5% last year and translates to $162.7 billion in annual losses across key retail sectors.

What’s driving these losses? Promotion errors, mispriced items, out-of-stocks, and inconsistent execution—all fueled by a lack of real-time visibility on the shelf.

The Shelf: Retail’s Last Data Desert

Despite massive investments in e-commerce, supply chain systems, and enterprise platforms, one critical environment has been left behind: the store interior.

Most retailers still rely on manual audits, static planograms, or reactive field reports to understand what’s happening in their aisles. Meanwhile, 85% of online orders are still fulfilled from stores, creating mounting tension between what’s promised online and what’s actually available on the shelf.

That gap isn’t just inconvenient. It’s costly.

• 54% of dissatisfied shoppers cite out-of-stocks as their top complaint.
• 80% of retailers report mispricing rates of at least 5%.
• 81% say these inefficiencies are eating 5% or more of their operating margin

Why Visibility = Advantage

Only 1 in 4 retailers report having full visibility into store operations. That’s where the competitive advantage lies.

Because visibility doesn’t just tell you what’s going wrong—it unlocks the ability to act:

• Automate audits to free up labor
• Validate promotions to protect revenue
• Capture real-time shelf data to power e-commerce accuracy
• Reduce shrink and waste through early intervention

In short: you can’t fix what you can’t see.

Simbe POV: Digitizing the Shelf to Drive Growth

At Simbe, we believe the shelf is no longer a static display. It’s a dynamic source of truth—a foundational data layer for retail’s next era.

Our Store Intelligence™ platform combines robotics, computer vision, and real-time analytics to give retailers full-shelf visibility across availability, pricing, and product location. This data doesn’t sit in a silo—it flows into pricing, merchandising, e-commerce, and supply chain systems, creating a feedback loop that drives execution, not just insight.

Early adopters are already seeing:

• 98%+ on-shelf availability
• 90%+ pricing accuracy improvements
• 50% faster online order fulfillment
• Up to 88% reduction in waste

That’s not theoretical ROI—it’s operational transformation.

The Bottom Line

Retail’s biggest blind spot is also its biggest opportunity. By digitizing the shelf, retailers aren’t just improving store execution—they’re unlocking margin, improving loyalty, and building a smarter, more responsive business.

The path forward starts with ground truth. Because in today’s market, what’s on the shelf is what shapes your performance.

→ Download the full report: The State of In-Store Retailing 2025

→ Stay tuned for Blog 2: “Beyond Pilots—Why Store Intelligence Must Become Infrastructure”