Wal-Mart, like many other retailers, is increasingly counting on customer self-service to help it reduce operating costs and maybe even reduce the time customers spend waiting to go through point-of-sale lines.

Some recent visits to Wal-Mart superstores in the Ohio area indicated Wal-Mart, again like other retailers, is also battling shrinkage issues with the program.

“The level of shoplifting has been unbelievable,” a front end manager told Supply Chain Digest last week.

The comments came after a new version of Wal-Mart’s self-service software had been installed at a Wal-Mart supercenter in the Dayton, OH area. Among the changes: a tighter link between a customer scanning a product UPC code, and weight sensors that indicate the item had been placed in the bag. Customers could not go to the next item until confirmation that the previously scanned item had been put in the bag, and placing an item in the bag without a product scan also caused an error.

The Wal-Mart manager said the new software version had been installed in just the last few days and was causing some problems with customers used to the old system and a slower overall checkout process, but that it was simply needed given the level of shrinkage.

Studies have found conflicting results as to the level of shoplifting at self-service systems. In 2005, for example, NCR surveyed its retail self-checkout customers and reported that two-thirds reported no change in the amount of shrink, with one-third reporting a drop in shrink. “Not a single client thought shrink had gotten any worse,” an NCR executive said at the time.

But the temptation for many shoppers must be great.

Retailers are using a variety of approaches from weight sensors at the stations to video monitoring. But certainly RFID, when it someday gets to the item level, can change the entire landscape of self-service. Shoppers would be corralled into portals that read every item in the cart automatically – and even those items stuffed in a shoplifter’s coat.

Between now and then, you can expect many thrusts and parries between retailers anxious to realize the cost benefits of self-service but leery of the high cost of shrinkage and shoplifters seeing an easy path out of the store.