INDIANS with money love to shop. Annoyingly for retailers, so do Indians without money. A new survey of retailers in 42 countries by Britain’s Centre for Retail Research found the highest level of “shrinkage” (losses from shoplifting, theft by workers and accounting errors) in India. Goods worth 2.72% of sales went walkabout. In Taiwan, the best performer, only 0.87% did.

This is not because India is a nation of tea leaves. It is because Indian shops have not yet learned how to protect their stock. Fifteen years ago Taiwanese shops had one of the worst rates of shrinkage in the world, but they took measures to improve it. Joshua Bamfield, the author of the survey, says he is confident that India can do the same.

Globally, shrinkage cost retailers $107 billion in the year to June. This was 5.6% less than the previous year, but still the equivalent of 1.36% of sales. In America, light-fingered employees are a bigger problem than thieving shoppers. In Europe, it is the other way around. Worldwide, crooked staff have better opportunities to steal than ordinary shoppers. Per incident, they pinch ten times more.

When it comes to thwarting thieves, shop-owners are on their own. In most countries the criminal justice system has all but given up trying to punish shoplifters. Even in Britain, which is not shy of locking people up, only 5,000-10,000 of the roughly 450,000 who are arrested every year go to jail, and then for an average of 2.2 months. So retailers install CCTV cameras, attach so-called electronic article surveillance tags to their wares, train their staff to spot thieves and screen workers for criminal records before hiring them. This year retailers spent $26.8 billion, or 0.34% of sales, on preventing theft.

Some dismiss shoplifting simply as a cost of doing business. Yet it can be serious. Some shoplifters work in organised gangs. Some turn violent when interrupted. Some, especially those who are hooked on drugs, are persistent and prolific. And all impose a cost on honest shoppers. Theft inflates the average family’s annual shopping bill by $186.