This is a difficult issue.
We're a small shop, and we try to be generous with the cuts, so that our customers never come up short.
But then we consistently wind up short, by about 3/4 yard per bolt. That's 5% of the merchandise, that we lose to "shrinkage".
For us, well, it's just the cost of business, and it's spent to keep our customers happy and coming back.
But for a big chain, that's publicly traded... I would imagine that the individual stores are under a lot of pressure from their accounting department, to NOT be losing 5% of their fabric to shrinkage. I would think that the shareholders would find that numberto be unacceptably high... especially if you multiply it by the number of yards they sell!
One of the ladies who works here at Favorite Fabrics, used to work at JoAnns, and she told me that from time to time each person who worked at the cutting table would be "audited" to make sure that they were not giving away any extra fabric.