How much does a stockout actually cost?

The global figure cited most often is IHL Group's $1.77 trillion in inventory distortion in 2023, of which roughly $1.2 trillion is attributable to out-of-stocks. Inside a single mid-market company, the visible cost is the lost margin on the missed sale. The full cost includes substitution at lower margin, expedited freight, supplier escalation fees, customer trust erosion, and planner bandwidth lost to firefighting. Because most of those layers never appear as a line item, teams that only track the missed sale consistently underestimate what stockouts are costing them.