It turns out shoplifting isn’t spiraling out of control, but lawmakers are pushing for tougher penalties for low-level and nonviolent crimes anyway.
Over the last couple of years, it seemed that America was experiencing a shoplifting epidemic. Videos of people brazenly stealing merchandise from retailers often went viral; chains closed some of their stores and cited a rise in theft as the primary reason; and drugstores such as CVS and Walgreens started locking up more of their inventory, including everyday items like toothpaste, soaps, and snacks. Lawmakers from both major parties called for, and in some cases even implemented, more punitive law enforcement policies aimed at bucking the apparent trend.
But evidence of a spike in shoplifting, it turns out, was mostly anecdotal. In fact, there’s little data to suggest that there’s a nationwide problem in need of an immediate response from city councils or state legislatures. Instead, what America seems to be experiencing is less of a shoplifting wave and more of a moral panic.
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Now, those more forgiving criminal justice policies are at risk, in part because of a perceived trend that appears to have been overblown.
lawmakers are pushing for tougher penalties for low-level and nonviolent crimes
Oh joy, when we did this in the 90s it ended with the Supreme Court saying there’s no issue with giving a life sentence to a father of three for stealing VHSs of children’s movies from a K-Mart. I imagine some details will change this time around, but not the important one.
These days it will be a life sentence for a single mother stealing baby formula.
I mean what fun are crippling poverty, miserable healthcare and horrific political ideologies if you can’t rub it in our face every single fuckin chance that comes around?
Citations Needed had an episode about this. Extraordinary bullshit media narrative around shoplifting
And barely a peep about corporate price gouging, wage slavery, etc etc
PBS Newshour covered this last week, too, saying it’s mostly a bullshit excuse (in whisper-talk).
woah, I never thought I’d see another listener in the wild. cool beans.
That was the point. It was a narrative shift operation.
Channel 5 did a few videos recently in SF. Really highlights shoplifting and reselling schemes that are incredibly common in that area.
I wouldn’t say it’s nation wide, but there’s definitely an issue with shoplifting in these areas with incredibly lowered penalties for shoplifting.
There’s a bunch of other things covered in this video, but there’s a good view on the shoplifting.
I worked in the HQ for one of these big American retailers. All in all, the product and customer experience teams know that customers hate this but execs keep siding with the bean counters over the customer.
If you want to stick it to them, just keep placing online pickup orders. Many places don’t have service fees for pickup, and it forces the retailer to hire employees to run around the store and parking lot.
Retail stores are not designed like an Amazon warehouse. Fulfilling an online order with your own employees is clunky and inefficient. Also, people who buy online tend to make less impulse purchases than when they’re inside of a Target or Walmart.
So, all in all, pick up orders cost the company more, make them less money, and force them to hire back the people they replaced with self checkout machines.
Bean counters = investors represented by the board
Rank and file accountants that often are associated with this term don’t give a shit.
I work on the customer side at a retailer. The front end always replaced by machines. In fact we’ve never stopped hiring for cashiers.
I get so sick of the, “I should get a discount since I’m checking myself out.” you are, fool. If we increased the pay so much to actually get people in the store to be cashiers, your prices would skyrocket.
“I refuse to go to self checkout because I don’t want them to replace the cashiers” fine. Wait in line and stop complaining. It’s easier to station a few people covering 10 registers than 3 people to 3 registers.
For the record, I don’t make the budget. I’d hire at higher wages anyways. We pay relatively competitively for the area.
Eons ago when I was working in retail, pretty much all the training on “shrink” (aka losses, including theft) emphasized that the overwhelming majority of it comes from employees (and not necessarily from employee theft). Things have certainly changed in the post-covid era, but the fundamentals haven’t changed all that much. So, I have been skeptical about some of the retailers’ shoplifting claims.
Manufacture consent, pass bills that shit on ordinary people and raise the magic economy line. Repeat.
Politically appropriate ways to solve poverty:
- Lower the poverty line so fewer people qualify.
- Make up ever lower and lower bars for incarceration. The incarcerated are not included in poverty statistics.
Prison solves so many problems from a political POV. Work no one wants to do? Incentivize prison labor with commuting sentences. Reagan closed all the mental health facilites instead of making them work for the patients? Detain the mentally unwell during an episode and tell them to stop resisting while you beat them, then charge them with resisting arrest. A close friend of mine is a CO and man the shit I hear straight from his mouth. Fun fact if you know a CO well you will learn things about your state or county that don’t make it to the media. Easiest example I can give is when they rotate high value inmates so they tell you something like “hey we got one of the dudes whose connected to chappo xfered to us for a stay”
I’ve seen it from the inside myself. Truth doesn’t matter when nobody can see it. Those of us who have seen it just keep our heads down because nobody will help and we’re afraid.
I believe you.
It’s tough to fault you for that. I’ve heard how so little that happens there gets reported, I’ve heard about COs group together to throw someone under the bus to hide their actions, or more often inaction. Part of the reason I get along with the CO I mentioned is because he tends to always find himself in some kind of weird opposition to those bad kinds of COs who try to make problems for him just for doing his job as it should be done, as in by the book. I genuinely don’t know where to start when it comes to some of the problems I hear about.
Honestly, by the book is still some awful shit. And yeah, cops will absolutely abuse the genetic fallacy.
Gotta fill those slave pits somehow.
At what point do we fight back? I didn’t vote for these corps to lord over me.
What we need is stronger laws about white collar crimes. With mandatory prison assignments so no activist judge can send them to Club Fed.
Could we push for tougher penalties for things like wage theft, tax evasion, forcing employees to work off the clock, and all the rest of the shit businesses and employers do to fuck over employees? Walk They through the store, out the front door, put them in the back of the cop car and book them, just like the guy that steals a pack of underwear?
The problem is theft for sure, but it’s happening at the top of the payscales in this country, not at the bottom. People getting fucked out of decent paying jobs and a shot at the education it takes to get one. That’s what drives petty crime. Poverty.
No because those at the levers of power are fine with the crimes being done to us.
Yeah when I visit boomer relatives they seem to think retail stores in big cities are war zones- and they vote, which kinda tells me there’s political support to put S.W.A.T. teams in every retail store
Shoplifting is a real and increasing problem and looking at how many cases are reported is a nonsensical metric because microscopically few issues are ever reported. I have seen this first hand and a huge uptick started well before the pandemic. The actual accelerator is the ease of monetizing gains with the rise of online marketplaces most specifically Facebook.
Once upon a time the prime way to monetize would be to sell to people like pawn shops or used goods shops willing to pay 1/4 of sticker. The only things reasonably monetizable was singular high dollar figure items like expensive tools.
Then craigslist came into being but buying such goods was inherently skeevy and your target market was inherently small and it took a lot of time per item. Again the only monteizable items are singualr high dollar figure items where it’s reasonable to spend a half hour to an hour per item meeting up. Again prices are expected to be a fraction of sticker.
Fast forward to online markets. Now you can get the majority of sticker with payment processing and shipping and tap with a few online stores into a massive portion of the populace. Now anything that isn’t insanely specific can be moved easily just list it and wait for your online shoppers to put it in their cart and take your outgoing ill gotten gains to the post office. A goddamn idiot can do it.
If you work at a store and you pay attention you can see the people you are used to see stealing selling your stores shit online. To anyone really paying attention it’s completely fucking obvious. It changes the incentive structure.
If you go to a store you will notice stores doing a LOT more to make theft less trivial. All the expensive shit and some that isn’t that expensive is behind cages, there is more loss prevention, more security in places, more prosecution of organized losers. This money isn’t spent for no reason. There are more assholes coming through and its usually the same cadre of assholes and a substantial minority are absolutely willing to threaten workers if called out.
Fuck shitty people.
But evidence of a spike in shoplifting, it turns out, was mostly anecdotal.
Shoplifting is trending up, it’s just not the moral panic Republicans made it out to be.
https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/shoplifting-statistics/
It’s also not generally driven by poor people trying to survive
Shoplifting losses grew 19.4% year-over-year; as a share of retail sales dollars, losses to theft increased 10.5%.
58% of organized retail crime is cargo theft.
So yeah dude is pretty much spot on. Check out the lists of what is typically stolen - things that are easily resold, and shit teens like (because teens steal a lot for a variety of reasons). Essentials don’t make the list anywhere
First - This article is conflating “shrink” and 'retail theft". Shrink accounts for losses including theft, but also accounts for accounting losses, damaged goods, and lost shipments. Theft itself is broken up into “external theft” and “emoyee theft”. External theft was 36% of that 1.6% ($40B). (https://cdn.nrf.com/sites/default/files/2023-09/NRF_National_Retail_Security_Survey_2023.pdf)
Second, these statics are from FY2022, which ended Jan 30th, 2023. We won’t know FY2023, as it is not over yet, so we don’t know if it is truely “trending up” or holding steady - we have ONE (1) years’ worth of data of increased shrink.
Third - shrink, according to their own statistics, ROSE between FY2021 and FY2022, yet FY2022 was on par with FY2019 (1.62%) and FY2020(1.6%), while FY2021 decreased to 1.4% - so, again… no “trend” of an increase. Also no “trend” of a decrease, for that matter. (https://cdn.nrf.com/sites/default/files/2020-07/RS-105905_2020_NationalRetailSecuritySurvey.pdf) (https://cdn.nrf.com/sites/default/files/2021-08/2021 National Retail Security Survey updated.pdf)
They even retracted their statement last month (https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-retail-lobbyists-retract-key-claim-organized-retail-crime-2023-12-06/)
Further, if we take their own data again, external theft to be that figure above ($40B), and again use the NRF’s statistics that cybercrime rose to an average of $4M per incident, you can quickly see how this idea of shoplifting being majorly problematic is erroneous. Moreover, the NRF lists shoplifting as only the third most important worry of surveyed retailers - in their own words, they are more concerned about shootings and cybercrime than inperson shoplifting.
Lastly, this all needs to be put in context. Taking the $112.1B adjustment as 1.6% of retail sales, this totals $7.1T… so, in reality, EXTERNAL THEFT (not employee theft, not product loss due to damage or shipping to the wrong place) was .00576% of total sales, and over the period of 2019 to 2022, retail profits (which are taken into acount AFTER things like theft have been factored in) have steadily increased up to the 2022 level of 5.9% (after skyrocketing in 2021 to over 13%) so even while they are claiming that retail theft is growing, even total shrink isn’t effecting their overall margins. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/197576/annual-retail-sales-in-the-us-since-1992/#:~:text=By the end of 2022,increase from the year before.) (https://www.forrester.com/blogs/us-retail-industry-sales-and-profits-trends-2001-2022-steady-growth/#:~:text=US Retail Net Profit Trends&text=The retail net margin remained,decreased to 3.3%25 in 2022.)
Now - of course this is an overall look at retail - this doesn’t take into account the individual annecdotes, or the massive differnces between small local retailers and big box stores, nor does it look into the differnces between online retailers, store fronts, and the differences in theft experienced by each (e.g. amazon is massive - are they over-representing both profit margin and shrink due to cymbercrime?).
I made a hobby out of fucking with shoplifters for YEARS. For a sample size of one store it is real and obvious.
Gotta have the public funded police protecting the corporate wealth!
Fuck these scum bag companies
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I mean yeah, what did you think the point of this lie was in the first place?
I think this article is alright but doesn’t quite address an important issue: for the cities that are encountering increased shoplifting, do we have an idea why? As the article states, most cities saw a decrease in shoplifting when compared to their lowest numbers before things got weird (usually around 2019, before the pandemic). Some important exception were Los Angeles and New York which have seen increased shoplifting numbers. So the idea that shoplifting has increased is technically true in at least those 2 cities. The council on Criminal Justice report, linked in the vox article, provides some of the following information on what may be the why:
It is possible that the growth in incidents in the three cities with the largest increases could be related to shoplifting “specialists,” such as those highlighted by New York City Mayor Eric Adams earlier this year.10 A small group of individuals committing a large share of offenses is a common finding in criminological research11 However, it is unclear why a group of specialists would drive such a large increase during this period compared to the pre-pandemic period. Bail reform is one possible explanation, yet the timing of the reform (at least in New York) does not align with the shoplifting increase, and research suggests that bail reform likely has no association with increased larceny.12 Another possibility is a change in the rate at which stores report shoplifting to police. This analysis is based solely on reported shoplifting incidents; the underreporting of shoplifting has yet to be systematically analyzed. However, data from the Anaheim (California) Police Department indicate that a major retailer reported 8% of shoplifting incidents in 2022 and 20% in 2023.13 According to one report, a spike in San Francisco shoplifting may have resulted from increased reporting.14 If retailers in some cities increased reporting, then that would increase the count of shoplifting offenses even if there was no actual increase. Researchers can use the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to gauge if reporting levels have changed for crimes that involve people or their possessions.15 But businesses are not included in the NCVS sample. In addition, the National Retail Security Survey does not provide data on the share of incidents reported to police.16
Sadly, it seems that we don’t have a concrete reason for the increased shoplifting in select cities.
There wasn’t any increase in shoplifting, the numbers cited were brought by the lobbying groups.l, a study that was debunked so thoroughly that it was removed.
But the lobbyists got what they wanted anyway. Are we surprised at this point that laws are meant to bind the weak? Im guessing they know what is coming and want to imprison us for being hungry when that time comes.
Ill save my surprise for when we proles get up and start slapping these pigs into the dirt like we need to. Considering the moves they’re making it will be sooner than we think
