US retail group retracts claim that half of $94.5bn inventory loss was from theft
National Retail Federation says 2021 data was flawed and based on congressional testimony from president of an advocacy group
The powerful National Retail Federation (NRF) lobbying group has retracted a claim that “organized retail crime” accounted for “nearly half” of the shopping industry’s $94.5bn losses due to theft or “shrink” in 2021.
The industry group had said the impact of organized retail crime, which it previously claimed had increased by 26.5%, had become increasingly violent. Retail giants like Target, Walmart and Walgreens said it was threatening their businesses.
The NRF said the figure was based on a congressional testimony from Ben Dugan, the former president of an advocacy group, the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail, and that an analyst from K2 Integrity, a risk consultancy that co-authored the report, inferred the “nearly half” claim.
why the fuck do we even allow lobbying. bullshit fake gamified system that no proper country should have
Writing to your representative is a form of lobbying
An unsolicited expert opinion is lobbying
What's messed up is the amount of money to run and that citizens united made unlimited funds possible
Congressmen always worried about the cash they'll need to get elected
If there were term limits we would have faceless corporate buyouts with little experience, vs someone running on name recognition
Heck I want a campaign finance max limit.
Unfortunately, term limits can't stop this.
Campaign finance reform can. Anyone running for office has a cap on how much can be spent. Political organizations also have a cap and they have to disclose who their donors are.
No more dark money.
I'd say we should go so far as to move to sortition (randomly selected people serving a term in office) but I am pragmatic.
I say we push all suffering and misery onto a single child and then live in the utopia that results.
... That's what I just said. Are you a bot?
I think I hit reply to the wrong parent message. But either way, I'm totally not a robot..........
That totally sounds like something robot would say though... :p
Right. Politicians know nothing about technology half the time, right?
Who does know - it’s people in the technology field.
They have to communicate somehow. Not saying it’s not broken today, and I think you could have a clever setup of advisors, but at the end of the day there will just have to be some kind of input by experts.
Let's just skip all the bullshit and move straight to direct voting.
It's been proven that congress doesn't follow the will of the people, anyways.
Paragraph salad, delicious
Because at least in theory, lobbying is at the core of a functioning republic. If you and couple neighbors get together to try to convince your county aldermen to fix some potholes, that's lobbying. Any time a person tries to influence their representative, it's lobbying. It's incredibly difficult to have actual codified laws that allow the things you want without also opening up tons of loopholes for corruption.
Why do you think it's hard to separate the two? One involves receiving money or business perks and the other serves the community.
Because directly receiving money is already illegal. Anything currently legal is so because it's protected by the same things protecting local organizations putting up flyers/billboards/radio ads/etc. Even stricter monetary limits don't really work, as you end up catching things such national humane society ads, because if they contain any messaging regarding support for legislation/wanting new legislation it's considered lobbying.
It's really just an intro to the subject, but Knowing Better has a great video on it. Great leaping off point. The very short and very inadequate TL;DW is essentially that "get the money out of politics" doesn't actually mean anything.
I don't have time to watch the video but I will later. It's never going to be possible to get the money out of politics 100%, but transparency and getting rid of super pacs would go a long way.
Oh there is absolutely more we could be doing, especially regarding tracking dark money spending. I was primarily pointing out that "we should just get rid of lobbying" is an almost entirely nonsensical statement.
It is illegal in many places, but nearly impossible to enforce.
Why do you think that?
Experience. It's illegal in Brazil, no one has ever been convicted. It's a hard crime to define. It's like a law saying "strictly no ambling", but how do you differentiate from regular walking?
It is the right to petition government. Not allowing this is kind of fascist?
The theft was coming from retailers. Raising prices without raising the cost of living accordingly isn't inflation; it's exploitation.
Bit of creative accounting. Blame shoplifters. Boom! Tax free profits.
Whaaaaaat, they’re lying????
i wonder how many single family homes would have been necessary to store all those stolen goods.
What is this “Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail”?
The article describes it as an advocacy group. But for what exactly? In my humble and biased opinion, these two things are very far apart (LE and Retail)
Edit: to -> two
Advocacy for promoting lies.
In other words, a lobbying group.
There are lobbying groups for equality, medical care, women's rights, chkldren's rights, and environmental protections and other topics that don't promote lies. Musicians and artists banded together as a group to lobby against censorship.
Just becsuse there are shitty lobbyists doesn't mean they all are.
Most retail companies' Loss Prevention department works with local law enforcement, which I actually think is a good thing. Focus on the people who rob/use violence or teams of people who run out with carts full of expensive things to resell, not the single mom pocketing food...
You know who you don't see constantly complaining about retail theft, grocery stores. Probably because they have a business model resistant to the real cause of all these losses, online shopping and the decline of retail.
It's easier for the execs though to blame it on retail theft and tell their shareholders that they're gonna lobby Congress to lock up shoplifters and solve the problem, rather than tell them the business is slowly dying and there's nothing they can do about it.
Surprise, surprise: the industry lied.