The shoplifting scare might not have been real — but its effects are
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.
…
Now, those more forgiving criminal justice policies are at risk, in part because of a perceived trend that appears to have been overblown.
"a moral panic".... generating this is standard operating procedure for the people in charge.
if you want to bring the hammer down, develop 'a moral panic' and get those susceptible constituents to go along with it.
hate brown people? pretend there is an immigration problem. scared of homosexuals? dont ya know, theyre comin to convert your kids.
"a moral panic" is the rod conservatives use to beat their voters into submission with.
Yep, gotta agree here.
It’s not so much that there’s a conspiracy or anything that defined, but Facebook or other non-authoritative news sources create a “news-wave” (as opposed to a “crime wave”), and legislators come across it and balk.
I mean, I do think some people (maybe conservatives especially) have a psychological longing to live through a moment of crisis where they can live out a brave hero fantasy, and they're always looking for that moment of crisis, and legislators and others are just organically responding to that, but there are definitely some organizations out there that are pushing this particular moment of crisis
I thought that was gonna be a link to the Project Veritas fraud farm but yeah, fuck the NRF too!
*>"a moral panic" is the rod conservatives use to beat their voters into submission with.
Not just conservatives.
FTA:
Edit: Apparently I don't know shit about Eric Adams, who was not only a cop, but a supporter of the "stop and frisk" policy.
Isn't the whole US political spectrum between some conservatives and some different conservatives who tolerate a few lefties hanging out with them too?
Pretty much between to the right of Reagan conservatives and outright fascists.
The Dem leadership hasn't been center-left since Carter at the latest and the GOP hasn't been a legitimate political party at all since 2015.
Fascists and extra fascists.
Yes but now it has shifted to the right yet again, so it is one fascist party and one rightwing party.
Are you assuming that just because he's a Democrat he can't be conservative? I hate to break it to you, but that's not a good assumption.
Yeah, I really fucked up.
The sad part is that I didn't even know anything about Eric Adams before I wrote that. I just extrapolated from my experience here in Atlanta and made an educated guess. The thing is, when big cities are dominated by Democrats it doesn't mean everybody's liberal (let alone leftist). Instead, especially in places with a lot of minorities, it's that the Republican Party's bigotry is a deal-breaker so even the conservatives are Democrats, too. So you end up with a mayoral race where everybody's got a (D) next to their name, but the winner is somebody centrist or even center-right. (Consider how Atlanta's black mayors have always allied themselves with the rich white business community and how the current one has been pushing hard for Cop City, for instance.)
I also considered how former NYC mayors included people like Giuliani and Bloomberg, and figured that theme likely continued as well.
I did double-check afterwards, and was disappointed to be even more correct than I expected to be.
"Not just conservatives" he says and mentions fascist cop (but I repeat myself) Eric Adams as an example 🤦
Fun* fact: most of the Dem party top is conservative to the point of being to the right of Reagan
*and by "Fun" I mean tragic and infuriating
Yeah, I deserved that. I didn't do my research.
Not really a good example. As the article indicates, most of the 24 tracked cities saw an average drop in shoplifting. The main exceptions were New York and Los Angeles which saw increased shoplifting rates, especially compared to 2019. This means that Eric Adams appears to be addressing a real problem occurring in New york, vs maybe other cities which may be attempting to address non existent problems (or problems which the information we track doesn't show).
Increased ARREST rates for shoplifting. Both the NYPD and the LAPD as well as the LA County Sheriff are infamous for overpolicing, especially of poor people and minorities. Add at least one "tough on crime mayor" and arrests for poverty-related crimes go up regardless of whether crime does.
"Appears to" being the operative words.
Conservative is as conservative does.
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
This is all cover for the wage theft addiction bosses have.
https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime
PBS Newshour covered this last week, too, saying it's mostly a bullshit excuse (in whisper-talk).
Just once, I want a PBS host to bellow with the volume of a Republican that just watched the newest Project Veritas fraud 😁
Closest they come is at the beginning when they're thanking the billionaires for their financial support.
"This episode of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is brought to you by Capital One and FTX: what WAS in your wallet?"
That was the point. It was a narrative shift operation.
woah, I never thought I'd see another listener in the wild. cool beans.
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.
https://youtu.be/URfCwT3UQy4
Quite literally less crime is occurring every year. Got to keep those private prisons filled.
Shoplifting is definitely up (I worked in the industry for 20 years). However, that doesn’t mean the retail giants weren’t using that as leverage. People are always shocked at how often it happens (pretty much constantly all day).
Literally in the comment section of an article showing that there doesn't appear to be any evidence of increased Shoplifting. Unless you're in the few cities seeing increased shoplifting, we'd need some more information.
The cities with the huge problems regarding shop lifting are in large part to easing up on punishments due to budget problems in the judicial system.
A source would be appreciated. My understanding is that the reasons are still being studied
Data is only going to show who they know about. That’s probably 20% of all actual shoplifting. I had a hard enough time getting my team to report shoplifting when observed due to, “it happens all the time, I don’t have time to report it” or the like. The data is definitely not close to accurate.
But the lack of reporting hasn’t changed, has it? So if the old numbers and new numbers are both underreported, can’t we still compare them and see a decline?
If only 20% is reported, and the reported number is going down, that also means the unreported 80% is going down too. That's just how fractions and ratios work.
You're right. Consistency is key. In new york apparently shoplifting reports went from 8 to 20% which could be part of the reason for the increased numbers
Come on you know that has to be false. The stores know how much they ordered and how much of it they sold. If they didn't, they wouldn't even know how much to order next time.
The only way they wouldn't know how much was actually stolen is, if stolen goods are a rounding error of what they throw out day to day. (In which case we have a much more significant problem of Corporate waste on our hands)
People, yes, people still do count audits daily, at least where I worked. They also still do inventory audits regularly yearly/2x year/2x every other year depending on the volume of the store.
Throwing things out does happen but they budget for that daily/weekly/ and so on. Theft is harder to budget for especially when it’s changing. This is mostly what the giants are complaining about when they say theft is to blame for x,y,z.
Well then the data is accurate which one is it now?
You haven’t ever done inventory management I take it. Both are true.
People can’t count all the inventory in a big box store of 40,000 SKUs daily, weekly, or monthly. That’s why they have usually have a yearly, etc inventory as well (and even then it’s not 100% accurate). This is exactly why you can see on the site that they have 2 in stock but when you get there the shelf is empty (let’s assume no one actually bought the item while you were in route).
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.
That's funny because the grocery I work for is pushing hard on online orders. They love it. The only logic I've heard so far is that online orders are a "guaranteed sale", whatever that's supposed to mean.
They literally tell us to set product aside and not put it on the shelf so we can sell it online instead. They are valuing online shoppers way over in store shoppers.
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.
I was IN loss prevention. Literal store detective.
Did we catch the occasional shoplifter? Yes.
Were they as common or as high dollar value as employees skimming or scamming? Abso-fucking-lutely not.
If you’re in retail, rest assured, those folks are there to catch you more than they’re there to catch shoplifters.
When I worked in retail, anecdotally, it was my understanding that most theft was internal. At Real Canadian Superstore (think Walmart Supercenter, but not Walmart) I saw lots of my coworkers steal all kinds of things. We went through one loss prevention after another, fired for, you guessed it, stealing (ironic, I know). Most of my co workers stole their food for their meal breaks. I very rarely saw or heard of a customer being caught stealing. And no, no one reported others to management.
If you didn't notice the customers stealing you were probably too busy actually working and not attending to all the fuckin thieves
or, just maybe, there aren't as many thieves as the coalition of tough on crime lawmakers and corporate interest want you to think there is
There are plenty of thieves because the mechanics of monetizing stolen goods totally changed with online markets and life is tough at the low end of the financial spectrum. It would be shocking if they're weren't. I'm a Democrat who recognizes the worthiness of helping people and hates Republican scumbags. I'm not buying into any narrative I'm just recognizing reality.
Manufacture consent, pass bills that shit on ordinary people and raise the magic economy line. Repeat.
Politically appropriate ways to solve poverty:
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.
They're trying to build a prison!
For you and me to live in
ANOTHER PRISON SYSTEM
The percentage of Americans in the prison system, prison system, has
doublednearly tripled since 1985.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.
And/or: …are fine with the crimes being done by them.
What we need is stronger laws about white collar crimes. With mandatory prison assignments so no activist judge can send them to Club Fed.
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.
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
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%20National%20Retail%20Security%20Survey%20updated.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%20the%20end%20of%202022,increase%20from%20the%20year%20before.) (https://www.forrester.com/blogs/us-retail-industry-sales-and-profits-trends-2001-2022-steady-growth/#:~:text=US%20Retail%20Net%20Profit%20Trends&text=The%20retail%20net%20margin%20remained,decreased%20to%203.3%25%20in%202022.)
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.
Sure, stealing is wrong. But there's a limit, if you're operating a store as poorly as Dollar General, stealing from stores that actively take advantage of both the community and the staff is moral. They were receiving so much stuff that the cashier/cleaner/stocker-in-one can't get them out of the boxes in time for the next shipment, should just be giving those boxes away.
/s
Gotta have the public funded police protecting the corporate wealth!
“For social order we need tighter reigns! Incarceration hasn't worked as a deterrent, I say we expand execution to include lesser crimes!” - Chief Judge Griffin, Judge Dredd (1995)
Fuck these scum bag companies
The vast majority of retail theft is by employees not customers.
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:
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
You are, it seems to be obvious to everyone except some of you in your own country.
This is the weirdest comment. You aren't from here, and you ignore the statistics that say otherwise, so you offer neither facts nor anecdotes. But the article is definitely wrong just because? I rarely downvote comments but you've earned that ignoble distinction.
People who have fallen victim to moral panics frequently get absolutely indignant when told they have fallen victim to a moral panic. Not really different than cults or MLMs, in that regard.
It's easier to bamboozle someone than to convince them they've been bamboozled.
“Anecdotal evidence was artificially hyped via viral videos amplified by corporations for their own ends to create the perception of a widespread problem that just isn’t supported by fact.”
B-b-b-but I’ve seen the videos! I don’t live there and have zero evidence, but I’m sure it’s happening just because…well, as previously mentioned….those videos…umm…
Gtfoh
https://youtu.be/URfCwT3UQy4
LOL, facts don't care about your feelings.
Got anything to back that up?
Those porn videos you watched about it aren't real, dude.
I don't know if the facts in this article are strictly speaking true or not, but it is definitely written in a weasle-worded manner that is quite off-putting to have to read. e.g., it seems to be cherry-picking what it says vs. does not say. For one thing, despite how corporations have been shown to continually lie about this entire affair - closing down stores that are hundreds of miles away from the sites where the looting happened, while still citing that as their justification; which increases the number, size, and severity of "food deserts" where poor people have greatly reduced access to basic goods & services - yet now we are to take them at their word and use their "data" that they provide to us, over and above the (anecdotal) actual evidence that we have seen with our very own eyes (although...how CURRENT is the latter data? it most definitely was happening during the pandemic, but is it still? I mean yeah probably but how often)?
And now politicians are likely to come in and "make everything better", i.e. fuck it all up and make it 10x worse, not "reforming" the situation, nor even "punishing" either the looting transgressors or the corporations that continually lied about it, but instead using it as an excuse to make life more difficult for poor people, even as conservatives not merely do not care but take active glee in the people "getting what they deserve", again ignoring how it is not the same people receiving the punishment as that did the crime in the first place.
In any case, news articles were sold yesterday, but this media outlet would like to sell you another story TODAY, so they load it up with all sorts of wording in order to increase "engagement" in order to get you to click on it. Are you angry? Click it and find out more! Conversely though, they do not bother to even attempt to tell a balanced story - probably b/c that would lead to fewer clicks, but also definitely b/c that would take more investment into writing the story in the first place, and they have to continually churn out new content so as to make a quick buck:-(.
Late-stage capitalism sucks donkey balls.:-( In particular, it sucks how ALL the parties involved are greedily fucking over everyone else - the looters, the corporations lying about it, the politicians swooping in to take advantage, the media churning out their engagement content, and now probably you and me and all of the commenters here not perfectly capturing some tiny nuance of the situation so we all must be spreading "misinformation" to some degree or another (if only there was some place that we could go to find reliable, factual information and analysis! unfortunately, there are very few of those places left... and this article definitely does not seem to be one of them).