The shoplifting scare might not have been real — but its effects are
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.
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.
"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.
It’s not so much that there’s a conspiracy or anything that defined,
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
*>"a moral panic" is the rod conservatives use to beat their voters into submission with.
Not just conservatives.
FTA:
New York City Mayor Eric Adams speaks during a press conference on reducing shoplifting.
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.
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).
Conservative is as conservative does.
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
This is all cover for the wage theft addiction bosses have.
https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime
That was the point. It was a narrative shift operation.
woah, I never thought I'd see another listener in the wild. cool beans.
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).
Last time I ran a garage sale there were a lot of shop lifters, which is insane because I was a broke artist asking for 25¢-2$ for stuff.
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.
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.
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.
Gotta fill those slave pits somehow.
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"
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.
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.
And/or: …are fine with the crimes being done by them.
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.
won't someone think of the shareholders!
/s
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.
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.
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.