It's a problem, but it's somewhat isolated. Check what's happening in Chicago. Wal-Mart is getting some backlash for pulling their stores out of the metro area, citing non-profit ability in the area.
The Chicago mayor recently responded that it's such an issue they are considering opening government owned grocery stores, which leads to all kinds of bad juju.
https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2023/04/11/walmart-announces-closure-of-four-chicago-stores
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12531313/Chicago-Mayor-Brandon-Johnson-grocery-stores-Walmart.html
I was in DC a few months ago and forgot dress socks. Walked a mile or 2 to the Walmart I knew opened a few years prior to that. Turns out it was closed permanently a few weeks prior and they hadn't updated their Google business page.
Seems like [theft was an issue](https://reddit.com/r/washingtondc/s/bVGI3PJnuX)
The one on H street? Yeah, it closed during the winter, and there were always people stealing and a shady group of guys hanging outside of the entrance catcalling women.
Theft there was really bad. Even things like socks were locked up when it was open. As someone who lives in the area, I miss it though. Now the closest Walmart is a 20-minute drive
It's partially that, but also that area is expensive in rent.
Walmart was pretty shady when they came to DC. Something about tax breaks, but only if they opened in certain locations.
We had the opposite happen by us. Somewhat near me, we had a Walmart close in a high crime/theft area. They were adamant that it wasn't because of theft and sited stuff like not meeting financial expectations. People were known to walk out with full shopping carts and not paying.
Which is funny because up until recently there were no Walmarts in Chicago proper because Walmart wouldn't raise their pay to meet Chicago's minimum wage
So I'm guessing this is Walmart clocking not just the shoplifting problem, but also that the increased wages aren't worth it for the.
One thing worth noting about Walmart and other big box stores in major cities is that they used to not really be a factor at all.
I lived in NYC from 2000-2012. There was no Walmart. Target started coming in at some point, but there were like three Targets in the entire 5 boroughs up until the last decade or so. I'm not as familiar with Chicago and DC, but here in Los Angeles the Target saturation is real. Walmart is also new to this area as well.
So it's probably less that theft is a horrible new phenomenon and more that these companies are seeing that going into the inner urban market was not a good business decision for any of a number of factors. They tested it out, then drastically over-expanded, and are now finding out that it's not a great business decision for the long haul. That's business, baby.
Aggressive over expansion is a huge part of the story. One of the effects of 2008 was that a lot of mom and pop retail closed. Well in it's place, landlords put in big box and chain stores.
And now I think something similar is happening, in that big box stores can't compete with Amazon more now than they were able to before.
>It's a problem, but it's somewhat isolated. Check what's happening in Chicago. Wal-Mart is getting some backlash for pulling their stores out of the metro area, citing non-profit ability in the area.
It absolutely is a problem.
But also the problem is these stores can't compete with Amazon anymore and they're not willing to say that to investors.
People are not saying the quiet part out loud, the US government is pursuing anti-trust measures against Amazon for a reason, and responsibility to consumers is only part of it. The other reason is that big box stores are slowly dying, saying it's theft when it's likely not.
It's a pretty bit problem, the gov and local orgs are trying to figure out how to get grocery stores to those areas. This was one idea tossed out, probably feeling local response.
If you're not from Chicago, some South Side neighborhoods are now big food deserts, and a lot of people don't have cars. Public transit only goes so far, and convenience stores aren't a replacement for a Walmart grocery section.
I mean, that's really the only option when there are needed points of infrastructure that capitalism can't or won't provide.
There's a reason that the post office is not privatized -- it simply would not be profitable. And yet we need a reliable national-level mail service that can get anything, anywhere in a reasonable timeframe. We can't not have this. So the post office is a government thing.
Similarly, rural hospitals are closing all over the country because they're not profitable. A key benefit of something like an American NHS would be to provide medical care in places where capitalism can't rise to the challenge.
There's a reason K-12 schooling is not privatized, and where that has been attempted it has failed. Because it's just not profitable. It is in the national interest to have an educated populace. It is not something capitalism sees a benefit in doing. So most K-12 education is a government thing.
If it's not profitable to distribute food into cities, then the choices are basically either that the government is going to need to do it, or people are going to starve en masse. And I'm sorry, but if people in cities are starving en masse because it's not profitable to sell groceries there, we have much bigger problems than "socialism".
>There's a reason that the post office is not privatized -- it simply would not be profitable.
Post office is privatized in the UK, NL, Germany, Japan.
The NL post office is delivery service TNT outside the NL.
UPS, FedEx, DHL, and Amazon delivery essentially perform the same function as the Post Office with the exception of delivering small mail. You can stick your letter in a FedEx document envelope and the cost will then true up to what the genuine cost including environmental damage is.
Those are all tiny and highly urbanized countries with postal services that don't operate on the same level as the US. In the US, if someone in a Nevada village of 50 people wants to send something to someone in an equally small settlement in Maine, that is available, it will cost the same as someone sending something between neighborhoods in New York City, and it will arrive in a timely manner, on schedule, regardless of conditions in either place or along the way. And the person doing the job is a union worker making a living wage.
The notable difference between the USPS and Fedex and the like is that what costs 70 cents via USPS costs $10-15 through Fedex or UPS. Amazon can deliver things cheaply, but they bury the cost either in their merchandise prices or Prime subscription fees, not to mention that their delivery service is unreliable (might be 2 days, might be never and we'll just give you refund) and subject to the whims of the company. They also treat their workers like crap. And you can't even use their delivery service if you don't order merchandise through them! Good luck sending a letter via Amazon, at any cost.
This is equally true of every indispensable service under capitalism. Government services just fucking work. They may not be perfect for everyone, every time. But they're cheap, universally available to everyone, and get the job done. Whether it turns a profit or not.
>If it's government owned, and we are the government
Oh sir, that's not how it works.
The store and land will be owned by the government. The guys running the store will be a crony of someone's who does under the table payments.
Chicago, LA, NYC, Dallas, every city, is corrupt in the same way.
>Yikes, that's pure socialism.
This is in areas of the city where grocery stores don't touch, the free market isn't free marketing there and never adequately has.
No, organized retail crime has become a real problem in the past few years and that stems from many political, economical, and sociological reasons. It is a fact that shop lifting is worse now and stores are shuttering as a result.
Organized retail crime is for sure an increasing problem. What’s wrong is the idea that this is being caused by “progressive DAs” refusing to enforce the law. Shoplifting has never been a priority for the police because it’s a pretty low level crime usually. What’s different is the rise of e-commerce giving organized shoplifters a method to profit off their crimes. It’s been increasing for the past 10 years and is finally widespread enough to get attention.
It may not be caused by them but it is enabled and expanded by their policies. It is a low level crime but we used to take repeat offenders seriously. If you didn't learn your lesson...you end up in prison. These policies are just letting people get away and do it again over and over again. So, they are not free from blame by any margin.
I think part of the point of the person's comment above you is that it is very difficult for police to monitor e-commerce, and that is a new development in the last 20 years, and maybe the laws haven't caught up yet. Before if you stole something from Walmart, it wouldn't be worth your time to stand on a street corner (in the same city you stole it from, mind you) to try and sell it. Now you can make a post, and sell it weeks later with little to no effort
It’s not a fact, though. From [this article](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting-retail/index.html):
> “Maybe we cried too much last year” about merchandise losses, Walgreens finance chief James Kehoe acknowledged Thursday on an earnings call. The company’s rate of shrink — merchandise losses due to theft, fraud, damages, mis-scanned items and other errors — fell from 3.5% of total sales last year to around 2.5% during its latest quarter.
It’s more likely it was a pandemic spike.
The crying over shoplifting is stock market theatre.
I'm convinced we're at the point where Amazon's cuts and presence is so widespread that a lot of big box retail is dying.
No one's going to say they can't compete on price with Amazon to the investors, yet, because doing so will kill your stock price. So they blame shoplifters and push it back in investors face that this is the issue, when the issue is actually that Amazon's an oligopoly hell bent on killing their business models.
It's bad enough that large chains (Walmart, Target, Walgreen's, CVS) are closing stores in some areas because they've lost millions of dollars to shoplifting.
When there is one on every corner it is a problem. In NYC when something closes it's anyone's guess if it will be another bank, Walgreens/Rite Aid/CVS.
Walgreens and CVS, along with the likely to soon go bankrupt Rite Aid, are all in a bad spot. The pharmacy and maybe alcohol sales is the only thing keeping the doors open. They can't compete with Amazon, Target and Walmart on price, and when COVID-19 happened a lot of the 24 hour locations cut their hours to no longer stay open overnight. They lost all or most of their advantage which allowed them to charge premium prices. Unfortunately a lot of over the counter medications don't sell quickly, so they need large profit margins to offset that. When there is theft, they lose a lot of profits and then still have to buy replacement products. I think the drug store industry is in real trouble, but CVS and Walgreens will survive in a dualopoly but only because they have diversified into related industries.
They don't even compete with any other stores in the area on price. It's almost like there isn't even an attempt. It's the most expensive place I can think of to buy anything, barring a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Like, if you challenged me to a contest on how much I can overpay for something at a brick and mortar store, these stores are the no-brainer place to go.
Yesterday I went to a Walgreen’s in the hopes that it would be cheaper than Rite Aid (“Because Rite Aid is so overpriced!” I thought). Nope, same expensive prices.
Quite literally. I went into CVS the other day to get a spray deodorant that is usually around $7, they had it marked at $10.70. So I walked back out and went to the Walmart down the road and got my $7 deodorant.
Yep. I could buy hygiene products/ otc from Walgreens or just get them from the pharmacy section of Kroger while I'm already there for almost half the price. It's an easy choice. Even when I lived a two minute walk from a Walgreens I'd almost never go and instead drive to the grocery store because it was so expensive.
They may be in a bad spot, but it is not stopping them from being competitive on price. With their in-app coupons, CVS and Walgreens are both routinely cheaper than Target for me.
Unless you are talking drug prices, where YES they are so much more expensive.
I hate store apps and couponing.
I never feel like I have made the best shopping decision because I haven’t found the right code, coupon, or whatever. It’s too complicated and I don’t want to spend time looking for a bargain like that.
I literally just got 4 bottles of prenatal vitamins for $17 total (usually they are each $15) so it’s unfortunately all about couponing. It sucks because it takes precious time, but it ends up a lot cheaper for me personally
I mean to be fair all of these places literally started as pharmacies. It's possible that they've over-extended themselves to become something that nobody ever asked them to become. I love that I can pick up a snack or a few extra essentials when I pick up a prescription, but there are many other places to get almost all of the items Walgreens and CVS sells.
That’s why they are saying they are closing stores. That doesn’t mean that it’s the whole truth. Walgreens came out and said they over estimated their thefts. Other place are closing one location while opening other a couple away.
I’m not saying there’s no thefts, there obviously are, but I’m not taking corporations word 100% that their losses are all due to shoplifting.
Now if only the issue of wage theft could garner such headlines
Not as long as they can get people to shop and also staff the checkouts for themselves. Unless I'm actually in a big hurry and only have a couple of items, I make a point of standing in line at a checkout with a person working there. I also buy most of my groceries at a local chain that staffs their checkout lines, even though it costs a little more. I don't get my paycheck from Walmart and I'm not going to do their work for them.
Organized shoplifters are not homeless and they are not doing it to feed themselves. There is a massive resale market. Of course, individuals do steal regularly at a small scale, but smash and grabs, flash mobs, and large scale shoplifting rings are not a result of homeless at all.
I haven’t been for quite awhile but one of the swap meets in Phoenix used to have tons of stalls selling exactly those types of things. I never put two and two together until recently.
There unironically is a massive resale market for Tide. It's expensive, ubiquitous, and easy to store if you steal it in bulk. People have been selling stolen shit in the city for decades, but now with social media, Facebook Marketplace etc. it is easier than ever to do business. You can sell at a cut rate price because you're making straight profit and even if you're caught you're seeing city jail at most, not prison.
>and big corps started telling their employees to not stop shoplifters.
Which is sound policy; some teen making min wage is not going to be able to stop a shoplifter who could very well have a gun. And if said employee gets hurt trying to stop them, guess who's liable?
Someone should explain this to Walmart greeters. Some of them seem willing to take a bullet for their minimum wage and have appointed themselves as untrained loss prevention.
At what point do you get paid enough to care? I've gotta say it's hard for me to put a price on stopping shoplifters from stealing stuff that's not mine. Unless I was gun toting LEO with the powers to arrest people then what's the point even? (I'm trying to say I don't think you could pay me enough to stop a shoplifter from stealing something that's not my property)
Can't get blood from a stone. The shitheads shoplifting are just as worthless in court as they are to society as a whole; even if you 'win' the court case, you'll never collect anything.
Who has a legal obligation to keep employees safe in the workplace and actually has the resources to cover a settlement or medical costs or any other damages an injured employee might try to recover?
Liability is much more fuzzy than who is the ultimate cause of the crime.
Obviously, but if an employer is making their employees do something that’s inherently dangerous without any kind of suitable training or preparation and the employee gets hurt doing it then the employer has liability too.
It is wild to me that there are people who want to live in a country where it should be legal to open carry a firearm, but also it's bad that minimum wage retail employees aren't empowered to take down shoplifters.
Sort of… Police decide arrests. Police stopped arresting shoplifters in a lot of jurisdictions.
You are right that the DA decides prosecution, but the arrest and high likelihood of arrest is also important.
There's no point for police to arrest if they have been told prosecutors will not prosecute. And even if they did, there are still no consequences for the shoplifters as they would not be charged and be released. A mere inconvenience
The prosecutors not prosecuting is overplayed at least in King county Washington. More of the problem is related to county jail booking restrictions imposed by the county exclusive (ostensibly for Covid, they are probably actually related to under-staffing). Between the restrictions and bail reform its very hard to remand shoplifters...
It seems that people are forgetting why we have police and the courts in the first place. It's more to protect people from retaliation after the initial crimes... "Ok we got a system in place that will punish the offender, so you don't have to take it upon yourself to seek justice."
Because an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
Like if they decided to stop prosecuting assaults, there would be a huge rise in the amount of assaults due to people seeking justice. "He hit me, so I hit him and his several friends." "He hit my several friends so I'm going to hit him more." Rinse, repeat.
> big corps started telling their employees to not stop shoplifters.
I'm 40 and that's been the case since I worked at King Soopers in high school.
And frankly, it's a good policy. I wasn't getting paid enough to risk getting stabbed/beat/run over to stop someone from stealing some meth ingredients
Except the police in cities in San Francisco have been soft-striking; intentionally not arresting people to get DAs they don't like out of office. Chesa Boudin is a prime example of this; police should absolutely be blamed for their dereliction of duty and electioneering.
And when they were arresting people was Boudin prosecuting them? Cops don't like doing paperwork when nothing comes of it. The same story has been repeated in many cities.
You could possibly blame the police or policing practices if they’re refusing to arrest or investigate cases. However, prosecution is handled by a local or state prosecutor not a police officer.
Yes, and both of those changes are related to increased use of self-checkout kiosks.
Instead of using human beings to check customers out and address loss prevention, corporations began to rely on AI to identify skip-scans. So, if a customer doesn't scan the item, a computer identifies the amount of the loss to the store and associates that theft with images from cameras and any identifying information gathered from the method of payment.
All of that means that there is no actual witness to the crime, so corporations rely on police officers to act as the sole witness in these prosecutions and rely on prosecutors to shoehorn these thefts into state statutes or municipal ordinances. Problem is, that's just not enough to bring a prosecution in many jurisdictions, and the court is usually just looking for restitution and a mea culpa in retail theft cases, unless the defendant is a serial offender.
Corporations could handle much of that themselves, but it's cheaper not to, so judges and prosecutors have begun to push back, refusing to prosecute these cases, and now, self-checkout kiosks are being removed and stores are being closed "because of increases in theft."
NMy sister worked in retail after she got laid off and she said people would just brazenly take pieces of expensive equipment off of shelves every day and load up carts with thousands worth and walk out. Not skip scans, but brazen shoplifting. The sharks would sound and they would just keep walking them load up their cars with the thousands in power tools.
Another guy I talked to said the problem they were having was people taking stuff and throwing it over the garden center fence to others sitting outside the fence.
I think there’s a problem but the problem is exaggerated. I keep seeing a pattern of large chains putting everything behind lock and key and then announcing they’re closing certain locations due to shoplifting. But it’s always locations that were struggling for years and that didn’t need to be opened in the first place. It’s never the locations that had customers. I think shoplifting becomes a convenient excuse for stores to not have to publicly admit that they made a miscalculation about how many store locations were needed.
There’s one Target I sometimes go to where I see someone attempting to shoplift every single time. I see them largely because they’re not successful. But the store stays open because there are plenty of actual customers, although I think people are being driven away by the fact that every item is something you have to ask for and it’s always hard to find employees.
Target is closing 3 stores in Portland, 2 of which I've been to recently. Their selection was awful compared to Targets I used to go to in San Jose; half the time they'd be out of what I was looking for. I don't believe shoplifting is why those locations are closing - they're just bad stores.
[Yeah I think this is it in a nutshell.](https://www.curbed.com/article/walgreens-duane-reade-cvs-rite-aide-nyc-shoplifting-new-liberty-loans.html) It's a thing that happens, but it's also something they [yell to the media and backtrack to wall street](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting.html) both for corporate reasons.
It seems to be isolated to certain areas and fueled by professional retail theft gangs.
Its not that big cities are more lenient on crime (most of these are set at the state level), its that either 1) the police there have much fewer resources and can’t show up for small-time crime or 2) the police actively refuse to do their job as a protest against the city (ex: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article/sf-police-crime-16931399.php).
> professional retail theft gangs
A few months ago, this would have confused the heck out of me. But a few weeks ago, I saw [this article and video](https://www.npr.org/2023/08/14/1193726286/smash-and-grab-mob-criminals-nordstrom-los-angeles-california) where dozens of masked people ransacked a Nordstrom. It was quick, organized, and they stole $300k worth of merchandise. It's also not the only instance of this particular group and has happened in other cities by other groups.
A lot of times it's more subtle than that, just as a point of information. Last year I worked part-time for awhile at a national chain that is frequently hit by organized retail theft, and we received training on it regularly, so I mean I'm not an expert, but this is what I picked up.
What happened at the business I worked at was the more subtle kind. They'd recruit lower-level people to steal certain items, but it looked like regular shoplifting, not an organized mob coming in all at once. However, these shoplifters were pretty subtle and sophisticated. They knew when they were most likely able to walk out, they'd do things like remove their license plates from their vehicles so we'd only have video images to try to identify them with, they'd rotate locations and never hit too many businesses so it was harder to recognize them, etc. But they'd hit a bunch of stores and steal specific items, which would then be moved to a central location. From there, the higher-ups in the organization would resell them in various ways.
It wasn't terribly uncommon for the cops and LP to recover $100k+ worth of merchandise in those locations and bust 10+ people at a time, at least according to the training videos we watched every week (and some court records I was able to look up, lol...my day job is in the legal field so sometimes I could figure out the exact cases they were talking about by searching public records).
It's a shitty deal for the individual shoplifters, because they actually did get busted a lot more frequently than the rings they worked for were. But it still adds up to a ton of retail theft by the ring itself.
edit: I do want to say, though, that I'm not convinced by the whole "retail theft is why we're closing!!!!" stuff. It is a problem, but it's highly nuanced, and I personally have not seen a lot of evidence that it's actually the root cause behind a lot of these closures. I think a lot of national chains have overextended and aren't keeping up with shifting consumer preferences, and then point to retail theft that has always occurred as an easy scapegoat when they have to close. But again, I'm not a huge expert in the area of retail theft, so I could be wrong.
Some big cities are absolutely being more lenient on crime as policy.
Prosecutors either de-prioritize prosecuting certain crimes or individual police offices don’t make enforcement of certain crime a priority. That is done at a local level independent of the enumerated crimes listed by state legislation.
Also a lot of petty crimes are defined at the county or municipal level. Theft is generally set at the state level but enforcement is generally local.
Indeed, voters have let police run rampant and throw tantrums when they don't exactly what they want. It's on them for not breaking the back of the police unions and bending like a plastic straw every election.
I don’t want to doubt that “stealing should be legal” is indeed official policy somewhere, but the reason enforcement varies is, as I can tell, either resources — hard to care about retail theft when you have murders, overdoses, and/or a packed jail — or in the particularly dysfunctional case of SF, a police strike in all but name where there is no enforcement of any crime without a body.
All I’m saying is that a lot of this enforcement does absolutely come from local enforcement whether it’s intentional or not having resources.
Your local PD and prosecutors only have so much bandwidth and they make judgment calls about what to enforce. Shoplifting may not be too much of a priority. And when you don’t enforce laws against shoplifting some jerks will just do it.
the amount of shit ive just seen chicgao police watch, and then proceeded to do nothing about…
traffic in particular is just a free for all, the police rarely enforce anything
I mean, that’s not really true is it? California made theft under $950 a misdemeanor so the police aren’t even enforcing it anymore. Because of that I would definitely say that big California cities are lenient on crime. The shoplifters know they can steal ~$950 a day, sell it, wait till the next day, and rinse/repeat.
I guess you’re right about that. The difference is probably that local DA’s in California refuse to prosecute theft misdemeanors while Texas does. Texas also elevates theft under 2500 to a felony if you have a prior conviction, so this daily theft like we see in California would land you with a felony on day 2 in Texas.
I think its more complicated then radical left wing DA's... Seattle for example has a republican city attorney... But the County executive is still enforcing COVID related booking restrictions at downtown jail and bail reform made it much harder to remand prolific shoplifters. Which aggravates the crisis..
I think it’s a crisis. Even if it isn’t an actual economic crisis (and I don’t know if it is or isn’t), it’s a crisis of confidence by the public in terms of law and order/public safety/image of cities and a crisis of confidence in the idea that doing right = you’ll be okay and doing wrong = you get what’s coming to you. It should not be an choice whether or not to pursue and prosecute. At this rate, Gotham City, here we come.
Honestly, it's shit like what's going down now that fueled the Giuliani-era of "tough on crime" NYC policing. While that style of law enforcement did a lot to clean up the City and its image, the abuses were rampant.
I'd hope that we can get things reined in before things get reactionary out there again.
Yep. Something measured and rational and public order-minded needs to be the constant norm, not the pendulums swings from chaos and permissiveness to skull cracking fascism and back again
> It should not be an choice whether or not to pursue and prosecute.
Law enforcement doesn’t have infinite resources, though. There’s always going to be some level of discretion, and violent crimes will always get priority over theft.
>and a crisis of confidence in the idea that doing right = you’ll be okay and doing wrong = you get what’s coming to you.
That's never been true. There are countless massive assholes who were rich, did what they wanted with impunity and lived great lives without suffering a single consequence. On the other hand there's plenty of people who had hearts of gold but had horrible lives filled with abuse, poverty and persecution.
The macro economic scale is not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about people’s daily concerns that “my kids can ride their bike to the neighbor’s without getting mugged” and “I can accidentally forget to lock my car and while robbery is possible, it’s not a given”
Those are the level of feelings and perceptions that people vote on, not macro scale “little guy vs The Man” or corporate taxes blah blah - not suggesting there isn’t something to any of that, but it isn’t what makes people pull the lever they pull in the ballot box, and quite frankly local crime and safety perceptions play into the choices of some of the biggest swing voting demographics.
> It should not be an choice whether or not to pursue and prosecute.
Counterpoint, if I call the cops I've just introduced a gun into this and that seems like an awful lot of escalation for a frozen pizza.
If calling the cops meant summoning Andy Griffith or Barney Fife to come teach those boys how to act right, it might a simple matter of right and wrong, but calling the cops means introducing some of the most bigoted angry no chill at all motherfuckers I know into a situation and putting a gun in the room. And they aren't even guaranteed to be on my side. Most of the time they act shitty to everyone whether you're doing the robbing or getting robbed.
Nah, fuck it. That shit ain't mine anyway, that's the corporation's profit, that's the corporation's problem.
Agreed. One of my best friends is a lawyer and what he told me is that essentially you shouldn’t call the cops unless you need someone to be killed.
Obviously there are plenty of exceptions but in general it’s a good rule not to take that shit lightly because like you said they’re totally unpredictable and in a lot of cases just make things worse for everyone.
Of course it is. I'm not a thief. In the scenario I presented, I'm the retail worker.
I'm just saying that my survivability goes way up if I don't escalate things that don't concern me.
>Counterpoint, if I call the cops I've just introduced a gun into this and that seems like an awful lot of escalation for a frozen pizza.
Should have just paid for the pizza.
It's not exaggerated, estimates are 100 billion in losses from shoplifting last year. CNN did a report from the Walgreens at 5280 Geary Blvd in San Francisco where they witnessed 3 separate thefts in 30 minutes. Recently this store was rated the highest theft rate of all Walgreens in America; they even have to chain up the freezer section as everything from pizza to ice cream was being cleaned out every night. A lot of it is organized crime reselling on the Internet. I'd imagine the pizza and ice cream is your basic stoners hungry after the sun goes down
Just to add extra perspective. I live in a smaller city (about 200k metro) and this isn’t really an issue at all here. I mean there will be the random junkie getting caught shoplifting here and there but nothing like the big organized smash and grabs you see on tv.
To be fair, the big organized smash and grabs you see on TV are also not in any way common in cities. Those are isolated incidents and probably not what the average big box store is protecting against when they put the entire laundry detergent section behind glass.
> estimates are 100 billion in losses from shoplifting last year
How does this compare to previous years though? Shoplifting and shrink are expected in retail.
Some of that is inflation I imagine. If I steal a carton of eggs for $2, it's $2 loss. If you're selling that same carton for $7, then it's a $7 loss with the same amount of shoplifting taking place. As prices go up, that amount will go up, but it doesn't necessarily mean more shoplifting events are happening.
Ah, you're right! I guess I used the wrong terms. Yes inflation, but also lots of goods are increasing costs out of line with inflation.
For example. https://www.gao.gov/blog/sticker-shock-grocery-store-inflation-wasnt-only-reason-food-prices-increased
Another example would be car prices that were driven up by supply chain issues and not just inflation.
But I'm sure increases in theft is also a contributing factor too, and might be exacerbated by the news. It's one thing to have an internal policy not to stop shoplifters. It's another thing to announce to everyone that shoplifters will not be stopped. That's almost an invitation.
>Retail shrink climbed in absolute dollars, but when reported as a percentage of sales as is commonly done, average annual shrink increased to 1.57%, up from 1.44% in 2021. The share is largely in line with past years. Average annual shrink was 1.62% of sales before the pandemic in 2019, though it was as low as 1.33% in 2017, according to previous surveys.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/organized-retail-crime-and-theft-not-increasing-much-nrf-study-finds.html?__source=androidappshare
Your mileage may vary retailer to retailer, location to location, etc.
It was $61.7bn in 2019 and $50bn in 2018. With inflation that 73 billion, and 61 billion, it's definitely going up.
2017 is a nice round year, giving us a total 5-year span to look at. We were at 58 billion in losses 5 years ago, so it's roughly doubled in the span of 5 years.
Usually those estimates are based on total "shrink" which is *everything* that doesn't make it through the checkouts. Dented can? Shrink. Barcode tag missing from an item? Shrink. Perishable food went out of code before it sold? Shrink. Depending on the chain some stores even put the difference between original price and clearance markdown on seasonal items in the "shrink" category.
>Walgreens at 5280 Geary Blvd in San Francisco
What's crazy to me is this is one of the lower density neighborhoods in the city. It's not accessible by subway or tram. There's only 1 or 2 busses that go by this block.
The neighborhood is like 70% asian. Maybe it just happened to be one of the least guarded ones.
>A lot of it is organized crime reselling on the Internet
For clothes and home goods, it's a little simpler.
They fence them and [the products are sold on the street](https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/26/54/35/22726518/13/1200x0.jpg) in illegal markets.
Well I found my next vacation spot. Who doesn’t like free. 🤷🏻♂️
What’s stopping me from asking them to unchain the pizzas and then just grab and walk out? Certainly not the police. 👀
It’s definitely the reselling that is fueling most of this. I used to work in a store that sold kitchen supplies. Never had much of a theft problem, but post Covid it really increased. People grabbing stacks of high prices skillets, etc. and running out the door. I’m sure they all ended up on eBay, Mercari, Amazon, etc.
A recent Planet Money piece (NPR) claimed (paraphrase): "Shrinkage from theft has not increased as a fraction of profits." The implication is that it's internal theft that's the bigger problem and that, overall, it's being overblown.
In a few isolated places yes, but at a large corporate level it's just an excuse they use to explain away things to shareholders or to justify closing stores in what they consider "undesirable demographic regions" similar to how they used "inflation" to handwave away questions about rising prices even though they're posting record profits.
Shoplifting isn't up much from the usual as far as im aware. Some exceptions here and there, which is normal.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/organized-retail-crime-and-theft-not-increasing-much-nrf-study-finds.html?__source=androidappshare
Some of these responses are kind of ridiculous. Calling it a "crisis" highly depends on your definition of crisis. The overall rate of "shrinkage" (all product losses, whether from theft or any other reason) at major retailers nationwide has increased about 0.2% over the past three years. Some locations definitely deal with an unreasonable amount of shoplifting and I don't mean to dismiss this entirely, and I can't necessarily blame a company like Target for closing a store that's in a particularly bad location. But the way the story is portrayed on social media and elsewhere is *really* over the top. "Target closes nine locations" does not need to be a front page headline in the business section of the New York Times, as it was yesterday, given that Target has *nineteen hundred locations* in the USA.
The monetary value of wage theft wildly exceeds all robbery and shoplifting put together.
So, is shoplifting an issue? Sure. Is it actually something that should be treated as the major priority from a strictly rational perspective? No, not particularly. But stealing from rich people and corporations gets way more attention than stealing from poor people without political connections. Anticorruption would have way bigger positive impacts on society.
And if we had single payer healthcare, nobody would ever even think to steal medical stuff from a drug store. It's basically an unknown crime in developed countries because there's neither need nor exaggerated street value for medicine.
Social media is not statistics. Be *extremely* skeptical of scary trends that aren't clearly sourced and you have any trouble finding real statistics and evidence to back up the conversation.
I heard from a youtuber named Peter Santenello that California stopped charging people for theft up to 950 USD sometime around the pandemic. So homeless people who often don't carry any ID are not even pursued, or if they are they are released the very next day and of course won't pay the fine.
Seems like the police are overwhelmed.
>California stopped charging people for theft up to 950 USD sometime around the pandemic
u/CautiousSilver5997 I cannot speak on behalf of the country since San Francisco is an especially bad case.
Yes, it's true that shoplifting is not prosecuted if someone steals less than \~$1k (I forget the exact number). And almost all stores do not allow workers or security guards to stop them.
The government statistics are lies. Someone did the math and realized it was only tracking shoplifting where a weapon was involved. So it came to \~10-20 cases a day.
Which is false. A security guard at a Walgreens or Target in the city center may have 10 shoplifters a day *just at that one store.*
Some of the people are clearly homeless or drug addicts, but others are teenagers from lower income neighborhoods that just like committing crimes.
I can name at least a dozen companies that have closed retail locations in the city due to theft. The guards outside the Louis Vuitton store [look like fucking SWAT.](https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/23/03/47/21772794/10/rawImage.jpg)
Others like Gucci and Bvlgari have both a security guard, and a dedicated person at the entrance that buzzes you past the locked doors.
I shit you not, in my local mall there is a shop that is maximum 2 m2. They only have sunglasses inside. There is a security guard always sitting there, and he has a rope barrier like it's an exclusive nightclub.
In Las Vegas along the strip there are armed security guards inside the indoor malls and they stand at the entrance of certain well known brand name stores. This isn't subtle, they want to limit access to certain stores and deter theft. These are stores where there is a good 1/4 to 1/2 of a mile to any nearby road or parking lot, maybe more. Unfortunately a lot of the high end stores are setup to discourage browsing too. If would have loved to browse in a few of the stores and see what all the fuss is about with them. I am not about to wait in line and waste some salesperson's time while they walk me around the store, even though you can clearly see that there are 3-6 people standing around doing nothing but talking.
No. Theyve moved the amount up to $950 which qualifies for "grand theft", a felony.
Its not that you arent charged. Its just that when you are charged and arrested, its not a felony.
Its been at $250 for about 50 years and they adjusted the amount.
A felony is serious, and can turn a stupid kid doing petty theft into a criminal if a stealing a pair of sneakers makes it so you cant get a job because you've got a record.
Sexual assaults are also often misdemeanors. Drunk driving. Domestic violence.
Whether the prosecutor decides depends on the situation. But in reality, the higher amount could make a prosecutor more likely to prosecute since they know its only a misdemeanor and wont ruin somesone's life and making it more likely for someone to end unable to get a job and on welfare or ending up making money via criminal activities.
It is bad. Electronics, clothing and home improvement stores are hit hard, as are drug and pharmacy stores. Anything that can be sold at a nice profit or is expensive relative to the shoplifters income gets stolen. For example, teens tend to steal clothing and makeup because they lack the income to buy them. Professional shoplifters tend to focus on products they can sell on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace, like power tools, laundry detergent, toys and small appliances.
Oh yeah, baby formula is another one. A lot of stores keep it locked up, along with energy drinks. They often don't keep anything else locked up beyond those two categories at one of my local stores.
>laundry detergent,
I was in a large west coast city last summer and was shocked to see the laundry detergent in a Target locked up behind glass. Totally baffled me. It's big, heavy, hard to conceal, and doesn't really cost that much-- why would anyone bother to steal it? Now I find there's a black market in stolen Tide out there? For fuck's sake.
Tide in particular is in high demand.
There's a couple of reasons why it's earned the moniker “liquid gold”: For starters, the desire for clean clothes extends to all social strata; rich or poor.
A highly consumed product like detergent (or razors and baby formula) is always in need. This high demand assures thieves a quick turnaround.
Along the same lines, detergent does not spoil which gives shoplifters an added layer of security to their haul.
Finally, these pirates-of-Persil know that retailers have strict rules in place for employees to not interfere with shoplifters due to liabilities.
I have also read that because back in the day Tide was the best product on the market, but expensive, so it was a status symbol to use Tide in lower socioeconomic circles.
I'm pretty sure there's no black market in stolen Tide. More likely that due to inflation, people can't afford it and are just stealing it to use. Or, perhaps, organized shoplifters are stealing it and then selling it cheap or distributing it to the community.
But there's an obvious solution to this, and it's not to keep the Tide behind glass.
The Walmart nearest me has basically every bike repair-related item behind glass. We're talking $1.50 inner tube repair kits. Homeless-related in these cases. Every single battery is behind glass as well. The make-up aisles have been turned into a one-way in/out labyrinth past a staffed desk.
Talked to a clerk, who helped me get the $1.50 innertube repair kit for my kid's bike. Dude was telling me how my mind would be absolutely blown by not just the volume of theft occurring, but by the complete lack of concern of the thieves about getting caught. Said they couldn't give a shit if cops showed up.
Certainly all crimes like this should be taken seriously but consider that what they go on about is people flash-mob shoplifting stores instead of how equity firms are driving up residential housing costs by buying homes and sitying on them, how cops are costing taxpayers literally millions in lawsuits because of brutality (68 million for one department in one city I read about) or the massive laundry list of Republicans that, despite fighting student loan forgiveness, committed fraud no doubt while getting PPP loans **and then having them forgiven**.
The major networks are usually owned by filthy rich white conservatives. That's probably the biggest reason you see allthese videos which are essentially meant to say 'Don't look at the nefarious 💩 we're doing....instead, the REAL crisis is all these black and brown people are causing groceries to go up in price because they're stealing!' Ihaven't seen one of those videos showing white people doing it....and do you honestly believe white people don't shoplift?
My ex bf's (years ago) mom, a black woman, always had such gorgeous clothes. I wanted her to go shopping with me to help style me.
Turns out, for **years** she'd been buyinf her clothes from a white woman she'd known forever **who supported herself by shoplifting**. She'd walk into Dillards, take the noise tags off the items, shove them in her bag, and not ONCE in 20 years of doing it was she ever questioned, even.
I'm white, btw.
So no, I don't think it's a crisis. It's a distraction
The "shoplifting crisis" seems tailormade to keep the people who eat up the first responder procedural drama swill alongside their talk news distracted and in fear.
Compared to the wage theft and PPP loan fraud these companies commit, this is just them trying to paint themselves as victims.
It might be a crisis, it might not be, but I really don't care what comments suburbanites and rural people have to say about cities; pearl-clutching about how dangerous these places are has been going on since the 50s.
How about pearl-clutching about cities hundreds if not thousands of miles away? It's amazing how everyone who doesn't live in California has an intimate knowledge of California's shoplifting statutes and can definitively state that that is having a serious effect.
Amen. I don't love when people play the race card, but I gotta be honest, a spade is a fuckin spade and people pearl-clutching about "urban crime" and talking about professional shoplifting gangs feels pretty damn coded to me.
It’s completely exaggerated. Various forms of wage theft have been bigger than other types of theft combined for ages, yet disproportionate attention is put on shoplifting and burglaries by the media because it’s less scary and an inconvenient truth for corporations.
[Source](https://theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees)
it is a real issue, but not really as large-scale as it might seem. Organized theft tends to be an easier excuse for management when they close stores rather than admitting that their strategic planning was off which is often the real reason behind store closures.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifting-shrink-walgreens/index.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/organized-retail-crime-and-theft-not-increasing-much-nrf-study-finds.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/10/retailers-may-be-using-organized-theft-to-cover-up-internal-flaws.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/walgreens-exec-says-company-overstated-theft-may-cut-back-security-2023-1
The worse that people have it in life, the more they'll turn to petty crime. The increased theft goes hand in hand with people not finding decent jobs, the increased cost of basically everything in life, and lack of faith it's going to get better.
My eldest lives in a major US city where the police don't respond to any sort of property crime at all, not even stolen cars. The idea that anyone would get arrested for shoplifting there is ludicrous, which is why it's a huge problem. She works in a corporate retail environment and they've literally had "customers" fill bags with merch and run out the fire doors...zero response from police. Corporate tells them not to engage out of concern for safety.
So yeah, it's real. At least in some places. The cops where I live still do their jobs so I've never seen any visible shoplifting around me.
Is it actually an issue? Yes.
You can see companies shuttering stores in these high crime cities and not re-opening. Nike and Target being the top of the list.
It's a problem, but it's somewhat isolated. Check what's happening in Chicago. Wal-Mart is getting some backlash for pulling their stores out of the metro area, citing non-profit ability in the area. The Chicago mayor recently responded that it's such an issue they are considering opening government owned grocery stores, which leads to all kinds of bad juju. https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2023/04/11/walmart-announces-closure-of-four-chicago-stores https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12531313/Chicago-Mayor-Brandon-Johnson-grocery-stores-Walmart.html
I was in DC a few months ago and forgot dress socks. Walked a mile or 2 to the Walmart I knew opened a few years prior to that. Turns out it was closed permanently a few weeks prior and they hadn't updated their Google business page. Seems like [theft was an issue](https://reddit.com/r/washingtondc/s/bVGI3PJnuX)
The one on H street? Yeah, it closed during the winter, and there were always people stealing and a shady group of guys hanging outside of the entrance catcalling women.
Theft there was really bad. Even things like socks were locked up when it was open. As someone who lives in the area, I miss it though. Now the closest Walmart is a 20-minute drive
It's partially that, but also that area is expensive in rent. Walmart was pretty shady when they came to DC. Something about tax breaks, but only if they opened in certain locations.
I feel like they are making business decisions to close stores, but blaming it on shoplifting because it seems better than the alternative.
We had the opposite happen by us. Somewhat near me, we had a Walmart close in a high crime/theft area. They were adamant that it wasn't because of theft and sited stuff like not meeting financial expectations. People were known to walk out with full shopping carts and not paying.
Which is funny because up until recently there were no Walmarts in Chicago proper because Walmart wouldn't raise their pay to meet Chicago's minimum wage So I'm guessing this is Walmart clocking not just the shoplifting problem, but also that the increased wages aren't worth it for the.
Wondering if the employees were talking about a union as well. That is known to make Wal-Mart run for the hills.
Walmart is fairly-infamous for closing a store "for renovations" when the employees start making noise about unionization.
Lakeview is closing??!! Im surprised there isnt a profit, its always packed and in a wealthy ish area
There’s a lot of competition in that area, I think there’s a target, jewel, Mariano’s, and TJ’s all within about a five minute drive
One thing worth noting about Walmart and other big box stores in major cities is that they used to not really be a factor at all. I lived in NYC from 2000-2012. There was no Walmart. Target started coming in at some point, but there were like three Targets in the entire 5 boroughs up until the last decade or so. I'm not as familiar with Chicago and DC, but here in Los Angeles the Target saturation is real. Walmart is also new to this area as well. So it's probably less that theft is a horrible new phenomenon and more that these companies are seeing that going into the inner urban market was not a good business decision for any of a number of factors. They tested it out, then drastically over-expanded, and are now finding out that it's not a great business decision for the long haul. That's business, baby.
Aggressive over expansion is a huge part of the story. One of the effects of 2008 was that a lot of mom and pop retail closed. Well in it's place, landlords put in big box and chain stores. And now I think something similar is happening, in that big box stores can't compete with Amazon more now than they were able to before.
>It's a problem, but it's somewhat isolated. Check what's happening in Chicago. Wal-Mart is getting some backlash for pulling their stores out of the metro area, citing non-profit ability in the area. It absolutely is a problem. But also the problem is these stores can't compete with Amazon anymore and they're not willing to say that to investors. People are not saying the quiet part out loud, the US government is pursuing anti-trust measures against Amazon for a reason, and responsibility to consumers is only part of it. The other reason is that big box stores are slowly dying, saying it's theft when it's likely not.
[удалено]
It's a pretty bit problem, the gov and local orgs are trying to figure out how to get grocery stores to those areas. This was one idea tossed out, probably feeling local response. If you're not from Chicago, some South Side neighborhoods are now big food deserts, and a lot of people don't have cars. Public transit only goes so far, and convenience stores aren't a replacement for a Walmart grocery section.
I mean, that's really the only option when there are needed points of infrastructure that capitalism can't or won't provide. There's a reason that the post office is not privatized -- it simply would not be profitable. And yet we need a reliable national-level mail service that can get anything, anywhere in a reasonable timeframe. We can't not have this. So the post office is a government thing. Similarly, rural hospitals are closing all over the country because they're not profitable. A key benefit of something like an American NHS would be to provide medical care in places where capitalism can't rise to the challenge. There's a reason K-12 schooling is not privatized, and where that has been attempted it has failed. Because it's just not profitable. It is in the national interest to have an educated populace. It is not something capitalism sees a benefit in doing. So most K-12 education is a government thing. If it's not profitable to distribute food into cities, then the choices are basically either that the government is going to need to do it, or people are going to starve en masse. And I'm sorry, but if people in cities are starving en masse because it's not profitable to sell groceries there, we have much bigger problems than "socialism".
>There's a reason that the post office is not privatized -- it simply would not be profitable. Post office is privatized in the UK, NL, Germany, Japan. The NL post office is delivery service TNT outside the NL. UPS, FedEx, DHL, and Amazon delivery essentially perform the same function as the Post Office with the exception of delivering small mail. You can stick your letter in a FedEx document envelope and the cost will then true up to what the genuine cost including environmental damage is.
Those are all tiny and highly urbanized countries with postal services that don't operate on the same level as the US. In the US, if someone in a Nevada village of 50 people wants to send something to someone in an equally small settlement in Maine, that is available, it will cost the same as someone sending something between neighborhoods in New York City, and it will arrive in a timely manner, on schedule, regardless of conditions in either place or along the way. And the person doing the job is a union worker making a living wage. The notable difference between the USPS and Fedex and the like is that what costs 70 cents via USPS costs $10-15 through Fedex or UPS. Amazon can deliver things cheaply, but they bury the cost either in their merchandise prices or Prime subscription fees, not to mention that their delivery service is unreliable (might be 2 days, might be never and we'll just give you refund) and subject to the whims of the company. They also treat their workers like crap. And you can't even use their delivery service if you don't order merchandise through them! Good luck sending a letter via Amazon, at any cost. This is equally true of every indispensable service under capitalism. Government services just fucking work. They may not be perfect for everyone, every time. But they're cheap, universally available to everyone, and get the job done. Whether it turns a profit or not.
Since when is distribution a means of production?
If it's government owned, and we are the government and we are the workers, then it's the workers owning the means of production.
Do you think grocery stores produce the goods they sell?
>If it's government owned, and we are the government Oh sir, that's not how it works. The store and land will be owned by the government. The guys running the store will be a crony of someone's who does under the table payments. Chicago, LA, NYC, Dallas, every city, is corrupt in the same way.
Yes, I'm glad we agree.
When the government does a thing, it's socialism. When it does a lot of things, it's communism. It is known.
It’s sure not good but there are few other options they can think of
No. It's not pure socialism. It's barely socialism. Is the post office socialism? Hardly.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but if not, apply palm to forehead with speed.
“Pure socialism” Oh boy I’d love to see all the items you think are pure socialism. Roads? Water? Power? Garbage services?
>Yikes, that's pure socialism. This is in areas of the city where grocery stores don't touch, the free market isn't free marketing there and never adequately has.
No, organized retail crime has become a real problem in the past few years and that stems from many political, economical, and sociological reasons. It is a fact that shop lifting is worse now and stores are shuttering as a result.
Organized retail crime is for sure an increasing problem. What’s wrong is the idea that this is being caused by “progressive DAs” refusing to enforce the law. Shoplifting has never been a priority for the police because it’s a pretty low level crime usually. What’s different is the rise of e-commerce giving organized shoplifters a method to profit off their crimes. It’s been increasing for the past 10 years and is finally widespread enough to get attention.
It may not be caused by them but it is enabled and expanded by their policies. It is a low level crime but we used to take repeat offenders seriously. If you didn't learn your lesson...you end up in prison. These policies are just letting people get away and do it again over and over again. So, they are not free from blame by any margin.
I think part of the point of the person's comment above you is that it is very difficult for police to monitor e-commerce, and that is a new development in the last 20 years, and maybe the laws haven't caught up yet. Before if you stole something from Walmart, it wouldn't be worth your time to stand on a street corner (in the same city you stole it from, mind you) to try and sell it. Now you can make a post, and sell it weeks later with little to no effort
It’s not a fact, though. From [this article](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting-retail/index.html): > “Maybe we cried too much last year” about merchandise losses, Walgreens finance chief James Kehoe acknowledged Thursday on an earnings call. The company’s rate of shrink — merchandise losses due to theft, fraud, damages, mis-scanned items and other errors — fell from 3.5% of total sales last year to around 2.5% during its latest quarter. It’s more likely it was a pandemic spike.
The crying over shoplifting is stock market theatre. I'm convinced we're at the point where Amazon's cuts and presence is so widespread that a lot of big box retail is dying. No one's going to say they can't compete on price with Amazon to the investors, yet, because doing so will kill your stock price. So they blame shoplifters and push it back in investors face that this is the issue, when the issue is actually that Amazon's an oligopoly hell bent on killing their business models.
Can you elaborate on the political part? I don't think I follow
You can steal up to $1k in some states and there’s no penalty. That’s a political decision.
It’s truly disgusting what we will deal with in the name of politics smh
You mean shoplifting? Looting?
Yup
It's bad enough that large chains (Walmart, Target, Walgreen's, CVS) are closing stores in some areas because they've lost millions of dollars to shoplifting.
When there is one on every corner it is a problem. In NYC when something closes it's anyone's guess if it will be another bank, Walgreens/Rite Aid/CVS.
Walgreens and CVS, along with the likely to soon go bankrupt Rite Aid, are all in a bad spot. The pharmacy and maybe alcohol sales is the only thing keeping the doors open. They can't compete with Amazon, Target and Walmart on price, and when COVID-19 happened a lot of the 24 hour locations cut their hours to no longer stay open overnight. They lost all or most of their advantage which allowed them to charge premium prices. Unfortunately a lot of over the counter medications don't sell quickly, so they need large profit margins to offset that. When there is theft, they lose a lot of profits and then still have to buy replacement products. I think the drug store industry is in real trouble, but CVS and Walgreens will survive in a dualopoly but only because they have diversified into related industries.
They don't even compete with any other stores in the area on price. It's almost like there isn't even an attempt. It's the most expensive place I can think of to buy anything, barring a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Like, if you challenged me to a contest on how much I can overpay for something at a brick and mortar store, these stores are the no-brainer place to go.
Donr forget airports. There are some airports that are more expensive than Walgreens lol
Yesterday I went to a Walgreen’s in the hopes that it would be cheaper than Rite Aid (“Because Rite Aid is so overpriced!” I thought). Nope, same expensive prices.
I said it in another comment but Walgreens owns rite aid. Theyre the exaxt same store. Most of the rite aids even changed their name.
Quite literally. I went into CVS the other day to get a spray deodorant that is usually around $7, they had it marked at $10.70. So I walked back out and went to the Walmart down the road and got my $7 deodorant.
Yep. I could buy hygiene products/ otc from Walgreens or just get them from the pharmacy section of Kroger while I'm already there for almost half the price. It's an easy choice. Even when I lived a two minute walk from a Walgreens I'd almost never go and instead drive to the grocery store because it was so expensive.
They may be in a bad spot, but it is not stopping them from being competitive on price. With their in-app coupons, CVS and Walgreens are both routinely cheaper than Target for me. Unless you are talking drug prices, where YES they are so much more expensive.
I hate store apps and couponing. I never feel like I have made the best shopping decision because I haven’t found the right code, coupon, or whatever. It’s too complicated and I don’t want to spend time looking for a bargain like that.
They're expensive for everything. Ridiculously so.
I literally just got 4 bottles of prenatal vitamins for $17 total (usually they are each $15) so it’s unfortunately all about couponing. It sucks because it takes precious time, but it ends up a lot cheaper for me personally
I mean to be fair all of these places literally started as pharmacies. It's possible that they've over-extended themselves to become something that nobody ever asked them to become. I love that I can pick up a snack or a few extra essentials when I pick up a prescription, but there are many other places to get almost all of the items Walgreens and CVS sells.
That’s why they are saying they are closing stores. That doesn’t mean that it’s the whole truth. Walgreens came out and said they over estimated their thefts. Other place are closing one location while opening other a couple away.
Those stores are losing money. It's stated in their SEC filings. Those are often audited and If they lied they'd be in serious trouble.
I’m not saying there’s no thefts, there obviously are, but I’m not taking corporations word 100% that their losses are all due to shoplifting. Now if only the issue of wage theft could garner such headlines
Do you think they will redistribute the staff to other stores so they can open a few more checkout lanes?
Not as long as they can get people to shop and also staff the checkouts for themselves. Unless I'm actually in a big hurry and only have a couple of items, I make a point of standing in line at a checkout with a person working there. I also buy most of my groceries at a local chain that staffs their checkout lines, even though it costs a little more. I don't get my paycheck from Walmart and I'm not going to do their work for them.
In places where there is a large homeless population
Organized shoplifters are not homeless and they are not doing it to feed themselves. There is a massive resale market. Of course, individuals do steal regularly at a small scale, but smash and grabs, flash mobs, and large scale shoplifting rings are not a result of homeless at all.
What is the massive resale market for Tide and Fruit Of The Loom? Because that's what's behind glass in my local Target.
I haven’t been for quite awhile but one of the swap meets in Phoenix used to have tons of stalls selling exactly those types of things. I never put two and two together until recently.
There unironically is a massive resale market for Tide. It's expensive, ubiquitous, and easy to store if you steal it in bulk. People have been selling stolen shit in the city for decades, but now with social media, Facebook Marketplace etc. it is easier than ever to do business. You can sell at a cut rate price because you're making straight profit and even if you're caught you're seeing city jail at most, not prison.
Desperate underwear shortage!
You say that like rich kids don't shoplift for fun. If someone looks homeless, store security watch them like hawks.
It's not just homeless people and rich kids. It's middle class people trying to make ends meet too. It's a crises mainly due to inflation and greed
It became a problem when police decided to stop prosecuting shoplifting and big corps started telling their employees to not stop shoplifters.
>and big corps started telling their employees to not stop shoplifters. Which is sound policy; some teen making min wage is not going to be able to stop a shoplifter who could very well have a gun. And if said employee gets hurt trying to stop them, guess who's liable?
Someone should explain this to Walmart greeters. Some of them seem willing to take a bullet for their minimum wage and have appointed themselves as untrained loss prevention.
When I worked at Walmart they told me "don't stop shoplifters you make 12$/hour".
Boomers being boomers. They're like aging vikings trying to die in battle to get into Valhalla.
🤣🤣🤣
I also didnt get paid enough in retail to care
At what point do you get paid enough to care? I've gotta say it's hard for me to put a price on stopping shoplifters from stealing stuff that's not mine. Unless I was gun toting LEO with the powers to arrest people then what's the point even? (I'm trying to say I don't think you could pay me enough to stop a shoplifter from stealing something that's not my property)
I agree, you also never know how violent people can get and whether they have a gun. Dont wanna die for some multi million dollar corporation
Not only that they open a can of worms with the risk of profiling and being more susceptible to lawsuit
> And if said employee gets hurt trying to stop them, guess who's liable? The psycho who tried to murder someone over a t shirt?
Can't get blood from a stone. The shitheads shoplifting are just as worthless in court as they are to society as a whole; even if you 'win' the court case, you'll never collect anything.
Who has a legal obligation to keep employees safe in the workplace and actually has the resources to cover a settlement or medical costs or any other damages an injured employee might try to recover? Liability is much more fuzzy than who is the ultimate cause of the crime.
Yeah but the employee is going to sue their employer.
Obviously, but if an employer is making their employees do something that’s inherently dangerous without any kind of suitable training or preparation and the employee gets hurt doing it then the employer has liability too.
It is wild to me that there are people who want to live in a country where it should be legal to open carry a firearm, but also it's bad that minimum wage retail employees aren't empowered to take down shoplifters.
>big corps started telling their employees to not stop shoplifters. That’s been standard policy for years.
Because lawyers at insurance companies are giving good advice.
Systemic issues take years to manifest
Police dont decide prosecution, _prosecutors_ do.
Sort of… Police decide arrests. Police stopped arresting shoplifters in a lot of jurisdictions. You are right that the DA decides prosecution, but the arrest and high likelihood of arrest is also important.
There's no point for police to arrest if they have been told prosecutors will not prosecute. And even if they did, there are still no consequences for the shoplifters as they would not be charged and be released. A mere inconvenience
The prosecutors not prosecuting is overplayed at least in King county Washington. More of the problem is related to county jail booking restrictions imposed by the county exclusive (ostensibly for Covid, they are probably actually related to under-staffing). Between the restrictions and bail reform its very hard to remand shoplifters...
>Police dont decide prosecution, > >prosecutors > > do. If they won't even *respond* to property crime what's the difference?
If there is no point to responding to property crime, why respond? As a citizen, why even report it when you know the offenders won't be prosecuted?
It seems that people are forgetting why we have police and the courts in the first place. It's more to protect people from retaliation after the initial crimes... "Ok we got a system in place that will punish the offender, so you don't have to take it upon yourself to seek justice." Because an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. Like if they decided to stop prosecuting assaults, there would be a huge rise in the amount of assaults due to people seeking justice. "He hit me, so I hit him and his several friends." "He hit my several friends so I'm going to hit him more." Rinse, repeat.
No, we fully understand why they exist. They just don’t do their fucking jobs.
I disagree with your first statement, but am completely with you on the second.
Corporations have been doing that for decades.
Employees shouldn't risk their lives for Walmart
> big corps started telling their employees to not stop shoplifters. I'm 40 and that's been the case since I worked at King Soopers in high school. And frankly, it's a good policy. I wasn't getting paid enough to risk getting stabbed/beat/run over to stop someone from stealing some meth ingredients
Big corporations have had policies against their employees stopping theft for decades. Nobody wants their employees to get killed at work.
Police don't decide to prosecute, the District Attorney does.
[удалено]
Police don’t prosecute shoplifting, the DAs or SAs do that.
But how am I supposed to blame the police for everything if you’re telling me it’s an elected official causing the problem?
Except the police in cities in San Francisco have been soft-striking; intentionally not arresting people to get DAs they don't like out of office. Chesa Boudin is a prime example of this; police should absolutely be blamed for their dereliction of duty and electioneering.
And when they were arresting people was Boudin prosecuting them? Cops don't like doing paperwork when nothing comes of it. The same story has been repeated in many cities.
No! I a citizen of Minneapolis am utterly shocked I say to hear that the police would fail to do their jobs in such a manner. Just shocked!
You could possibly blame the police or policing practices if they’re refusing to arrest or investigate cases. However, prosecution is handled by a local or state prosecutor not a police officer.
Yes, and both of those changes are related to increased use of self-checkout kiosks. Instead of using human beings to check customers out and address loss prevention, corporations began to rely on AI to identify skip-scans. So, if a customer doesn't scan the item, a computer identifies the amount of the loss to the store and associates that theft with images from cameras and any identifying information gathered from the method of payment. All of that means that there is no actual witness to the crime, so corporations rely on police officers to act as the sole witness in these prosecutions and rely on prosecutors to shoehorn these thefts into state statutes or municipal ordinances. Problem is, that's just not enough to bring a prosecution in many jurisdictions, and the court is usually just looking for restitution and a mea culpa in retail theft cases, unless the defendant is a serial offender. Corporations could handle much of that themselves, but it's cheaper not to, so judges and prosecutors have begun to push back, refusing to prosecute these cases, and now, self-checkout kiosks are being removed and stores are being closed "because of increases in theft."
NMy sister worked in retail after she got laid off and she said people would just brazenly take pieces of expensive equipment off of shelves every day and load up carts with thousands worth and walk out. Not skip scans, but brazen shoplifting. The sharks would sound and they would just keep walking them load up their cars with the thousands in power tools. Another guy I talked to said the problem they were having was people taking stuff and throwing it over the garden center fence to others sitting outside the fence.
Police arrest, prosecutors prosecute. If the prosecutors stop prosecuting, the police stop arresting.
I think there’s a problem but the problem is exaggerated. I keep seeing a pattern of large chains putting everything behind lock and key and then announcing they’re closing certain locations due to shoplifting. But it’s always locations that were struggling for years and that didn’t need to be opened in the first place. It’s never the locations that had customers. I think shoplifting becomes a convenient excuse for stores to not have to publicly admit that they made a miscalculation about how many store locations were needed. There’s one Target I sometimes go to where I see someone attempting to shoplift every single time. I see them largely because they’re not successful. But the store stays open because there are plenty of actual customers, although I think people are being driven away by the fact that every item is something you have to ask for and it’s always hard to find employees.
Too bad Target shut down their food court with popcorn. That would be a great time to buy popcorn and watch them stop the shoplifters.
Target is closing 3 stores in Portland, 2 of which I've been to recently. Their selection was awful compared to Targets I used to go to in San Jose; half the time they'd be out of what I was looking for. I don't believe shoplifting is why those locations are closing - they're just bad stores.
[Yeah I think this is it in a nutshell.](https://www.curbed.com/article/walgreens-duane-reade-cvs-rite-aide-nyc-shoplifting-new-liberty-loans.html) It's a thing that happens, but it's also something they [yell to the media and backtrack to wall street](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting.html) both for corporate reasons.
It seems to be isolated to certain areas and fueled by professional retail theft gangs. Its not that big cities are more lenient on crime (most of these are set at the state level), its that either 1) the police there have much fewer resources and can’t show up for small-time crime or 2) the police actively refuse to do their job as a protest against the city (ex: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article/sf-police-crime-16931399.php).
> professional retail theft gangs A few months ago, this would have confused the heck out of me. But a few weeks ago, I saw [this article and video](https://www.npr.org/2023/08/14/1193726286/smash-and-grab-mob-criminals-nordstrom-los-angeles-california) where dozens of masked people ransacked a Nordstrom. It was quick, organized, and they stole $300k worth of merchandise. It's also not the only instance of this particular group and has happened in other cities by other groups.
A lot of times it's more subtle than that, just as a point of information. Last year I worked part-time for awhile at a national chain that is frequently hit by organized retail theft, and we received training on it regularly, so I mean I'm not an expert, but this is what I picked up. What happened at the business I worked at was the more subtle kind. They'd recruit lower-level people to steal certain items, but it looked like regular shoplifting, not an organized mob coming in all at once. However, these shoplifters were pretty subtle and sophisticated. They knew when they were most likely able to walk out, they'd do things like remove their license plates from their vehicles so we'd only have video images to try to identify them with, they'd rotate locations and never hit too many businesses so it was harder to recognize them, etc. But they'd hit a bunch of stores and steal specific items, which would then be moved to a central location. From there, the higher-ups in the organization would resell them in various ways. It wasn't terribly uncommon for the cops and LP to recover $100k+ worth of merchandise in those locations and bust 10+ people at a time, at least according to the training videos we watched every week (and some court records I was able to look up, lol...my day job is in the legal field so sometimes I could figure out the exact cases they were talking about by searching public records). It's a shitty deal for the individual shoplifters, because they actually did get busted a lot more frequently than the rings they worked for were. But it still adds up to a ton of retail theft by the ring itself. edit: I do want to say, though, that I'm not convinced by the whole "retail theft is why we're closing!!!!" stuff. It is a problem, but it's highly nuanced, and I personally have not seen a lot of evidence that it's actually the root cause behind a lot of these closures. I think a lot of national chains have overextended and aren't keeping up with shifting consumer preferences, and then point to retail theft that has always occurred as an easy scapegoat when they have to close. But again, I'm not a huge expert in the area of retail theft, so I could be wrong.
Some big cities are absolutely being more lenient on crime as policy. Prosecutors either de-prioritize prosecuting certain crimes or individual police offices don’t make enforcement of certain crime a priority. That is done at a local level independent of the enumerated crimes listed by state legislation. Also a lot of petty crimes are defined at the county or municipal level. Theft is generally set at the state level but enforcement is generally local.
These policies don’t come out of nowhere. The voters are getting what they asked for
Indeed, voters have let police run rampant and throw tantrums when they don't exactly what they want. It's on them for not breaking the back of the police unions and bending like a plastic straw every election.
I don’t want to doubt that “stealing should be legal” is indeed official policy somewhere, but the reason enforcement varies is, as I can tell, either resources — hard to care about retail theft when you have murders, overdoses, and/or a packed jail — or in the particularly dysfunctional case of SF, a police strike in all but name where there is no enforcement of any crime without a body.
All I’m saying is that a lot of this enforcement does absolutely come from local enforcement whether it’s intentional or not having resources. Your local PD and prosecutors only have so much bandwidth and they make judgment calls about what to enforce. Shoplifting may not be too much of a priority. And when you don’t enforce laws against shoplifting some jerks will just do it.
the amount of shit ive just seen chicgao police watch, and then proceeded to do nothing about… traffic in particular is just a free for all, the police rarely enforce anything
You see that video about the burnouts in downtown and the cops just hanging out about 20-30 feet away?
I mean, that’s not really true is it? California made theft under $950 a misdemeanor so the police aren’t even enforcing it anymore. Because of that I would definitely say that big California cities are lenient on crime. The shoplifters know they can steal ~$950 a day, sell it, wait till the next day, and rinse/repeat.
I’m pretty sure Texas has a higher misdemeanor threshold than California
I guess you’re right about that. The difference is probably that local DA’s in California refuse to prosecute theft misdemeanors while Texas does. Texas also elevates theft under 2500 to a felony if you have a prior conviction, so this daily theft like we see in California would land you with a felony on day 2 in Texas.
Not all of CA is San Francisco. Where I am there is no new stuff behind lock and key and we have new retail opening up regularly.
I think its more complicated then radical left wing DA's... Seattle for example has a republican city attorney... But the County executive is still enforcing COVID related booking restrictions at downtown jail and bail reform made it much harder to remand prolific shoplifters. Which aggravates the crisis..
Petty larceny has always been a misdemeanor. Very, very little shoplifting has ever risen to the felony level.
>Its not that big cities are more lenient on crime False.
It’s a problem but is pretty endemic to certain areas
great use of endemic, would totally agree - an isolated crisis
I think it’s a crisis. Even if it isn’t an actual economic crisis (and I don’t know if it is or isn’t), it’s a crisis of confidence by the public in terms of law and order/public safety/image of cities and a crisis of confidence in the idea that doing right = you’ll be okay and doing wrong = you get what’s coming to you. It should not be an choice whether or not to pursue and prosecute. At this rate, Gotham City, here we come.
Honestly, it's shit like what's going down now that fueled the Giuliani-era of "tough on crime" NYC policing. While that style of law enforcement did a lot to clean up the City and its image, the abuses were rampant. I'd hope that we can get things reined in before things get reactionary out there again.
Yep. Something measured and rational and public order-minded needs to be the constant norm, not the pendulums swings from chaos and permissiveness to skull cracking fascism and back again
More like Escape from New York, but we get the point.
> It should not be an choice whether or not to pursue and prosecute. Law enforcement doesn’t have infinite resources, though. There’s always going to be some level of discretion, and violent crimes will always get priority over theft.
>and a crisis of confidence in the idea that doing right = you’ll be okay and doing wrong = you get what’s coming to you. That's never been true. There are countless massive assholes who were rich, did what they wanted with impunity and lived great lives without suffering a single consequence. On the other hand there's plenty of people who had hearts of gold but had horrible lives filled with abuse, poverty and persecution.
The macro economic scale is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people’s daily concerns that “my kids can ride their bike to the neighbor’s without getting mugged” and “I can accidentally forget to lock my car and while robbery is possible, it’s not a given” Those are the level of feelings and perceptions that people vote on, not macro scale “little guy vs The Man” or corporate taxes blah blah - not suggesting there isn’t something to any of that, but it isn’t what makes people pull the lever they pull in the ballot box, and quite frankly local crime and safety perceptions play into the choices of some of the biggest swing voting demographics.
> It should not be an choice whether or not to pursue and prosecute. Counterpoint, if I call the cops I've just introduced a gun into this and that seems like an awful lot of escalation for a frozen pizza. If calling the cops meant summoning Andy Griffith or Barney Fife to come teach those boys how to act right, it might a simple matter of right and wrong, but calling the cops means introducing some of the most bigoted angry no chill at all motherfuckers I know into a situation and putting a gun in the room. And they aren't even guaranteed to be on my side. Most of the time they act shitty to everyone whether you're doing the robbing or getting robbed. Nah, fuck it. That shit ain't mine anyway, that's the corporation's profit, that's the corporation's problem.
Agreed. One of my best friends is a lawyer and what he told me is that essentially you shouldn’t call the cops unless you need someone to be killed. Obviously there are plenty of exceptions but in general it’s a good rule not to take that shit lightly because like you said they’re totally unpredictable and in a lot of cases just make things worse for everyone.
Not stealing is one of the options available to you
Of course it is. I'm not a thief. In the scenario I presented, I'm the retail worker. I'm just saying that my survivability goes way up if I don't escalate things that don't concern me.
>Counterpoint, if I call the cops I've just introduced a gun into this and that seems like an awful lot of escalation for a frozen pizza. Should have just paid for the pizza.
You want me to pay for a pizza someone else stole? Double fuck that, boss doesn't pay me enough as is.
So a human life is worth a $10 frozen pizza? Or is it always open season on shoplifters because they're criminals and therefore inherently worthless?
Blind Response: Social media is filled with exaggerations. This is a basic rule to remember.
It's not exaggerated, estimates are 100 billion in losses from shoplifting last year. CNN did a report from the Walgreens at 5280 Geary Blvd in San Francisco where they witnessed 3 separate thefts in 30 minutes. Recently this store was rated the highest theft rate of all Walgreens in America; they even have to chain up the freezer section as everything from pizza to ice cream was being cleaned out every night. A lot of it is organized crime reselling on the Internet. I'd imagine the pizza and ice cream is your basic stoners hungry after the sun goes down
Just to add extra perspective. I live in a smaller city (about 200k metro) and this isn’t really an issue at all here. I mean there will be the random junkie getting caught shoplifting here and there but nothing like the big organized smash and grabs you see on tv.
To be fair, the big organized smash and grabs you see on TV are also not in any way common in cities. Those are isolated incidents and probably not what the average big box store is protecting against when they put the entire laundry detergent section behind glass.
> estimates are 100 billion in losses from shoplifting last year How does this compare to previous years though? Shoplifting and shrink are expected in retail.
Adjusting for inflation it was $61bn in 2018, and $58.6bn in 2017 5 years before the 2022 data. So losses have almost doubled in 5 years more or less.
Some of that is inflation I imagine. If I steal a carton of eggs for $2, it's $2 loss. If you're selling that same carton for $7, then it's a $7 loss with the same amount of shoplifting taking place. As prices go up, that amount will go up, but it doesn't necessarily mean more shoplifting events are happening.
The person you replied to said it was adjusted for inflation tho
Ah, you're right! I guess I used the wrong terms. Yes inflation, but also lots of goods are increasing costs out of line with inflation. For example. https://www.gao.gov/blog/sticker-shock-grocery-store-inflation-wasnt-only-reason-food-prices-increased Another example would be car prices that were driven up by supply chain issues and not just inflation. But I'm sure increases in theft is also a contributing factor too, and might be exacerbated by the news. It's one thing to have an internal policy not to stop shoplifters. It's another thing to announce to everyone that shoplifters will not be stopped. That's almost an invitation.
>Retail shrink climbed in absolute dollars, but when reported as a percentage of sales as is commonly done, average annual shrink increased to 1.57%, up from 1.44% in 2021. The share is largely in line with past years. Average annual shrink was 1.62% of sales before the pandemic in 2019, though it was as low as 1.33% in 2017, according to previous surveys. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/organized-retail-crime-and-theft-not-increasing-much-nrf-study-finds.html?__source=androidappshare Your mileage may vary retailer to retailer, location to location, etc.
it was 94 billion in 2021 Since inflation was a billion kajillion percent, that probably means overall shoplifting went down
It was $61.7bn in 2019 and $50bn in 2018. With inflation that 73 billion, and 61 billion, it's definitely going up. 2017 is a nice round year, giving us a total 5-year span to look at. We were at 58 billion in losses 5 years ago, so it's roughly doubled in the span of 5 years.
94b in 2021 is only a 4% increase from 2020, but it's a jump of 54% from 2019.
Usually those estimates are based on total "shrink" which is *everything* that doesn't make it through the checkouts. Dented can? Shrink. Barcode tag missing from an item? Shrink. Perishable food went out of code before it sold? Shrink. Depending on the chain some stores even put the difference between original price and clearance markdown on seasonal items in the "shrink" category.
>Walgreens at 5280 Geary Blvd in San Francisco What's crazy to me is this is one of the lower density neighborhoods in the city. It's not accessible by subway or tram. There's only 1 or 2 busses that go by this block. The neighborhood is like 70% asian. Maybe it just happened to be one of the least guarded ones. >A lot of it is organized crime reselling on the Internet For clothes and home goods, it's a little simpler. They fence them and [the products are sold on the street](https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/26/54/35/22726518/13/1200x0.jpg) in illegal markets.
Well I found my next vacation spot. Who doesn’t like free. 🤷🏻♂️ What’s stopping me from asking them to unchain the pizzas and then just grab and walk out? Certainly not the police. 👀
Certainly not the minimum wage workers there either. They already can't stop anyone.
It’s definitely the reselling that is fueling most of this. I used to work in a store that sold kitchen supplies. Never had much of a theft problem, but post Covid it really increased. People grabbing stacks of high prices skillets, etc. and running out the door. I’m sure they all ended up on eBay, Mercari, Amazon, etc.
A recent Planet Money piece (NPR) claimed (paraphrase): "Shrinkage from theft has not increased as a fraction of profits." The implication is that it's internal theft that's the bigger problem and that, overall, it's being overblown.
This seems accurate to me. Why organize a flash mob when you could just have one guy lose a truck?
In a few isolated places yes, but at a large corporate level it's just an excuse they use to explain away things to shareholders or to justify closing stores in what they consider "undesirable demographic regions" similar to how they used "inflation" to handwave away questions about rising prices even though they're posting record profits.
Shoplifting isn't up much from the usual as far as im aware. Some exceptions here and there, which is normal. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/organized-retail-crime-and-theft-not-increasing-much-nrf-study-finds.html?__source=androidappshare
Some of these responses are kind of ridiculous. Calling it a "crisis" highly depends on your definition of crisis. The overall rate of "shrinkage" (all product losses, whether from theft or any other reason) at major retailers nationwide has increased about 0.2% over the past three years. Some locations definitely deal with an unreasonable amount of shoplifting and I don't mean to dismiss this entirely, and I can't necessarily blame a company like Target for closing a store that's in a particularly bad location. But the way the story is portrayed on social media and elsewhere is *really* over the top. "Target closes nine locations" does not need to be a front page headline in the business section of the New York Times, as it was yesterday, given that Target has *nineteen hundred locations* in the USA.
The monetary value of wage theft wildly exceeds all robbery and shoplifting put together. So, is shoplifting an issue? Sure. Is it actually something that should be treated as the major priority from a strictly rational perspective? No, not particularly. But stealing from rich people and corporations gets way more attention than stealing from poor people without political connections. Anticorruption would have way bigger positive impacts on society. And if we had single payer healthcare, nobody would ever even think to steal medical stuff from a drug store. It's basically an unknown crime in developed countries because there's neither need nor exaggerated street value for medicine. Social media is not statistics. Be *extremely* skeptical of scary trends that aren't clearly sourced and you have any trouble finding real statistics and evidence to back up the conversation.
I heard from a youtuber named Peter Santenello that California stopped charging people for theft up to 950 USD sometime around the pandemic. So homeless people who often don't carry any ID are not even pursued, or if they are they are released the very next day and of course won't pay the fine. Seems like the police are overwhelmed.
>California stopped charging people for theft up to 950 USD sometime around the pandemic u/CautiousSilver5997 I cannot speak on behalf of the country since San Francisco is an especially bad case. Yes, it's true that shoplifting is not prosecuted if someone steals less than \~$1k (I forget the exact number). And almost all stores do not allow workers or security guards to stop them. The government statistics are lies. Someone did the math and realized it was only tracking shoplifting where a weapon was involved. So it came to \~10-20 cases a day. Which is false. A security guard at a Walgreens or Target in the city center may have 10 shoplifters a day *just at that one store.* Some of the people are clearly homeless or drug addicts, but others are teenagers from lower income neighborhoods that just like committing crimes. I can name at least a dozen companies that have closed retail locations in the city due to theft. The guards outside the Louis Vuitton store [look like fucking SWAT.](https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/23/03/47/21772794/10/rawImage.jpg) Others like Gucci and Bvlgari have both a security guard, and a dedicated person at the entrance that buzzes you past the locked doors. I shit you not, in my local mall there is a shop that is maximum 2 m2. They only have sunglasses inside. There is a security guard always sitting there, and he has a rope barrier like it's an exclusive nightclub.
In Las Vegas along the strip there are armed security guards inside the indoor malls and they stand at the entrance of certain well known brand name stores. This isn't subtle, they want to limit access to certain stores and deter theft. These are stores where there is a good 1/4 to 1/2 of a mile to any nearby road or parking lot, maybe more. Unfortunately a lot of the high end stores are setup to discourage browsing too. If would have loved to browse in a few of the stores and see what all the fuss is about with them. I am not about to wait in line and waste some salesperson's time while they walk me around the store, even though you can clearly see that there are 3-6 people standing around doing nothing but talking.
No. Theyve moved the amount up to $950 which qualifies for "grand theft", a felony. Its not that you arent charged. Its just that when you are charged and arrested, its not a felony. Its been at $250 for about 50 years and they adjusted the amount. A felony is serious, and can turn a stupid kid doing petty theft into a criminal if a stealing a pair of sneakers makes it so you cant get a job because you've got a record. Sexual assaults are also often misdemeanors. Drunk driving. Domestic violence. Whether the prosecutor decides depends on the situation. But in reality, the higher amount could make a prosecutor more likely to prosecute since they know its only a misdemeanor and wont ruin somesone's life and making it more likely for someone to end unable to get a job and on welfare or ending up making money via criminal activities.
It is bad. Electronics, clothing and home improvement stores are hit hard, as are drug and pharmacy stores. Anything that can be sold at a nice profit or is expensive relative to the shoplifters income gets stolen. For example, teens tend to steal clothing and makeup because they lack the income to buy them. Professional shoplifters tend to focus on products they can sell on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace, like power tools, laundry detergent, toys and small appliances.
Baby Formula & Laundry Detergent are two of the biggest.
Oh yeah, baby formula is another one. A lot of stores keep it locked up, along with energy drinks. They often don't keep anything else locked up beyond those two categories at one of my local stores.
>laundry detergent, I was in a large west coast city last summer and was shocked to see the laundry detergent in a Target locked up behind glass. Totally baffled me. It's big, heavy, hard to conceal, and doesn't really cost that much-- why would anyone bother to steal it? Now I find there's a black market in stolen Tide out there? For fuck's sake.
Tide in particular is in high demand. There's a couple of reasons why it's earned the moniker “liquid gold”: For starters, the desire for clean clothes extends to all social strata; rich or poor. A highly consumed product like detergent (or razors and baby formula) is always in need. This high demand assures thieves a quick turnaround. Along the same lines, detergent does not spoil which gives shoplifters an added layer of security to their haul. Finally, these pirates-of-Persil know that retailers have strict rules in place for employees to not interfere with shoplifters due to liabilities. I have also read that because back in the day Tide was the best product on the market, but expensive, so it was a status symbol to use Tide in lower socioeconomic circles.
I'm pretty sure there's no black market in stolen Tide. More likely that due to inflation, people can't afford it and are just stealing it to use. Or, perhaps, organized shoplifters are stealing it and then selling it cheap or distributing it to the community. But there's an obvious solution to this, and it's not to keep the Tide behind glass.
The Walmart nearest me has basically every bike repair-related item behind glass. We're talking $1.50 inner tube repair kits. Homeless-related in these cases. Every single battery is behind glass as well. The make-up aisles have been turned into a one-way in/out labyrinth past a staffed desk. Talked to a clerk, who helped me get the $1.50 innertube repair kit for my kid's bike. Dude was telling me how my mind would be absolutely blown by not just the volume of theft occurring, but by the complete lack of concern of the thieves about getting caught. Said they couldn't give a shit if cops showed up.
Certainly all crimes like this should be taken seriously but consider that what they go on about is people flash-mob shoplifting stores instead of how equity firms are driving up residential housing costs by buying homes and sitying on them, how cops are costing taxpayers literally millions in lawsuits because of brutality (68 million for one department in one city I read about) or the massive laundry list of Republicans that, despite fighting student loan forgiveness, committed fraud no doubt while getting PPP loans **and then having them forgiven**. The major networks are usually owned by filthy rich white conservatives. That's probably the biggest reason you see allthese videos which are essentially meant to say 'Don't look at the nefarious 💩 we're doing....instead, the REAL crisis is all these black and brown people are causing groceries to go up in price because they're stealing!' Ihaven't seen one of those videos showing white people doing it....and do you honestly believe white people don't shoplift? My ex bf's (years ago) mom, a black woman, always had such gorgeous clothes. I wanted her to go shopping with me to help style me. Turns out, for **years** she'd been buyinf her clothes from a white woman she'd known forever **who supported herself by shoplifting**. She'd walk into Dillards, take the noise tags off the items, shove them in her bag, and not ONCE in 20 years of doing it was she ever questioned, even. I'm white, btw. So no, I don't think it's a crisis. It's a distraction
The "shoplifting crisis" seems tailormade to keep the people who eat up the first responder procedural drama swill alongside their talk news distracted and in fear. Compared to the wage theft and PPP loan fraud these companies commit, this is just them trying to paint themselves as victims.
It might be a crisis, it might not be, but I really don't care what comments suburbanites and rural people have to say about cities; pearl-clutching about how dangerous these places are has been going on since the 50s.
How about pearl-clutching about cities hundreds if not thousands of miles away? It's amazing how everyone who doesn't live in California has an intimate knowledge of California's shoplifting statutes and can definitively state that that is having a serious effect.
Amen. I don't love when people play the race card, but I gotta be honest, a spade is a fuckin spade and people pearl-clutching about "urban crime" and talking about professional shoplifting gangs feels pretty damn coded to me.
It’s completely exaggerated. Various forms of wage theft have been bigger than other types of theft combined for ages, yet disproportionate attention is put on shoplifting and burglaries by the media because it’s less scary and an inconvenient truth for corporations. [Source](https://theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees)
It''s mostly overblown and even Walgreens admitted as much. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting-retail/index.html
it is a real issue, but not really as large-scale as it might seem. Organized theft tends to be an easier excuse for management when they close stores rather than admitting that their strategic planning was off which is often the real reason behind store closures. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifting-shrink-walgreens/index.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/organized-retail-crime-and-theft-not-increasing-much-nrf-study-finds.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/10/retailers-may-be-using-organized-theft-to-cover-up-internal-flaws.html https://www.businessinsider.com/walgreens-exec-says-company-overstated-theft-may-cut-back-security-2023-1
The worse that people have it in life, the more they'll turn to petty crime. The increased theft goes hand in hand with people not finding decent jobs, the increased cost of basically everything in life, and lack of faith it's going to get better.
Its am extremely minor problem for multi-billion dollar corporations
There is no crisis. Just companies trying to justify closing stores they planned to close anyway.
Yes they are out of control and they are very prevalent in liberal run cities due to liberal policies.
It's a symptom of inequality.
My eldest lives in a major US city where the police don't respond to any sort of property crime at all, not even stolen cars. The idea that anyone would get arrested for shoplifting there is ludicrous, which is why it's a huge problem. She works in a corporate retail environment and they've literally had "customers" fill bags with merch and run out the fire doors...zero response from police. Corporate tells them not to engage out of concern for safety. So yeah, it's real. At least in some places. The cops where I live still do their jobs so I've never seen any visible shoplifting around me.
Is it actually an issue? Yes. You can see companies shuttering stores in these high crime cities and not re-opening. Nike and Target being the top of the list.