Kevin Drum

I just got back from a bit of shopping at our local Albertson's. I haven't been to this particular store in a while, and I noticed that in my absence they had joined the crowd and put loads of stuff behind locked cabinets. This led to the following conversation while I was checking out:

ME: Is shoplifting really that bad?

CHECKER: Oh yeah.

ME: Even here in . . .

CHECKER: I know, even here in Irvine. [Note: Irvine is a famously low-crime, upper-middle-class place.] But you have to remember our location.

ME: Irvine?

CHECKER: We're right off the freeway. People from LA come down here to steal our stuff. They hop off the freeway and then right back on, and nobody stops them.

ME: That's really a thing? Is it worse than it used to be?

CHECKER: Yeah. It's a little inconvenient, but people also complain about prices going up. That's because of theft.

ME: That was because of inflation.

CHECKER: No, theft.

ME: It was inflation. Everything went up.

CHECKER: Well, the first time it was inflation, but the next time it was theft.

ME: ???

Obviously the folks at Albertson's know their business better than I do, and if they say theft is up, then I suppose theft is up. But did they really raise their prices because merch was heading out the door to hoodlums from LA?

Nothing seems to add up. Grocery Dive summed up the latest concerns of supermarket managers from a recent industry report:

More investments in promotional spending ... expand space for fresh departments including foodservice ... Labor remains a tough area ... boost the retention of full- and part-time workers ... healthcare costs ... training costs, which typically average more than $600 per employee.

Not a peep about theft. It apparently doesn't even top $600 training costs as something on the mind of grocers. Here are net profit margins for the industry:

This is national, and maybe stores near freeways have it worse. Who knows? But it sure doesn't look like increasing theft had a noticeable impact on margins, which have been rising slowly but steadily for years.

I'm still intensely puzzled about all this. Stores know that locked cabinets are a pain in the ass, and they wouldn't install them unless they felt a pressing need. But nothing seems to back this up. Shoplifting reports haven't increased outside of a couple of cities. Self-reported shrink hasn't increased. Margins haven't declined. What's going on here?

POSTSCRIPT: Do supermarkets keep track of inventory shrink as a line item? Of course they do. So why do we have to rely on surveys and such? Can't Kroger and Publix and Food Lion and all the rest just tell us what it is? Is this really a highly confidential trade secret?

I'm completely fed up with Google. They took away my ability to get more than ten hits per page, and there's now so much damn cruft on the results page (AI, ads, shopping, videos, etc. etc.) that it often has only six or seven actual site links. It's maddening because I often have to go way beyond ten (or six) results to get what I want. That now takes forever.

But what should I replace it with? Bing is also limited to ten results per page, so it's out. DuckDuckGo has an infinite number of results and no cruft, which is great. That's probably my choice. But what I'd really like is an advanced search page. Google still has this, but DDG doesn't. And it would be so easy to add!

Obviously I can make do without this, but it sure is handy. Any recommendations? Either for good search engines in general or for search engines with advanced search?

Here is Hilbert lounging on the top of the sofa. He doesn't do this much anymore because there's a red blanket (courtesy of American Airlines) on the sofa at the moment and both he and Charlie adore it. Every time I come into the living room they've switched off and a new cat is curled up on the blanket.

The New York Times reports today on a new study that shows an increase in alcohol-related deaths between 1999 and 2020. But it's based on numbers from the CDC's WONDER database, which is public and has a category just for alcohol. Here it is:

Sure enough, it's way up. Check the right boxes and you can get the numbers by age, race, region, and rural vs. metro if you feel like it. It only takes a few minutes, so I'm not sure why it took a journal article with eight co-authors to tell us this. But the article is paywalled, so maybe there's more in it that I can't see.

Are you on Twitter and would like to follow reliable economic commentary? Here are my top picks:

• Matt Darling
• Noah Smith
• Matt Yglesias
• Dean Baker

There are lots of good people on Twitter who don't say much about economics. And there are lots of good economists who don't say much on Twitter. But these four are both active on Twitter and consistently sensible and informative. They're all worth following if you have an interest in whatever the discourse happens to be saying about the economy from moment to moment.

A reader has shamed me into updating yesterday's chart showing how often Fox News mentioned inflation after the election was over. Here's a comparison with all TV news:

The drop at Fox News was more dramatic than most, but in fact everyone decided to stop talking about inflation once the election was over. (The mid-month spike is when the November CPI report was published.)

I guess everyone agrees: Inflation is only hurting consumers enough to be newsworthy if there's a political campaign saying so.

POSTSCRIPT: I'd also show you a longer-term comparison, but these numbers are a pain in the butt to collect and I'm too lazy to do it.

The Michigan index of consumer expectations (not current consumer sentiment) is doing its usual thing in the wake of the election:

As usual, Republicans are considerably more partisan about the economy than Democrats. After Joe Biden's election their expectations dropped about 75 points while Democratic expectations rose 30 points. This time around Republican expectations are already up 27 points compared to a Democratic drop of about 16.

This is a partisan dynamic we see frequently, and I don't know why. Are Republicans just more partisan? More scared of Democrats than Democrats are of Republicans? Is it media driven? Some enterprising grad student should look into this.

I'm not trying to be the bearer of bad news, but it strikes me that several economic indicators are blinking red right now. The yield curve has been negative for a while and has just turned upward. GDP growth has been above potential for several quarters in a row. Job growth has been slowing down for a long time and is now close to zero. The Fed has kept interest rates high too long. And there's this:

The Sahm Rule is triggered when the unemployment rate increases by 0.5 percentage points relative to its low in the previous 12 months. The low point of the past 12 months is 3.7% and unemployment hit 4.3% a couple of months ago. That's 0.6 percentage points. Unemployment has gone down a bit since then and we're now slightly below Sahm territory.

But even at that we're well above the level that signaled the last four recessions. In fact, if the Sahm Rule holds up, it suggests we're already in a recession.

I sort of doubt that, and the post-pandemic era has always been economically weird. If there's ever been a time for the usual rules to break down, this is it. Still, unless they all break down we're probably not too far away from a recession.

With Matt Gaetz out of the picture, Donald Trump has moved quickly to refill the attorney general job. His choice is Pam Bondi, the telegenic former attorney general of Florida and frequent Fox News guest host.

Bondi is a big time Trump loyalist these days, but it hasn't always been so. Remember when Trump had to give her a $25,000 bribe to avoid being prosecuted for fraud related to Trump University? All perfectly legal, of course. Good times.

Guess what? Inflation is over! According to Fox News, anyway:

Inflation itself hasn't changed over the past couple of weeks, but for some reason Fox News doesn't seem to care about it anymore. Here's a longer look:

Sadly, the Internet Archive suffered some technical difficulties right before the election, so the series is interrupted. But as you can see, for months and months Fox hosts were obsessed with inflation, mentioning it 10 to 20 times a day. This week it's down to two or three.

Remarkable, no? Inflation has been running around 3% for more than a year but it remained vitally newsworthy anyway the whole time. Until November 6.