Megan McArdle picks at a scab of mine today:
It’s hard to pick just one favorite form of internet insanity, but, if I had to, it would definitely be shoplifting denialism.
Over the last few years, shoplifting has clearly become a bigger problem. We’ve seen videos of brazen shoplifters casually walking off with goods while helpless security guards watch. Retailers tell us it’s a problem, one that’s forcing them to close some of the hardest-hit stores. If you live in one of those areas, it’s also visible in your daily shopping: the locked cases at your drugstore, the signs banning knapsacks or oversize totes, the armed guard who recently appeared at the exit of my local supermarket, checking receipts.
This is all true. Why would drugstores lock up toothpaste if shoplifting weren't a real problem? On the other hand, FBI crime statistics don't show a huge surge:
Shoplifting has gone up by a quarter since 2021, but it's still no higher than it was in 2017. However, I had to extrapolate this data myself and it might not be right. What's more, it's possible that retailers have mostly given up reporting shoplifting to the police since it does little good. Even the FBI admits that clearance rates are generally below 10%.
But there's also this:
This doesn't come from police reports. It comes from an annual survey of retailers by their own industry group. They have every incentive to report accurate numbers.
But there are problems here too. First, "shrink" includes losses from shoplifting, employee theft, and operational errors. Maybe it's steady because shoplifting went up and the others went down. Who knows?
Second, maybe shoplifting really has stayed steady, but it's because of the locked cabinets, surveillance systems, and guards at the door. There's no sure way to tease out causality.
What to think? It sometimes happens that widespread anecdotal evidence flatly doesn't match the best statistical data. This is one of those cases. So what's the best bet: trust the statistics or trust the anecdotes?
The case for statistics is that they really do tend to be reliable on a nationwide basis. The case for anecdotes is that they can identify trends faster and at a more granular level.
The case against statistics is that they're bloodless and don't always capture the full scope of things. The case against anecdotes is that media coverage can amplify limited local events into broad moral panics that don't represent reality. In turn, this can motivate businesses announcing weak results to blame everything on the excuse du jour—in this case shoplifting—because that's better than admitting you're managing the business poorly.
This has all been a longwinded way of saying that I find this particular issue perplexing. The anecdotal evidence really does look convincing, but maybe it's only capturing isolated incidents in a few high-crime cities. And why doesn't it show up in any of the data?
I don't know.
But Target was busted for lying about this last year
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-retail-lobby-confesses-it-lied-about-organized-shoplifting-rings
so was walgreens
https://www.governing.com/community/debunking-the-myth-of-a-shoplifting-crisis
oh, and McArdle? cmon
Exactly. McArdle never had to work a day in her life. She writes this unverified dreck and gets paid more than most for it.
If you lock stuff inside a case, you're an idiot. Sure, few people are going to have the patience and gall to steal shit behind it, but also, few people will have the patience to wait for someone to grab a key and open up the case so that they can grab that condom/lube/hair regrowth/douche/etc.
But if you're the manager of that Rite Aid in Los Angeles who locked almost everything in cases, you're the biggest loser. BTW, why would you lock away $2-$3 cereals and potato chips but not the $25 gift cards -- what kind of dumbass are you?
Just as much as would-be thieves will choose the path of least resistance and avoid your store, so too will shoppers.
pretty sure the gift cards aren't activated until you purchase them. stealing the cards is pointless.
You missed the part where thieves resell them to unsuspecting victims.
Yes but that wouldn't affect the third-party retailer at all. The cards themselves have no value until the cashier rings them up. So if a thief shoplifts them, all they can do is try to resell them. Some naive person may actually buy them, but then it's the naive person that's out the $25. The retailer (and the corporation on the face of the card) still isn't out anything (except maybe the few fractional cents it took to manufacture the card and ship it to the store), because until it's rung through the register, the card is loaded with no value. It's literally just a piece of plastic that has no use except possibly to scrape ice off your windshield.
This whole event would suck for the naive person, but the retailer has no reason to complain at all about it being "shoplifting."
So, your point is it that stores ostensibly only care about their bottom line, is that correct?
They care so much about that $2-3 bag of potato chips that they'd protect it by spending thousands of dollars on locked cases, but the consumer who unwittingly is a victim of a crime, because the store doesn't care if someone steals their gift cards, meh. 🤔
obviously yes.
Thieves steal the gift cards, record the card numbers and PINs, and then return the gift cards. A computer program can then check the card value and drain it once it's loaded.
https://www.propublica.org/article/maryland-gift-card-scams-prevention-act-walmart-incomm-retail#:~:text=Card%20draining%20is%20a%20scheme,online%20and%20steal%20the%20balance.
My anecdote: last week I went to the store for laundry detergent. My brand was locked in a cabinet. Waited 15 minutes for help.
Yesterday, I went to a different location (arguably a worse neighborhood) and, although some detergent is locked up, my brand was out in the open, in front of God and everyone. Even an endcap! More units than I've ever seen at once.
"The case against statistics is that they're bloodless and don't always capture the full scope of things. "
No, it's anecdotes which don't capture the full scope - by definition they are isolated incidents. And is the question how many shoplifting incidents there are or how much blood is spilled? I think not much, in shoplifting.
This seems to be a time when economic statistics are distrusted for political reasons, that is to say Republicans lie about them. This general distrust probably extends to those who are not necessarily sympathetic to Republicans. And the media look for alarming things, whether they are valid overall or not. You can trust the anecdotes when they agree with statistics.
This is the third post regurgitating right-wing talking points in a single afternoon. I'd have expected better than that, and I mean awful, from Kevin, but I guess not. After the radical left causing voters to have turned away and the Dems to have moved right, neither of which makes sense, and Harris losing because she can't disavow GOP smears on her, now we have crime is down but Dems are still soft on crime. Why don't they do something?
And read the darn article. It claims shoplifting is up (not) because security guards are there but turning their back on crime. Huh? So it's not lack of precautions at all. It's that somehow the libs are causing security guards to look away. But of course a tough leader would change that.
Blue flu is a thing. So bad so sad those so nice cops and guards are being held responsible for killing someone over a handful of toothpaste, or worse, they killed the wrong person. They believe it's wrong to hold them responsible, after all, personal responsibility matter, right?
Fair enough, but another reason I'm skeptical about Kevin's openness to the article's slant. Now, normally when anecdotal evidence conflicts with data, I'm inclined to be skeptical about BOTH sides. I still think that Kevin's dismissal of the need for more housing and affordable housing is laughable, especially given that the media rely on real data, too. (He's not asking why the data sets differ, just dismissing the others.)
But here there's an all too obvious parallel to public perception of crime quite generally. People in New York have become scared of riding the subway and sure purse snatchers and killers are everywhere, when there's no basis for this beyond a GOP effort, as with the economy (which Kevin has no trouble, thank goodness, debunking), to show the world as a disaster under Democrats. We're talking trading in fear.
Perhaps shoplifting would go down if many (most?) retailers were not trying to cut there staff numbers to zero.
"Wages are a a cost, and if we could eliminate them the profit would be endless!"
Also, almost all those videos are organized theft, which is not 'shoplifting'.
A lot lot of them are robberies.
steal a car, ram it into a building, rob items.
Yes, but Crissa is correct. None of that is "shoplifting," which is defined as "a person stealing a few items by walking into a store, pocketing them and then walking out." Ramming your car through the window, flashing guns, having a dozen other people smash and grabbing with you... all of those are other serious crimes, but aren't "shoplifting" as the term has been traditionally defined.
"The case for anecdotes is that they can identify trends faster and at a more granular level."
No. In order to have any meaning, there have to be a significant number of them, at which point they are statistics.
The weather at my house is an anecdote. It is useless to evaluate any trends at any level.
Apropos of nothing, a few months back, the editor of the Albuquerque Journal was arrested for shoplifting and spent 8 days in a Rio Rancho jail.
According to reports and video evidence, he and his kids were cruising the store, opening beverages and then putting the cans back on the shelves. At the self checkout, he showed them how you could aoid scanning many items, and still walk out with them.
But the "loss avoidance officers" onsite caught him in the act and he was arrested.
There are videos of flash mobs going into a retail place and walking off with a ton of stuff. Not common, but the videos are viewed, what, millions of times....
The Atlantic also have an article about shoplifters "Gone Wild":
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/shoplifting-crime-surge/680234/
Also lots of anecdotes. There are wild stories, and I'm sure some places have had it really bad. But is only takes one bad case of shoplifting at a given place to lock down everything. It that case it could just be traveling crews going after soft spots--which continues until they are shut down.
Those videos are also in circulation for years. My wife showed me one saying how awful it was. I checked it out and it was over a year old.
It seems to me that lots of theft type crime gets conflated with “shoplifting”. So those stories about theft of Amazon packages from train boxcars, porch pirates, store overnight thefts, catalytic converter thefts, etc. become part of the same problem in the public mind.
Shoplifting has always been pretty rampant though, hasn’t it? I remember when I was young (the 60’s) kids called it “kiping” and targeted stores with supposed lax security. I understood the discount store chain known as “White Front” went out of business due to shoplifting. My local CVS has put a lot of OTC drugs behind locked plastic cabinets and not only require you to summon a clerk to get them, but also the clerk walks the product to the register. Many of the same products are available at the grocery store next door not locked up.
Many of the same products are available at the grocery store next door not locked up.
Or online.
And bricks and mortar retailers wonder why the internet is destroying them...
I usually only go to brick and mortar stores if I want something in the next few hours. Otherwise I am going to order it from Amazon. With some products I can have it within a few hours even from Amazon and at least then I know whether it is in stock or not.
I am also going to do a lot more curbside pickup orders at brick and mortar stores which will increase their labor costs. At least I won't have to stand around waiting for people to unlock stuff though. Instead I can sit in my car and read this blog on my iPad.
I'm so old I remember going into a chain convenience store in PA as a kid, and *everything* was behind the counter, which had been moved to be right up against the door. This was the 80s, when all of our nation's cities had been deemed hellholes and most of the white people had fled, but my family was too poor to escape to the suburbs and had to give lists of items to the cashiers to go fetch for us in the locked-down 7-11.*
Somehow, I don't recall there being a moral panic about the shoplifting epidemic back then... probably because the 80s also had lots of more serious crimes going on in cities... and everyone in the suburbs and rural areas were just like "who cares what happens with Those People Downtown."
It's a sign of just how safe most urbanized places are (or how most suburbs have declined) that shoplifting has become the biggest moral panic crime on the news.
*It wasn't really a 7-11, but it also wasn't a Wawa nor a Sheetz, and I can't recall exactly which chain it was. A-Plus or Redner's maybe?
If it is up a little, O suspect it’s because Amazon makes it so easy to peddle stolen items.
EBay too. Why can you buy Prilosec on EBay?
Perhaps it is my Mk I eyeballs, but it looks to me like a linear trend line on the Retail Shrink chart would show increase over the interval.
The people most interested in pushing this particular anecdote fueled, data-free social controversy also seem to push other anecdote fueled, data-free social controversies.
This seems to tell us something important about their shoplifting stories
Over, say, the past 2 decades, retail stores have experienced the following changes:
- Self checkout replacing most cashiers.
- A overall reduction in employees working in stores
- Countless online opportunities to sell virtually anything online.
- the emergence, in big box stores, of a new class of products that are relatively small but very expensive: batteries for battery operated power tools and devices.
These changes have, of course, incentivized theft in general and made retail robbery and selling stolen goods a lucrative and reasonably safe business opportunity for organized crime. What most retailers will tell you while connected to lie detectors is that self checkout probably represents the majority of shrink - which retailers expected and accepted as the cost of SAVING much more money than they lose. Same goes for the reduction of visible employees in large stores. It is also a simple matter for organized crime to have someone get hired as a sales associate at a Home Depot or similar store, where they spend a couple weeks figuring out the routine of the skeleton crew, and directly or indirectly assist in the theft.
Yes, shrink has grown for many retailers, but for obvious reasons. One exception is Costco, and Costco’s execs have explained why. They were very late to the self checkout game (and have organized it to minimize theft and scanning ‘oversights’). Their stores are configured to funnel shoppers to a single exit door and staffed to make this keep the inconvenience of shoppers to a minimum.
Shoplifting being up in some locations and down in others?
I have been to several Wal-Mart locations recently, some of which have products locked up, but most do not. So maybe the answer is that some locations are experiencing shoplifting on some of the products and are taking action against that.
Information about what is being shoplifted might be enlightening.
"Why would drugstores lock up toothpaste if shoplifting weren't a real problem?" Because they want to employ half as many people. Does shoplifting exist? Yes. But with fewer employees to prevent, they lock everything up.
McMegan is the shoplifting denialist here, just not how she thinks.
In the drug store where I spend the most time, a bunch of brand-name drugs are locked up. Zyrtec is an example.
Interestingly enough, the store-brand generic of the same medicine is *not* locked up. Criminals are dumb, I guess. It couldn't possibly be that the store is trying to promote their own brand, which is more profitable for them, could it?
One thing missing here is the different kinds of shoplifting. Traditionally shoplifters stole while not being observed (which is why they disappear in the "shrink" category and nobody can say how much of it was criminal--by employees or customers). Other ways of stealing from shops are brazen stealing in the open and organized smash and grab attacks. Both of these seem become more common. They involve a degree of violence (or threat of violence) and are much more uncomfortable than the old sneaky ways. Maybe that is why there is such a brouhaha.
Pharmacies are closing for two reasons. (1) PBMs, pharmaceutical benefit managers have taken the profit out of filling prescriptions which carried a lot of marginal stores. (2) Over-expansion, mergers and acquisitions have weakened balance sheets amplifying the impact of even minor business changes. The US has a lot more retail than most developed nations, so there's a good chance we're going to see a lot more closures.
Employee theft is very much shoplifting also, so I fail to see why we should consider it as some manner of separate phenomenon.
That thing you're worried about (retailers making up shoplifting statistics to justify price hikes, or maybe shoplifting really is bad)? Kevin Drum doesn't really have anything to add to the conversation but he'll still post a few hundred words about it.