- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
It turns out shoplifting isn’t spiraling out of control, but lawmakers are pushing for tougher penalties for low-level and nonviolent crimes anyway.
Over the last couple of years, it seemed that America was experiencing a shoplifting epidemic. Videos of people brazenly stealing merchandise from retailers often went viral; chains closed some of their stores and cited a rise in theft as the primary reason; and drugstores such as CVS and Walgreens started locking up more of their inventory, including everyday items like toothpaste, soaps, and snacks. Lawmakers from both major parties called for, and in some cases even implemented, more punitive law enforcement policies aimed at bucking the apparent trend.
But evidence of a spike in shoplifting, it turns out, was mostly anecdotal. In fact, there’s little data to suggest that there’s a nationwide problem in need of an immediate response from city councils or state legislatures. Instead, what America seems to be experiencing is less of a shoplifting wave and more of a moral panic.
…
Now, those more forgiving criminal justice policies are at risk, in part because of a perceived trend that appears to have been overblown.
You must log in or register to comment.
“a moral panic”… generating this is standard operating procedure for the people in charge.
if you want to bring the hammer down, develop ‘a moral panic’ and get those susceptible constituents to go along with it.
hate brown people? pretend there is an immigration problem. scared of homosexuals? dont ya know, theyre comin to convert your kids.
“a moral panic” is the rod conservatives use to beat their voters into submission with.
Yep, gotta agree here.
It’s not so much that there’s a conspiracy or anything that defined, but Facebook or other non-authoritative news sources create a “news-wave” (as opposed to a “crime wave”), and legislators come across it and balk.
It’s not so much that there’s a conspiracy or anything that defined,
I mean, I do think some people (maybe conservatives especially) have a psychological longing to live through a moment of crisis where they can live out a brave hero fantasy, and they’re always looking for that moment of crisis, and legislators and others are just organically responding to that, but there are definitely some organizations out there that are pushing this particular moment of crisis
I thought that was gonna be a link to the Project Veritas fraud farm but yeah, fuck the NRF too!
*>“a moral panic” is the rod conservatives use to beat their voters into submission with.
Not just conservatives.
FTA:
New York City Mayor Eric Adams speaks during a press conference on reducing shoplifting.
Edit: Apparently I don’t know shit about Eric Adams, who was not only a cop, but a supporter of the “stop and frisk” policy.
Isn’t the whole US political spectrum between some conservatives and some different conservatives who tolerate a few lefties hanging out with them too?
Pretty much between to the right of Reagan conservatives and outright fascists.
The Dem leadership hasn’t been center-left since Carter at the latest and the GOP hasn’t been a legitimate political party at all since 2015.
Fascists and extra fascists.
Yes but now it has shifted to the right yet again, so it is one fascist party and one rightwing party.
Are you assuming that just because he’s a Democrat he can’t be conservative? I hate to break it to you, but that’s not a good assumption.
Yeah, I really fucked up.
“Not just conservatives” he says and mentions fascist cop (but I repeat myself) Eric Adams as an example 🤦
Fun* fact: most of the Dem party top is conservative to the point of being to the right of Reagan
*and by “Fun” I mean tragic and infuriating
“Not just conservatives” he says and mentions fascist cop (but I repeat myself) Eric Adams as an example 🤦
Yeah, I deserved that. I didn’t do my research.
Not really a good example. As the article indicates, most of the 24 tracked cities saw an average drop in shoplifting. The main exceptions were New York and Los Angeles which saw increased shoplifting rates, especially compared to 2019. This means that Eric Adams appears to be addressing a real problem occurring in New york, vs maybe other cities which may be attempting to address non existent problems (or problems which the information we track doesn’t show).
New York and Los Angeles which saw increased shoplifting rates
Increased ARREST rates for shoplifting. Both the NYPD and the LAPD as well as the LA County Sheriff are infamous for overpolicing, especially of poor people and minorities. Add at least one “tough on crime mayor” and arrests for poverty-related crimes go up regardless of whether crime does.
This means that Eric Adams appears to be addressing a real problem
“Appears to” being the operative words.
Conservative is as conservative does.
lawmakers are pushing for tougher penalties for low-level and nonviolent crimes
Oh joy, when we did this in the 90s it ended with the Supreme Court saying there’s no issue with giving a life sentence to a father of three for stealing VHSs of children’s movies from a K-Mart. I imagine some details will change this time around, but not the important one.
These days it will be a life sentence for a single mother stealing baby formula.
I mean what fun are crippling poverty, miserable healthcare and horrific political ideologies if you can’t rub it in our face every single fuckin chance that comes around?
Citations Needed had an episode about this. Extraordinary bullshit media narrative around shoplifting
And barely a peep about corporate price gouging, wage slavery, etc etc
This is all cover for the wage theft addiction bosses have.
https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime
PBS Newshour covered this last week, too, saying it’s mostly a bullshit excuse (in whisper-talk).
Just once, I want a PBS host to bellow with the volume of a Republican that just watched the newest Project Veritas fraud 😁
Closest they come is at the beginning when they’re thanking the billionaires for their financial support.
“This episode of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me is brought to you by Capital One and FTX: what WAS in your wallet?”
woah, I never thought I’d see another listener in the wild. cool beans.
That was the point. It was a narrative shift operation.
Channel 5 did a few videos recently in SF. Really highlights shoplifting and reselling schemes that are incredibly common in that area.
I wouldn’t say it’s nation wide, but there’s definitely an issue with shoplifting in these areas with incredibly lowered penalties for shoplifting.
There’s a bunch of other things covered in this video, but there’s a good view on the shoplifting.
Quite literally less crime is occurring every year. Got to keep those private prisons filled.
Shoplifting is definitely up (I worked in the industry for 20 years). However, that doesn’t mean the retail giants weren’t using that as leverage. People are always shocked at how often it happens (pretty much constantly all day).
Literally in the comment section of an article showing that there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of increased Shoplifting. Unless you’re in the few cities seeing increased shoplifting, we’d need some more information.
The cities with the huge problems regarding shop lifting are in large part to easing up on punishments due to budget problems in the judicial system.
A source would be appreciated. My understanding is that the reasons are still being studied
Data is only going to show who they know about. That’s probably 20% of all actual shoplifting. I had a hard enough time getting my team to report shoplifting when observed due to, “it happens all the time, I don’t have time to report it” or the like. The data is definitely not close to accurate.
But the lack of reporting hasn’t changed, has it? So if the old numbers and new numbers are both underreported, can’t we still compare them and see a decline?
If only 20% is reported, and the reported number is going down, that also means the unreported 80% is going down too. That’s just how fractions and ratios work.
Come on you know that has to be false. The stores know how much they ordered and how much of it they sold. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t even know how much to order next time.
The only way they wouldn’t know how much was actually stolen is, if stolen goods are a rounding error of what they throw out day to day. (In which case we have a much more significant problem of Corporate waste on our hands)
People, yes, people still do count audits daily, at least where I worked. They also still do inventory audits regularly yearly/2x year/2x every other year depending on the volume of the store.
Throwing things out does happen but they budget for that daily/weekly/ and so on. Theft is harder to budget for especially when it’s changing. This is mostly what the giants are complaining about when they say theft is to blame for x,y,z.
Well then the data is accurate which one is it now?
You haven’t ever done inventory management I take it. Both are true.
People can’t count all the inventory in a big box store of 40,000 SKUs daily, weekly, or monthly. That’s why they have usually have a yearly, etc inventory as well (and even then it’s not 100% accurate). This is exactly why you can see on the site that they have 2 in stock but when you get there the shelf is empty (let’s assume no one actually bought the item while you were in route).
You’re right. Consistency is key. In new york apparently shoplifting reports went from 8 to 20% which could be part of the reason for the increased numbers
Last time I ran a garage sale there were a lot of shop lifters, which is insane because I was a broke artist asking for 25¢-2$ for stuff.
Gotta fill those slave pits somehow.
At what point do we fight back? I didn’t vote for these corps to lord over me.
They’re trying to build a prison!
For you and me to live in
The percentage of Americans in the prison system, prison system, has
doublednearly tripled since 1985.
Could we push for tougher penalties for things like wage theft, tax evasion, forcing employees to work off the clock, and all the rest of the shit businesses and employers do to fuck over employees? Walk They through the store, out the front door, put them in the back of the cop car and book them, just like the guy that steals a pack of underwear?
The problem is theft for sure, but it’s happening at the top of the payscales in this country, not at the bottom. People getting fucked out of decent paying jobs and a shot at the education it takes to get one. That’s what drives petty crime. Poverty.
No because those at the levers of power are fine with the crimes being done to us.
And/or: …are fine with the crimes being done by them.
Yeah when I visit boomer relatives they seem to think retail stores in big cities are war zones- and they vote, which kinda tells me there’s political support to put S.W.A.T. teams in every retail store
Shoplifting is a real and increasing problem and looking at how many cases are reported is a nonsensical metric because microscopically few issues are ever reported. I have seen this first hand and a huge uptick started well before the pandemic. The actual accelerator is the ease of monetizing gains with the rise of online marketplaces most specifically Facebook.
Once upon a time the prime way to monetize would be to sell to people like pawn shops or used goods shops willing to pay 1/4 of sticker. The only things reasonably monetizable was singular high dollar figure items like expensive tools.
Then craigslist came into being but buying such goods was inherently skeevy and your target market was inherently small and it took a lot of time per item. Again the only monteizable items are singualr high dollar figure items where it’s reasonable to spend a half hour to an hour per item meeting up. Again prices are expected to be a fraction of sticker.
Fast forward to online markets. Now you can get the majority of sticker with payment processing and shipping and tap with a few online stores into a massive portion of the populace. Now anything that isn’t insanely specific can be moved easily just list it and wait for your online shoppers to put it in their cart and take your outgoing ill gotten gains to the post office. A goddamn idiot can do it.
If you work at a store and you pay attention you can see the people you are used to see stealing selling your stores shit online. To anyone really paying attention it’s completely fucking obvious. It changes the incentive structure.
If you go to a store you will notice stores doing a LOT more to make theft less trivial. All the expensive shit and some that isn’t that expensive is behind cages, there is more loss prevention, more security in places, more prosecution of organized losers. This money isn’t spent for no reason. There are more assholes coming through and its usually the same cadre of assholes and a substantial minority are absolutely willing to threaten workers if called out.
Fuck shitty people.
But evidence of a spike in shoplifting, it turns out, was mostly anecdotal.
Shoplifting is trending up, it’s just not the moral panic Republicans made it out to be.
https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/shoplifting-statistics/
It’s also not generally driven by poor people trying to survive
Shoplifting losses grew 19.4% year-over-year; as a share of retail sales dollars, losses to theft increased 10.5%.
58% of organized retail crime is cargo theft.
So yeah dude is pretty much spot on. Check out the lists of what is typically stolen - things that are easily resold, and shit teens like (because teens steal a lot for a variety of reasons). Essentials don’t make the list anywhere
First - This article is conflating “shrink” and 'retail theft". Shrink accounts for losses including theft, but also accounts for accounting losses, damaged goods, and lost shipments. Theft itself is broken up into “external theft” and “emoyee theft”. External theft was 36% of that 1.6% ($40B). (https://cdn.nrf.com/sites/default/files/2023-09/NRF_National_Retail_Security_Survey_2023.pdf)
Second, these statics are from FY2022, which ended Jan 30th, 2023. We won’t know FY2023, as it is not over yet, so we don’t know if it is truely “trending up” or holding steady - we have ONE (1) years’ worth of data of increased shrink.
Third - shrink, according to their own statistics, ROSE between FY2021 and FY2022, yet FY2022 was on par with FY2019 (1.62%) and FY2020(1.6%), while FY2021 decreased to 1.4% - so, again… no “trend” of an increase. Also no “trend” of a decrease, for that matter. (https://cdn.nrf.com/sites/default/files/2020-07/RS-105905_2020_NationalRetailSecuritySurvey.pdf) (https://cdn.nrf.com/sites/default/files/2021-08/2021 National Retail Security Survey updated.pdf)
They even retracted their statement last month (https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-retail-lobbyists-retract-key-claim-organized-retail-crime-2023-12-06/)
Further, if we take their own data again, external theft to be that figure above ($40B), and again use the NRF’s statistics that cybercrime rose to an average of $4M per incident, you can quickly see how this idea of shoplifting being majorly problematic is erroneous. Moreover, the NRF lists shoplifting as only the third most important worry of surveyed retailers - in their own words, they are more concerned about shootings and cybercrime than inperson shoplifting.
Lastly, this all needs to be put in context. Taking the $112.1B adjustment as 1.6% of retail sales, this totals $7.1T… so, in reality, EXTERNAL THEFT (not employee theft, not product loss due to damage or shipping to the wrong place) was .00576% of total sales, and over the period of 2019 to 2022, retail profits (which are taken into acount AFTER things like theft have been factored in) have steadily increased up to the 2022 level of 5.9% (after skyrocketing in 2021 to over 13%) so even while they are claiming that retail theft is growing, even total shrink isn’t effecting their overall margins. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/197576/annual-retail-sales-in-the-us-since-1992/#:~:text=By the end of 2022,increase from the year before.) (https://www.forrester.com/blogs/us-retail-industry-sales-and-profits-trends-2001-2022-steady-growth/#:~:text=US Retail Net Profit Trends&text=The retail net margin remained,decreased to 3.3%25 in 2022.)
Now - of course this is an overall look at retail - this doesn’t take into account the individual annecdotes, or the massive differnces between small local retailers and big box stores, nor does it look into the differnces between online retailers, store fronts, and the differences in theft experienced by each (e.g. amazon is massive - are they over-representing both profit margin and shrink due to cymbercrime?).
I made a hobby out of fucking with shoplifters for YEARS. For a sample size of one store it is real and obvious.
anecdotal
Why don’t you survey a reasonable sample of individuals or observe in a random sample of stores. I think it would be fairly obvious to anyone actually on scene what is going on.
Any observations that I make would be anecdotal.
You’re the one saying a published study is wrong. Publish your own study saying otherwise.
Sure, stealing is wrong. But there’s a limit, if you’re operating a store as poorly as Dollar General, stealing from stores that actively take advantage of both the community and the staff is moral. They were receiving so much stuff that the cashier/cleaner/stocker-in-one can’t get them out of the boxes in time for the next shipment, should just be giving those boxes away.
won’t someone think of the shareholders!
/s
deleted by creator
What we need is stronger laws about white collar crimes. With mandatory prison assignments so no activist judge can send them to Club Fed.
Gotta have the public funded police protecting the corporate wealth!
“For social order we need tighter reigns! Incarceration hasn’t worked as a deterrent, I say we expand execution to include lesser crimes!” - Chief Judge Griffin, Judge Dredd (1995)
Fuck these scum bag companies
The vast majority of retail theft is by employees not customers.
