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Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores
- steve76 5y agoPlagues and barbarity go hand in hand. A few become obscure and cure disease and advance humanity. Everyone punching each other and stealing and killing each other miss out on it and die.
- PaulHoule 5y ago"Pawnshop" is the wrong word. A "Pawnshop" takes your goods for collateral and loans you money. A "fence" is somebody who helps thieves sell stolen goods. A pawnshop might be a front for fencing, but Amazon doesn't function as a pawnshop at all. [This comment was a reaction to the title of this post, which was fortunately changed.]
- andy_ppp 5y agoI’m actually surprised no-one has set up an online pawnshop, Klarna meets eBay.
- 55555 5y agoShipping costs make this probably a bad idea.
- Cerium 5y agoYou would have to do it as a social marketplace. You could post the items you want to pawn and local independent 'shops' could offer the item. Essentially, a reverse Craigslist with pawn dynamics backed by eBay style profiles and feedback.
- quakeguy 5y agoThat sounds like a good idea tbh.
- wil421 5y agoIt would be way too easy to scam them. Pawnshops need to validate the quality of the item and determine if it’s legit. Most Pawnshops will also sell on ebay.
- andy_ppp 5y agoThis is exactly what people said about eBay, no?
- wil421 5y agoHow can I put this. The clientele who are using eBay is not quite the same as Pawnshops. I’ve seen someone get off a city bus with a massive TV heading into the pawnshop. I doubt the person owned the TV and the pawnshop was known as a fence. It had a walk up after hours window that was open late. Although it’s much more common for homeless people to have phones these days than when I saw this occur. Junkies will find junk that’s for sure.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI thought pawn shops were places you could sell random stuff and buy random stuff, never knew they loaned money!
- astrea 5y agoWhen you "pawn" an item, you get a short term loan with your item as collateral. If you don't pay back the loan they sell your item.
- wccrawford 5y agoWith interest, of course.
- betwixthewires 5y agoIt's the oldest form of credit, the collateralized loan.
- ninetenfour 5y ago100%. Pawnshops are basically high interest collateral loan shops. This is saying that Amazon is a fencing operation. But then again this has been a major use for eBay and similar as well.
- rtkwe 5y agoThey're not great places to take stolen goods either, at least not generically, for anything with a serial number or distinct characteristics. Every item that get's pawned or sold in a store goes into a searchable database like LeadsOnline [0]. My family owns a number of pawn shops and we got a very low number of stolen items, the most common was someone stealing from family. [0] https://www.leadsonline.com/main/index.php https://www.leadsonline.com/main/index.php
- bko 5y ago> The target was no ordinary shoplifter. He was part of a network of organized professionals, known as boosters, whom CVS had been monitoring for weeks. The company believed the group responsible for stealing almost $50 million in products over five years from dozens of stores in Northern California. The story isn't about people selling stolen goods on Amazon. It's about organized theft operations. One way to stop theft is to reduce the ability to sell stolen goods, but that infringes on ownership rights of a large number of people that want to sell things online. I'm sure large corporations would love it if you can't buy their goods second hand. At the end of the day, protecting property rights is a job for the state. Since it sounds its being organized, the criminal organization might be exploiting recent changes in sentencing and prosecution: > Retail investigators blame changes in sentencing laws in some states for an uptick in thefts. In California, a 2014 law downgraded the theft of less than $950 worth of goods to a misdemeanor from a felony. Target recently reduced its operating hours in five San Francisco stores, citing rising thefts.
- tyoma 5y agoThe felony theft limit for Texas is $2,500, but their retail establishments do not report massive shoplifting sprees. Clearly there is more than misdemeanor/felony classification at work here.
- Workaccount2 5y agoI'm pretty sure in CA it's that police do not respond to calls for anything less than felony theft. So it creates a situation where you can walk in the store, grab what you want, and then walk out with out having the police called or anyone legally allowed to stop you.
- ceejayoz 5y ago> So it creates a situation where you can walk in the store, grab what you want, and then walk out with out having the police called or anyone legally allowed to stop you. Walmart and Target, among others, reportedly monitor small thefts and let you get up to the felony threshold over multiple incidents before swooping in.
- N1H1L 5y agoI thought that was EBay?
- chrisxcross 5y agohttps://archive.is/s4S8a https://archive.is/s4S8a
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JackFr 5y agoMods, please correct headline. This hardly a story about Amazon. It's a story of how Northern California's choice not to prosecute theft has resulted in a massive increase in criminal activity. That CVS has to privately hire security in the face of $10 million/year of goods being brazenly looted out of its stores has little to do with any Amazon policy and more to do with the policies adopted by local district attorneys.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoThe clickbait/bias just gets more and more brazen.
- adolph 5y agoLarge numbers without a comparison are difficult to understand. Is 10M a large or small number in this context? CA has 1,180 CVS pharmacies. [0] Northern CA has 40% of CA pop. [1] Assuming regular distribution of CVSes in CA, there are 472 in Northern CA. 10M is 21k/store. Is that a lot? Not certain. 0. https://www.scrapehero.com/largest-pharmacies-in-the-us/ https://www.scrapehero.com/largest-pharmacies-in-the-us/ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_California
- CrimsonRain 5y ago100% this.
- axus 5y agoI wonder if the savings to society for police/court time is worth the increased cost of goods from shops paying for their own security? Will this become another barrier to entry for small businesses?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoCan you link to some sources on this? edit: I'd seen this mentioned recently, but hadn't realised it was a long running culture war thing so it had already been discredited by research years ago: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2018/05/22/states-can-safely-raise-their-felony-theft-thresholds-research-shows https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aurizon 5y agoBack in the old days, you asked for items the clerk got them and you paid. There was too much theft in the old days for open shelves. Now we leave it open and trust - which has now been massively abused has expanded to fill that void. The clerks were labor intensive, but the similar robots to used in Amazon warehouses could serve people at a screen, the order assembled, paid and then handed to the client - much like online order and deliver - but in person. These huge costs will force this. Small stores will go to the old one at a time model service - most do this with cigarettes and liquor. It is a fine tuning of the retail chain that I feel will inexorable be forced upon us.
- jellicle 5y agoNobody working on wage theft by employers, by far the largest organized theft ring running.
- EarthIsHome 5y agoWage theft reported in Iowa using unpaid overtime as an example: http://www.iowapolicyproject.org/images/150818-wagetheft-Fig2-486283.jpg http://www.iowapolicyproject.org/images/150818-wagetheft-Fig... EPI has some good articles as well: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
- conductr 5y agoThe EPI article gives some interesting & specific examples of wage theft. However, I think that term and the discussion around it gives the impression that large corporations are looking for opportunities to steal employees wages. When I skim these examples I see a few honest mistakes / bad policies but mostly small likely bankrupt/distressed companies trying to keep the wheels from falling off their business. It's like a ponzi scheme falling apart, payroll checks bounce, tips get stolen, employees are asked to do something while clocked out, etc. Because many businesses have insufficient working capital, this just happens. Let's take a relative look at the problem > wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year. $50B / $6.5T [0] = 0.77% of wages are "stolen" While not good and $50B is a huge amount, I'd argue this is not much of a problem but a rounding error. Unless we require some level of capitalization or reserves by small businesses, a large portion of this will never go away. I would be shocked if even half the restitutions were paid, this forced bankruptcy for most of these businesses I would guess. [0]: https://www.bls.gov/cew/publications/employment-and-wages-annual-averages/2012/chart-data.htm https://www.bls.gov/cew/publications/employment-and-wages-an...
- noasaservice 5y agoIf employee steals from store, they're fired and arrested. If store steals from an employee, they're told to pound sand at a state level office and hope and pray that some mid-level bureaucrat looks into the issue and writes a "stern letter".
- Gunax 5y ago> Retail investigators blame changes in sentencing laws in some states for an uptick in thefts. In California, a 2014 law downgraded the theft of less than $950 worth of goods to a misdemeanor from a felony. Target recently reduced its operating hours in five San Francisco stores, citing rising thefts. I think this is an example of conflating two classes of crime. There are effectively two classes of shoplifter: the professional and the desperate amateur. The activists who wanted the sentencing reduction probably did not have organised gangs in mind. But the gangs are taking advantage of the light rules. This is something we miss a lot in discussions of crime. For instance, laws against possession exist because of the crimes associated with drug use. People who use drugs who wouldn't otherwise cause any crime are a sort of collateral damage of these rules. It's often remarked how drug laws are disproportionately enforced against the poor, but I have always regarded that as a feature and not a mistake (as awful as that is for equality under the law). No one really cares about the banker snorting coke because he isn't robbing gas stations to get his fix.
- throwaway894345 5y ago> But the gangs are taking advantage of the light rules. Not only that, but it incentivizes amateurs to become professionals. Theft becomes a viable career under lax laws. And crime begets poverty, so I suspect this creates quite a few more "desperate amateurs" some of whom will become professionals and so on.
- AlexandrB 5y ago> And crime begets poverty... Doesn't this get cause and effect backwards? You have no job, no prospects, so you turn to crime. How does the reverse narrative work?
- josephcsible 5y agoThe store can't afford to stay open because of all the crime, so it closes and lays off all its employees, who are now all in poverty.
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- paulpauper 5y agoI would hope so or expect so. How is this news surprising.
- kneel 5y agoGoing to CVS is a timesink now that I have to walk around and ask employees to open cases for me. Why can't they use vending machines?
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoHang on, we’ve had literally thousands of years with stores where you could pick up an item and run away, but don’t. There is now are organized shoplifting crime groups, and your solution is to design specialized vending machines for teeth whitening strips, phone chargers, etc? I’m not saying it is a net good to deploy violence on poor people. But don’t you suppose that society would benefit overall if there were physical and clear legal consequences to shoplifting? Or do you really want the world to use vending machines for everything? Aren’t you concerned about climate change? Where do you suppose all those vending machines would come from what how are they powered?
- kneel 5y agoI found vending machines on amazon, problem solved
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoInitially I was considering this would be farming more senseless production to China where you can feel good about the pollution because it isn’t seen, it isn’t tallied, and they won’t conform to economic policies designed to curb it. Ignoring the potential for slave labor and poor working conditions. Then you have the shipping of vending machines from China to all over the USA. Power, parts, these are made cheaply to fail so probably while more replacements than parts. All to treat 99% of people like criminals because we lack the conviction to actually do something about a shoplifting problem. But I have changed my mind. I was not aware vending machines are available on Amazon.
- fortran77 5y agoThese aren't "poor people." They make a good tax-free living from stealing.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoThis appears to be part of a long running PR campaign by large corporations that are happy to lock up poor, mentally-ill and drug-addicted people at the taxpayers expense if it lets them fear monger, while at the same time stealing from their own employees. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2018/05/22/states-can-safely-raise-their-felony-theft-thresholds-research-shows https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/... https://www.npr.org/2020/10/16/923844907/when-shoplifting-is-a-felony-retailers-back-harsher-penalties-for-store-theft https://www.npr.org/2020/10/16/923844907/when-shoplifting-is... https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/San-Francisco-s-shoplifting-panic-desperately-16327614.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/San-Fr... There's some telltale signs that people are trying to swap between thefts and violent organized theft in a dishonest way, trying to conflate the two. They're also using it as cover for closing stores that they were going to close anyway.
- black_13 5y agoYes i have seen the articles to much if the same content in different places to be spontaneous
- thatguy0900 5y agoLet's suppose there is a real problem with shoplifters effectively being immune from punishment, would you expe t there to be little news coverage?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- president 5y agoI don't care if they're rich, poor, mentally-ill, or drug-addicted - if someone breaks the law, there needs to be some sort of punishment. Letting them off is just enabling repeat offense and signaling to other criminals that this behavior is tolerated as we have seen.
- 5y ago
- black_13 5y agoIve gone to many retail stores at night an they have almost no one working there they are victims of efficiency and the people working there dont care about the store they are not paid enought to care ... if your making 7 dollars an hour in a retail store in Boston you by default hate your employer
- legitster 5y agoA friend of mine is a manager at a Safeway. He says a typical store might lose six figures worth of product in a year. In a bad neighborhood it's not uncommon to lose over a million dollars a year. They hire security personnel, but people figure out that a) even when security catches you, they are not allowed to restrain you and b) the police do not respond to shoplifters (in certain jurisdictions they are not allowed to. The stores are responsible for the cost of missing inventory - they credit it back to the manufacturers. Stores already run tight margins, so this cost ends up getting paid by reduced headcount at stores (except for security, if it's bad enough) and directly in prices. And this is in the grocery space, where there's very little secondary market for the stolen goods!
- 13of40 5y agoI noticed my local Home Depot has done away with the security tag scanners at the front of the store, apparently in favor of a cluster of new cameras above all the exits. I wonder if we're headed for just having an AI watch everyone all the time in the store like the automatic-purchase grocery stores Amazon was setting up. Either that or they discovered that it was better for their bottom line to put real security around the power tools than bust people for stealing trivial things.
- sjg007 5y agoUltimately high value things will get secured behind a clerk where you take a picture card of what you want to them. Stores will use cameras and AI to build a comprehensive case against someone or group and then notify the police. That will be enough for a warrant etc... Probably a startup or two in this space. I am sure home depot or CVS will invest in your series A.
- sjg007 5y agoInterestingly I was in Best Buy and this is what they’ve done.
- DavidPeiffer 5y agoFrom a month ago, they're working on some new methods where power tools won't work until they're activated at the register. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28035458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28035458
- matrix 5y agoAmazon's co-mingling of inventory facilitated large-scale theft by enabling stolen goods to be sold along-side legitimately sourced items. One has to wonder: at what point does Amazon's reluctance to improve supply-chain integrity venture into the territory of aiding and abetting crime?
- swayvil 5y agoUBI might fix this. Criminals, as a rule, aren't doing it for lulz. It's like the free speech problem. Don't combat the bad by trying to stamp it out. Combat it by providing a better option.
- frockington1 5y agoWouldn't people just collect UBI AND steal? The article explicitly mentions that most of the people doing this are also receiving state and feral unemployment benefits
- swayvil 5y agoIf UBI (or feral benefits) fulfilled their needs then I doubt that they would resort to crime.
- missedthecue 5y agoFor some reason, I just don't think the people described in this article are moving millions and millions of dollars of makeup and over-the-counter drugs every year in order to keep their basic needs met.
- luckylion 5y ago> Wouldn't people just collect UBI AND steal? Yes, they would. Great example: Turkish + Arab Clans in Germany. They usually collect benefits, aren't asked to work, and are heavily involved into crime.
- president 5y agoNever understood the point of UBI. We have food stamps, welfare, and a wide assortment of government safety net programs. UBI would just be all those things on steroids. Why would hard working people want their tax money going to others who aren't contributing? The whole concept would lead to mass dependency on the government, which is the worst thing that could happen.
- keeganpoppen 5y ago
- victorbstan 5y agoWhat’s the point of police or security guards?
- josephcsible 5y agoWhen the prosecutor refuses to prosecute anyone, there's no point at all.
- bluedino 5y agoI worked at a mall in the 90's in two different stores. One was a clothing store, and 'home shoppers' made up the majority of the thefts. The way it works, is you 'place an order', and someone from the theft ring steals what you want, and in a few days you get your items at a discount from the 'home shopper'. I remember my dad would buy some random clothing items from a friend of a friend who had things in the trunk of his car. I never thought much of it. When I worked at JC Penny I then saw how it worked. You'd have random individual shoplifters (they'd leave all the tags and stuff from the clothes in the bathrooms or dressing rooms), or you'd have multiple shoplifters come in at once, fill their carts and then dash out the door, getaway car waiting for them. Store security couldn't do much, if you tackled the people you'd get fired, so the best defense was to jam up the automatic doors with empty shopping carts, that way they could only leave with what they could fit in their hands. It wasn't much different at the electronics store I worked at afterward. PC add-in cards would end up missing, empty boxes found in the appliances on the other end of the store, sliced open so they could be fished out the bottom. There go the new $300 3Dfx cards... And the organized shoplifters came in at night, just before close. You'd have 5-6 people come in, and all head for the CD aisle. We'd page for customer assistance, and anyone still working in the store would head over. They'd fill their coats with CD's and again run out the door, getaway car waiting. All you can do is get them on camera, record the description or license plate of the car, and let the police know, and let the other stores know. Our internal email system had a ongoing thread of the shoplifters they'd seen lately, because they would hit every store in the state.
- Proven 5y agoThey could simply donate to Republican election campaigns.
- adamqureshi 5y agoBoosting has been going on since the 90's in NYC. Back in the day i used to work on 34th/7th ave in NYC s selling leather jackets in a rinky-dink store about 500 square fee. The boosters came in groups some from Brooklyn some from uptown. They would boost across the street from Macy's and sell the stolen goods right across the street or on the streets. They would go store to small shops and sell Georgio armani , versace to the employees who worked there and to tourists on the streets ( those brands where hot back then) some boosters even started taking orders,. there were independent operators( not with the pack) and others who would roll with the pack. Each booster specialized in boosting a product. Some would only do designer clothing while others would lift electronics and they would sell to tourists on the street or store clerks working in shops, I even bought a nice Armani suite from them one day. They had figured out how to beat all security alarms in macy's and someone then figured out that you could return what you stole from Macy’s without a receipt during the holidays so boosters then started to return what they stole back to Macy’s and Macy’s would cut them a check for it. This was around 1995. Some boosters tried to lift stuff from the store I was working in and I had to go and stop them , one time we had throw down right in front of our store to get the leather jackets back. I even had to go run after a few. Macy’s security guards can’t do jack. The cops had more important things todo I guess. The boosters would grab and bag and just run out the door and into the train and vanish. They had some aluminum foil around the bag they put the stuff in so the alarms did not go off. They would go downtown. Uptown and after the city got to HOT they started going to the suburban malls. It was like a syndicate. I guess it’s still happening now.
- gryz 5y agoCould a setup like with Amazon Go stores help here? Let in only customers with a verified account.
- CameronNemo 5y agoMaybe. That would be the last place I shop, though.
- josephcsible 5y agoThe shoplifter gangs will just jump over the turnstiles. I imagine any store impervious to this attack wouldn't meet fire safety requirements.
- MichaelZuo 5y agoHuh? Have you never seen turnstiles with tall plastic barriers? It would take quite a lot of strength to jump over 4–5 feet.
- AlexandrB 5y agoThere's an irony to the top comment on an article about organized shoplifting being a link to archive.is to get around the paywall. Especially given all the "tough on crime" and "rule of law" talk in the comments.
- josephcsible 5y agoReading the article doesn't make it disappear from the website. If I went to a bookstore, read one of their books in the store, then put it back on the shelf and left without buying anything, would you consider that to be shoplifting too?
- AlexandrB 5y agoNo, obviously not. But if you scanned the book, put it on archive.is and invited all the visitors to Hacker News to read it I think that might be copyright infringement. IANAL so setting the precise legality aside, in terms of economic harm (which many here have brought up regarding shoplifting), how is this different?
- josephcsible 5y agoIf I just told archive.is the title of a book, and they went to get it and scanned it in and put it on their website, they might be guilty of copyright infringement, but I don't think I would be.
- canada_dry 5y agoRight before the pandemic the gov't run liquor stores in Ontario were being robbed of stock in the middle of the day. Staff called police and then stood back. If police bothered to appear it was usually hours later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_t5WHvPv1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_t5WHvPv1g Possibly organized boosting, but as soon as word spread it became wildly popular for a few weeks.
- haOk 5y agoCorporations don’t want to pay taxes so they can be rich in the first place, now they’re mad what tax dollars there are won’t be spent on them? WSJ is manufacturing consent to smack talk government. If they don’t owe paying taxes, the public does not owe them public services.
- hamburgerwah 5y agoIn my experience retailers are lying in a bed of their own making. They have had more than a decade to implement RFID based UPCs and have steadfastly resisted it at every turn because of the few pennies it adds in the supply chain. While not perfect RFID allows for much better security controls that the status quo. Instead they continue to underinvest in adequate technology skills and will just rely on shady third party, privacy destroying, false positive generating facial recognition.
- tzs 5y agoHow would RFID help? The issue is that when they do catch someone shoplifting the stores do not want to apprehend them themselves for various legitimate reasons such as safety of their employees and customers, liability if they make mistake, and police that will not come and arrest the caught shoplifter (either they have too much other more serious crime to deal with, or the prosecutor's office won't prosecute). RFID tags would not address any of that.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoIf the # of crimes goes up 10x or 20x, and the police department stays the same size, you really think they are going to triage chasing down all the petty crime?
- barnesto 5y agoMaybe spend those millions on lobbying state and local governments to address the reasons this has become a problem in the first place. Also, all either does is make the products we have to purchase that much more expensive since, you know, the retailers are passing those expenses to customers.
- kibblesalad 5y agoMost of it is fabricated and fudged statistics as part of publications catering to corporate PR and the pro-surveillance narrative anyway: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-organized-crime-shoplifting-epidemic-panic-hits-san-francisco-media https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-organized-crim...
- rossdavidh 5y agoOne possible scenario: more and more stores like pharmacies where there aren't as many people "window shopping" or shopping for fun anyway, therefore not much spontaneous shopping to lose out on, will become pickup-only places where you cannot physically enter the store, you can only buy online and pick up at the window. It would probably require less square footage and less direct labor.
- ffggvv 5y agoremember when the police used to do it before they got defunded. now the richest corporations can buy private police to protect them and small business are left without any defense
- Avshalom 5y agohttps://twitter.com/mkonikov/status/1433413878285848578 https://twitter.com/mkonikov/status/1433413878285848578
- mukundesh 5y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplifting-epidemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift... "The retail executives and police officers emphasized the role of organized crime in the thefts. And they told the supervisors that Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot measure that reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors if the stolen goods are worth less than $950, had emboldened thieves."
- TekMol 5y agoretail theft accounts for around $45 billion in annual losses Is that in the USA alone? Anyhow. Another 45 billion reasons ecommerce and crypto currencies will grow. You cannot steal a product from a website. And you cannot make fake payments with Bitcoin.
- AniseAbyss 5y agoStores are switching to self checkout. Clearly the math works out for them but it makes stealing a lot easier.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Clearly the math works out for them but it makes stealing a lot easier. It makes outsider theft easier, but it also reduces the number of staff needed, and the majority of theft (from my understanding from people who have worked in Loss Prevention, the overwhelming majority) from retail establishments is insider theft.
- say_it_as_it_is 5y agoCalifornia is racing to the bottom, isn't it?
- black_13 5y agoWhat the could do is engage and pay there employees a living way and say promote stewardship of the neighborhoods the do business in?