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Retailers say thefts are at crisis level. The numbers say otherwise
- proc0 5y agoWhat is this article?! What's the point? It's seemingly arguing in favor of ignoring the crime by downplaying it. That's crazy, and also probably part of the problem. Article makes no mention of the policies that explicitly prevent authorities from apprehending shoplifters, from lowering requirements of arrest for less than ~$900 value, to defunding the police. There is no mention of any of this, yet it still tries to justify this by alluding to how little impact it causes on the large corporation. Not only is that besides the point, but think about the wellbeing of the store workers, and the customers witnesses, which will certainly change their behavior adding to the losses in the long run. TL;DR: garbage
- satronaut 5y agoLA times for ya
- bopbeepboop 5y ago
- croes 5y agoSure? "Proposition 47 did not end prosecution of thefts under $950 in California" https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-160551360299 https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-160551360299
- nicolashahn 5y agoThis states that thefts under $950 are still illegal, but the actual amount of prosecution that happens is still up to the DA. I'm interested in how many of these cases (as a percentage) are actually prosecuted.
- jeffbee 5y agoAll prosecutions are at the discretion of prosecutors.
- santoshalper 5y agoProbably not many, because prosecuting a case in court is expensive, resources are finite, and doing a trial or grand-jury for $500 is difficult to justify.
- jeffbee 5y agoNot mentioned in the article: the same threshold dollar amount has long been in force in Texas and other states. California was the outlier.
- _-david-_ 5y agoTexas has far more lax gun laws. If somebody was robbing a store they could very easily be shot and the police wouldn't bat an eye. Good luck trying to do that in California.
- jeffbee 5y agoI suggest you consult the Texas Penal Code or an attorney before drawing that conclusion. In no state is there a defense against using deadly force to stop someone fleeing from the theft of a third person's property. If you used deadly force against some guy who ran out of the Walgreens with an armload of cough syrup, you'd attract a manslaughter charge, minimum.
- _-david-_ 5y agoTexas Penal Code Sec. 9.41 talks about this. https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._penal_code_section_9.41 https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._penal_code_section_9.... There are multiple cases where people have argued they were justified in shooting a thief and won. I am only aware of people who owned the business themselves not employees, so there could be issues there. In California you almost certainly won't win in a case like that. In Texas depending on the situation you very easily could. It is of course not a guarantee and if the person is running away and you shoot them in the back you will probably lose.
- gotoeleven 5y agoThe issue is whether crimes are being prosecuted and criminals are actually prevented simply stealing some more the next day. This typifies why most of the fact checks from mainstream media organizations are worse than useless.. they're literally anti-informative. But left wingers get to keep feeling smug while they wonder why all the walgreens are leaving town...
- santoshalper 5y agoThe point is that the supposed wave of retail crime sweeping the nation is probably bullshit, or in the very least there is no data to support it, which I would expect would be important to people reading HN.
- proc0 5y agoThere are videos floating around, and many people in these cities like SF/LA can tell you of some experience. If calling out the large retail store's bullshit is the point, then I would find a breakdown of that dollar estimate interesting, but it seems the intention is to turn a blind eye, potentially making things even worse by keeping people in denial.
- mcguire 5y agoAnd viral videos make a great basis for government policy.
- sp332 5y agoEven if it's decriminalized, it's still a violation and the police can still show up and stop it (like a speeding ticket). Police have not been defunded. They don't show up because they are protesting the new district attorney and trying to make him look bad.
- nicolashahn 5y agoOr they know that the DA will not prosecute, so why bother.
- sp332 5y agoThey can still protect the business, and issue a fine or some deterrent.
- cgriswald 5y agoThe police in a nearby town were explicitly forbidden from issue citations or removing the residents of an unofficial homeless encampment that took over a city street two blocks from the police station, a county jail, and an official homeless encampment. Piles of stolen bikes. Harassment of employees and customers at local businesses. Frequent trespassing. Assaults of other homeless people, sometimes with weapons. Vandalism. All totally fine. It took years and the death of a homeless person by being burned alive for the 'compassionate' city council to do something about the problem. Their solution was to put up 2-hour parking signs—it was already illegal to park for more than 72 hours—and finally allow the police to do their job.
- gotoeleven 5y ago[flagged]
- beervirus 5y agoArticle: thisisfine.jpg But if the retailers are closing up shop, it is not fine. They wouldn’t forego the profits this article assumes exist just to make a political point.
- glasss 5y agoI think the purpose of the article is to point out that a large retail association / corporate interest group is most likely lying to push an agenda or policies of their own. I don't believe the group's claims of damages. Could you visualize stealing 3.6 Billion dollars worth of retail items in just San Francisco and Oakland a year? Making up such a figure serves no one any good, especially not your own interests because it reduces your credibility.
- proc0 5y agoMany stores have closed, and it wouldn't be a stretch to connect a bad shopping experience to lower sales, to then having to close the store, which could easily be millions of dollars that year. We can argue whether that was the only factor for these closed stores, but it's certainly a factor. It can still be an exaggerated number, but not only does the article offer no details as to how exactly this number was determined (which would have been interesting), it also fails to mention the potential intentions of why stores would report that... maybe it's the only way to get some attention to UNDO some of the legislation that has caused it.
- mcguire 5y agoArguing that perhaps you shouldn't make policy on the basis of rumors and viral videos?
- slibhb 5y agoWitnessing people going into a store and taking stuff feels dangerous, very wild west, and it seems symbolic of a decaying social order. I know that's an ill defined complaint but I suppose I trust my gut more than "eh in dollar terms it's a write off".
- iszomer 5y ago
- forgotmyoldacc 5y agoThat's not what banality of evil means: "evil acts are not necessarily perpetrated by evil people. Instead, they can simply be the result of bureaucrats dutifully obeying orders".
- iszomer 5y agoHow are store owners "allowing" their stores to be looted not considered as such, in relation to not prosecuting thefts under $950 by state law?
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoThere was a smash and grab this weekend at a jewelry store in a large, crowded mall in Austin, TX, which resulted in a lockdown because people mistakenly thought there were gunshots. I was surprised at the sheer brazenness of the theft - the jewelry store is basically smack dab in the middle of the mall, and the theft occurred during a crowded Sat evening, so it's not like the thieves were attempting to get out undetected. What many people are reacting to is the clear belief by thieves that they won't be confronted or significantly prosecuted, and that breakdown in the social fabric is what many people are reacting to.
- 5y ago
- yasp 5y agoWhen a crime is effectively decriminalized, your crime numbers that depend on the victimized reporting it become garbage.
- croes 5y agoThat doesn't make the claim of 25% loss from theft plausible.
- dymk 5y agoHow would you know?
- quaunaut 5y agoDo you have any data to back that up? In the case listed above, they have reason to report in insurance claims, yet it isn't manifesting there either.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
- threatofrain 5y agoThese are internal numbers reported by an industry retail group. Stores are free to account for shrinkage however they wish.
- draw_down 5y ago
- engineer_22 5y agohttps://archive.md/GNjpI https://archive.md/GNjpI
- croes 5y agoMaybe the retailers learned from the movie industry. We all know the billions and billions of dollars they lost because of pirated movies.
- hef19898 5y agoOh yeah, the first first people to accurately calculate not-realized sales figures.
- beervirus 5y agoLoss as a percentage of sales is an odd way of quantifying it. Loss as a percentage of net profit seems like a better figure of merit.
- xboxnolifes 5y agoLoss of net profit can get weird (editorially) when losses exceed profit or when net profit is negative.
- beervirus 5y agoSure, but people understand negative numbers. The pony is that if my profit margins are slim, then a smallish loss in theft can be a big deal. Comparing theft loss to gross sales just obscures the reality.
- xboxnolifes 5y agoPeople may understand negative numbers, but if I read a title that said "Retail theft accounts for -15% of net profit for Walmart", I'd be pretty confused. Hell, I'd say comparing theft to gross sales is most fitting comparison, as it's the cost that the consumer actually sees. 50% of gross sales would mean for each 2 sales of an item, 1 gets stolen. Maybe it doesn't give a good view of how much it impacts a business with theft being priced in, but it sure does paint a good picture of how much theft happens.
- bdowling 5y agoYou can easily avoid negative percentages by rephrasing. e.g., "Walmart profits are down 15% because of retail theft." Theft loss makes sense to present in relation to profits because the thieves in these cases resell the goods. The profits that the retailer would have made are literally transferred to the thief. The retailer still has its fixed expenses (rent, utilities, labor), so the theft basically comes directly out of the bottom line.
- bdowling 5y ago
- delecti 5y agoThe situation with the "crisis" feels very manufactured consent. Right around the time "defund the police" is getting serious attention, suddenly there's a crisis of theft to take the wind out of the movement.
- hammock 5y ago>Right around the time "defund the police" is getting serious attention Which was, itself, a response to another crisis...
- delecti 5y agoI've been hearing about police defunding/abolition for longer than just since last year. It just only got a jolt of attention because there was a 9 minute filmed incident that was pretty unambiguous. "Give the police lots of money" has been the status quo for a long time, and there's also been pushback against that for a long time.
- cowmoo728 5y agoI think there's a simpler explanation. The theft crowd and the "defund the police" crowd have semi-independently come to the conclusion that policing and legal systems are not very good at stopping or preventing most crime.
- chrischen 5y agoThese types of crimes are indicators of underlying social and societal flaws. America has a very high incarceration rate. Either our people genetically are just predisposed to crime or we’re doing something wrong with our policies, governing, and equality.
- tomjen3 5y agoI would like to see the stats with people who are in prison for low level drug offenses taken out. I suspect the numbers would start to be much closer to the European numbers. I personal theory is that there are two types of criminals - normal people who do the occasionally stupid thing (stealing a single item from retail or getting into a bar fight), and people who make crime their career path. The US model is to treat everybody as being in the latter group, while the Scandinavian model is to treat everybody as being in the first group. Instead we should treat people based on who they are, even if that means very different sentences for the same crime to different people.
- danschumann 5y agoI discovered this form of theft in 2003 ... In high school, I realized I could fill my cart, commit no crime until I was near the exit of the store, then transfer the items from cart to a shopping bag, and walk out without paying, running halfway around the block to my car (No plates on camera). I later believed in karma when there was a break in and only my stolen dvds(as well as my entire collection) were taken.
- arrakis2021 5y agoImagine 10 years ago if someone posted videos like the ones we see today of flash mobs shoplifting major retailers, or of stores literally BOARDING UP their windows in major urban centers. there would be no discussion, no debate, no “deconstruction of modern crime” - none of this handwringing pseudo-intellectual nonsense. In 2010 This would have been handled. Not sure what changed but these cities and their bureaucrats really don’t seem to care. People, however, do care about themselves, their families and their businesses. if this continues you can expect a major outflow of people, capital and talent.
- tayo42 5y agothere's nothing different about 2010. How do you think it would have been handled? People are just realizing what they can get a way with. I worked reatil in 2010, if there was a shoplifter we were told to let it go, same as now. Police don't patrol retail stores
- simplestats 5y agoI remember Fry's used to have cops visiting daily to pick up the shoplifters they had detained. I think policies tended to be more along the lines of try to detain them, but if they become dangerous to let them go. Just watching a thief pocket something and walk out the door without saying a word to them seems nuts. I still have difficulty believing this happens in most of the country, apart from urban areas. Certainly where I live there's lots of employes working in stores and no homeless around. meanwhile downtown the stores all seem to have minimal staff and incidents seem to be pretty common.
- Jochim 5y agoWhy should any retail worker stick their neck out for a company that's probably paying them close to minimum wage?
- UncleMeat 5y agoCould you imagine if “law and order” folks cared about wage theft remotely as much as they care about this?
- onphonenow 5y agoA number of 0.07% is ludicrously low I have a relative who worked at Walgreens in the bay area. Mind blowing daily theft. The walgreen shut down. Local politicians say theft is falling. But at least this location did not report each theft - it wasn't worth it, they'd be busy filling out forms to report theft all day and even if caught nothing would happen. The big risk was actually that a thief would be caught and get hurt and then sue. There was a much higher chance of consequences for that then the theft itself. This location at least went to extreme lengths to tell employees not to stop the thefts.
- gonehome 5y agoI got my booster shot scheduled in one of the Walgreens about a week before it closed (300 gough st), this is anecdotal but it's what it felt like there. I live in dogpatch and like SF (the area I live is nice). The shelves were 90% empty (likely because they were closing shortly), what remained on the shelves was entirely locked down. They had one security guard. Behind the counter in the pharmacy was a sign that said "we will get through this together" that looked like it had been put up by the employees (it wasn't some corporate poster, but something that looked printed). The lighting was harsh, the employees seemed stressed out. The tiny room they took us into for the shot was dirty, and the entire place was in generally pretty poor shape. This was one of the ones that got hit a lot by people with garbage bags emptying shelves repeatedly. Relatedly the raids in Union Square also looked pretty extreme and there are lots of pictures of boarded up retail to try and prevent future raids. There's also a ton of car smash and grabs and you see a lot of window glass on the street walking around. I think London Breed's response is the right one, hopefully she's able to do what she says. This is controversial off topic politics for HN, but lots of police presence in the tenderloin, a strong crack down on dealers, and giving addicts on the street an option of treatment or prison seems like the way forward (in addition to building a lot more housing to increase supply/lower costs generally).
- CodeGlitch 5y agoI live in the UK, and what you describe sounds like a 3rd world country, and yet the US is an incredibly wealthy country. Why do you put up with this? It's pretty depressing. (Not that I'm blaming you personally in any way, I meant us citizens).
- baskethead 5y agoI saw this happen in front of my own eyes in FiDi. The manager of the Walgreens said they don’t call the police anymore because SFPD won’t even come. I don’t trust any of the numbers coming from SFPD or the government of San Francisco.
- santoshalper 5y agoBut they certainly still make insurance claims, and this supposed wave of retail crime is not showing up there either. Read the article.
- WalterBright 5y agoCertainly? If they do, their insurance rates will go up. I know if I report a reimbursable event to my insurance company, my rates will go up until the reimbursement is more than paid back, then will fall back. So I consider whether it is worth it to clam it or not.
- rp1 5y agoThe article makes no mention of changes to insurance claims.
- iamtheworstdev 5y agoMaybe I'm wrong on this, but in order to file an insurance claim wouldn't their insurance expect a police report?
- xvedejas 5y agoNot just the large chains here -- my local bodega has had, for years now, teenagers rushing in, stealing a bunch of merchandise, and leaving. This was happening pre-pandemic. The shopowner said then that he doesn't bother filing police reports anymore, they won't go after kids anyway.
- verisimi 5y agoI'm glad someone is crunching the numbers. Will this sort of breakdown prevent us from needing to present a biometric id to enter a shop in the future? (Frankly in the present too - eg Lithuania, China, France, etc.) Unfortunately I don't think so, as the id is being marketed as a health security issue, rather than a anti-theft one. And mostly it seems we accept it on health marketing grounds.
- shadowgovt 5y agoThere's a couple possible ways to interpret this information. 1) Retailers are lying (or, more likely, in the grip of a meme and convinced the numbers are spiking without any past objective data to back up the assertion) 2) Specific market sectors are being hit disproportionately hard, but it doesn't show up in the numbers because the market is growing or moving in a way that other sectors are utterly side-stepping this kind of theft. If the latter, the next thing we can predict is the collapse of sectors (given the data sources, the predicted collapse would be most of the country would be fine but California towns would suddenly find mom-and-pops decide to do something else and major chains expect large conciliation from local governments to open a franchise location in their town).
- pessimizer 5y agoThere are other ways, like 1) considering that retailers aren't actually behind the moral panic, but rather politicians who run on law-and-order platforms and the funders that back them. Funders who couldn't care less about retail theft but have a vested interest in those politicians. 2) A gang of unarmed teens robbing a store at once is good footage for the news, and now that everyone has a cellphone it'll get filmed, and since the kids aren't armed, filmed with impunity.
- al2o3cr 5y agoFFS the bootlickers in this comment section: "Just because the data shows no sign of this happening doesn't mean I can't freak out about it!"
- NoGravitas 5y agoThis is a rationalist community. If reality differs from what you'd reason out from first principles then it's reality that's wrong.
- mcguire 5y agoA rationalist community? "Never mind the data, we've seen viral videos!" That's rationalist?
- xyzzy21 5y ago"The numbers" they are using under report because most victims have stopped filing reports due the DAs in LA and SF not bother to prosecute people and bailing them out on the cheap. Further the state source is 1 year old delayed. So not contemporary or current. Then again, the LA Times is akin to CNN in being 100% leftist propaganda, all the time so they have no more credibility than the National Inquirer!
- santoshalper 5y agoThere would still be a huge uptick in retail insurance claims - but there aren't.
- lp0_on_fire 5y agoCan't make insurance claims if you don't have the police reports to back it up.
- threatofrain 5y agoThese are internal numbers and so stores are free to account for shrinkage however they wish. For many stores the process of accounting for shrinkage is a routine matter and does not require any extra process. Also I wouldn't consider the NRF to be a state source; they are an industry retail group.
- mcguire 5y ago"The numbers" used in the article mostly come from the National Retail Federation, not the Po-po. There are two main sources of crime information in the US: the FBI's reports of reported crimes, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics' surveys. (https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ntcm_2014.pdf https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ntcm_2014.pdf) The latter do not depend on police reports. "The numbers" would have to climb quite a bit to get close to peaks in 1990 or so.
- anovikov 5y agoWhy not make it mandatory (otherwise it will be a factor of competition to not have one) to install airlock-like gates in stores that sell expensive stuff, like they do in banks? These can also detect weapons. I don't think that these smash-and-grab thieves will dare to upgrade themselves to armed robberies or hostage taking in this case, because that easily carries a death penalty which, given how many cameras are everywhere, will be nearly impossible to avoid.
- WalterBright 5y agoWhen I was young, most stores displayed a bold sign "ALL SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED". I haven't seen those signs in ages.
- dymk 5y agoThey never really made sense, because stores can not and have never prosecuted for any crime - that's the job of the state and it's entirely up to the state to initiate it. Stores can pursue _civil_ lawsuits and that's it.
- bhk 5y agoThey cite numbers from 2020 covering the whole country as evidence of no uptick in 2021 in LA and the Bay Area.
- mcguire 5y agoMost of the numbers available are from 2019 or 2020, but they would have to go up quite a lot to be near where they were in 1980, 1990, or 2000.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoI really hate this extremely politicised takes. The article just tries to refute the "outlandish claim" by saying it's not "organised crime" but shoplifting and fraud as well. I don't care if it's theft by individuals, shoplifting by employees, by customers or fraud. I don't care whether it's "organised or non". There is a 70bln figure of lost products to people who got something for free. Theft is theft and it's happening because people know they won't be punished. Same as the BLM riots, this is wrong, it's symptom of a society which doesn't function properly and it damages mostly honest low earners (with increased prices from businesses having to recoup losses, increasing risk of working in retail, etc) but criminals as well (because they learn crime works and don't join the productive side of society).
- WalterBright 5y agoSome of my childhood was spent living on military bases. A friend of mine was caught shoplifting before he left the PX (the general store on the base). The MPs put him in a room, and summoned his father, an officer. In the Air Force, officers are considered responsible for the behavior of their children (on and off the base). The AF considers an officer unfit for command if he cannot control his children. The MP, with the permission of the father, gave my friend a good lecture about just what was going to happen to him if he did it again. Scared the crap out of him. Never did it again.
- Overtonwindow 5y agoThis is a rather strange article. Rather than focus on a rise in crime, and its impact on communities, it seems to fixate on this one number and downplay the problem to death.