7 ms·

Piggybacking on this thread, is stealing a common thing across the whole of the US or is it restricted to some areas? I keep getting asked how people in n San F

Piggybacking on this thread, is stealing a common thing across the whole of the US or is it restricted to some areas? I keep getting asked how people in n San Francisco are living with crime so rampant and they send a video of gangs stealing from a store/mall.

balderdash 4y ago
its incredibly localized, the us is so large and heterogeneous in many respects
ipnon 4y ago
Organized retail theft is common in big cities. Most Americans do not live in big cities. This is not an issue for most Americans, and the stores they shop at do not have restrictive shelving nor go out of business do to "shrinking."
- quag 4y ago
  The "Most Americans do not live in bit cities" comment caught my eye. I wasn't sure if it was true or not, so I ran some numbers. Using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistical_areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic... Assuming 331M people in the USA, 164M (50%) live in a metropolitan area of at least 1.6M people. 189M people (57%) live in an area with at least 1M people. 230M (70%) live in an area with at least 500K people. My conclusion is that most Americans do live in big cities. However, even if all big cities have restrictive shelving practices, there are still 3 out of 10 Americans (outside of the 500K cities) that do no experience these practices. I'm in an area with 4M people and have seen the shelving practices. So I can concluded that at least 34% of Americans (who are in larger areas) have also experienced these restrictions.
  - kjeetgill 4y ago
    I'm not sure how to consider the stats you're using here. Metropolitan areas aren't cities, the whole reason for the term is to include not just adjacent suburbs, but whole adjacent cities to major urban cities. Do we really consider an hour away and for cities over living in San Francisco?
    - Macha 4y ago
      I mean, from a European perspective who has been to the bay area semi-often, SF - San Mateo - Redwood City - Palo Alto - Mountain View - Santa Clara - San Jose is pretty clearly a continuous urban area and the fact that the subdivisions are considered separate towns and cities more an anomaly of historical origins and local government setup rather than something you would decide working from the definition of town or city. In Europe, places that have been swallowed up by urban sprawl like that usually stop being called as such given time - no one persists in calling Chelsea, Charlton or Westminster cities now they're well inside the London urban area, and I suspect the same will happen to bay area towns and cities over the next 200 years unless it undergoes a significant population decline.
      - kjeetgill 4y ago
        Hm. Maybe it's just from having grown up here but to me those cities are very different places — each with a dozen neighborhoods of their own. And they range from "urban" through suburban, to isolated neighborhoods. Especially when you want to consider them in terms of stores, crime rates, foot traffic etc.
        Macha 4y ago
        Sure, but to stick with the London example, Canary Wharf, Chelsea, Westminster, Ealing and Croydon are all very different places with differing densities, land uses, socioeconomic makeup, etc.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    You're just lying with extra steps. The definition of an MSA is basically the "economic gravity well" of an urban areas. This is casually obvious just by looking at the nice green map they give you on that page. If you think some guy 2hr northwest of Bangor or 3hr out of Vegas into the Nevada desert is in an urban area I'll sell you some beach front property in Arizona.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Meanwhile in Tokyo you have self serve 24/7 convenience stores. And I’m not talking about vending machines. This is where you grab the item, enter on a screen what you got, pay for it, and walk out. No staff needed.
  - chrisjharris 4y ago
    These are still pretty rare, and there's always a member of staff present, usually at the counter right next to the self-checkout till.
  - ryan_lane 4y ago
    Though I know these exist somewhere, I haven't personally seen one in the 3 years I've been here. Petty theft does occur in Tokyo, and there's organized crime as well. You don't see this kind of organized retail theft because the police would actually investigate it, rather than do nothing and cry about "the crackdown on police rights".
ksenzee 4y ago
Right, so this is a hugely political issue right now. Don't be surprised to get wildly differing answers. Republicans are pointing at public disorder and screaming about crime, and Democrats are accusing them of being fragile suburbanites who can't handle normal urban life. I'm a left-leaning independent, and I tend to agree with Democrats on a lot of their talking points, but I will say that everywhere I go I see more public disorder than I did a few years ago. There are more locked shelves everywhere, and I think people's perceptions of crime and disorder are also affected by the fact that there are way more encampments of people living in tents and RVs (which leads to more litter on the streets etc.). I live southeast of Seattle, in a straight-up middle-class area, and our local Target now has OTC pain relief behind locked glass doors. I stopped dead and stared. I'd never seen that except in a big city. As for the issue of unhoused people, which I don't think is related to the actual crime rate but is very much related to perceptions of crime, we also have some tent encampments down in my area. In Seattle (I visit the International District weekly) a year ago there were huge tent cities under freeway overpasses, actual structures hacked together on sidewalks, people living in deplorable conditions. There have always been unhoused people in Seattle but it was an order of magnitude worse than normal. In the last several months Washington state and Seattle have made a huge effort to clear the tent cities and get people into transitional housing, and from what I can tell it's working: the sidewalk shacks are gone, the tents are gone, the areas are fenced off, and by all accounts they've gotten almost all the people living there into shelter of some kind. I'm paying attention to whether I hear less squawking about crime now that there's less visible disorder.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  How's the housing work? Victoria and Vancouver tried this by buying old hotels and turning them into apartments but they filled them with junkies and were surprised that they soon became worse than the outdoor camps. Any solution that doesn't segregate the sick can't work.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ksenzee 4y ago
thewebcount 4y ago
It’s very much specific to particular areas. In Los Angeles, a CVS or RiteAid in a less well-off area will have things behind plexiglass. The same store just outside Pepperdine (a very expensive university in the very wealthy Malibu area) has the same things and more expensive stuff just available on the shelves without restriction.
prawn 4y ago
More extreme instances likely restricted to particular areas but much more widespread is locking up seemingly cheap stuff behind cage/plastic. In Australia, spraypaint in a hardware store is locked up but often not much else that I can recall. In Home Depot in the US, power tools even in the $30-80 range can be, amongst other things. In supermarkets in most states/cities I've been to, cheap toiletries can require help from staff with a key, plus some electronics in the automotive section. Seems to be a reaction to targeted theft rather than just value of items.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
Restricted to some areas. I live in the kind of city that most HNers would sneer at (we're kind of known for being rough) and it's not like described.

balderdash 4y ago

its incredibly localized, the us is so large and heterogeneous in many respects

ipnon 4y ago

Organized retail theft is common in big cities. Most Americans do not live in big cities. This is not an issue for most Americans, and the stores they shop at do not have restrictive shelving nor go out of business do to "shrinking."

quag 4y ago
The "Most Americans do not live in bit cities" comment caught my eye. I wasn't sure if it was true or not, so I ran some numbers. Using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistical_areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic... Assuming 331M people in the USA, 164M (50%) live in a metropolitan area of at least 1.6M people. 189M people (57%) live in an area with at least 1M people. 230M (70%) live in an area with at least 500K people. My conclusion is that most Americans do live in big cities. However, even if all big cities have restrictive shelving practices, there are still 3 out of 10 Americans (outside of the 500K cities) that do no experience these practices. I'm in an area with 4M people and have seen the shelving practices. So I can concluded that at least 34% of Americans (who are in larger areas) have also experienced these restrictions.
- kjeetgill 4y ago
  I'm not sure how to consider the stats you're using here. Metropolitan areas aren't cities, the whole reason for the term is to include not just adjacent suburbs, but whole adjacent cities to major urban cities. Do we really consider an hour away and for cities over living in San Francisco?
  - Macha 4y ago
    I mean, from a European perspective who has been to the bay area semi-often, SF - San Mateo - Redwood City - Palo Alto - Mountain View - Santa Clara - San Jose is pretty clearly a continuous urban area and the fact that the subdivisions are considered separate towns and cities more an anomaly of historical origins and local government setup rather than something you would decide working from the definition of town or city. In Europe, places that have been swallowed up by urban sprawl like that usually stop being called as such given time - no one persists in calling Chelsea, Charlton or Westminster cities now they're well inside the London urban area, and I suspect the same will happen to bay area towns and cities over the next 200 years unless it undergoes a significant population decline.
    - kjeetgill 4y ago
      Hm. Maybe it's just from having grown up here but to me those cities are very different places — each with a dozen neighborhoods of their own. And they range from "urban" through suburban, to isolated neighborhoods. Especially when you want to consider them in terms of stores, crime rates, foot traffic etc.
      - Macha 4y ago
        Sure, but to stick with the London example, Canary Wharf, Chelsea, Westminster, Ealing and Croydon are all very different places with differing densities, land uses, socioeconomic makeup, etc.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  You're just lying with extra steps. The definition of an MSA is basically the "economic gravity well" of an urban areas. This is casually obvious just by looking at the nice green map they give you on that page. If you think some guy 2hr northwest of Bangor or 3hr out of Vegas into the Nevada desert is in an urban area I'll sell you some beach front property in Arizona.
Gigachad 4y ago
Meanwhile in Tokyo you have self serve 24/7 convenience stores. And I’m not talking about vending machines. This is where you grab the item, enter on a screen what you got, pay for it, and walk out. No staff needed.
- chrisjharris 4y ago
  These are still pretty rare, and there's always a member of staff present, usually at the counter right next to the self-checkout till.
- ryan_lane 4y ago
  Though I know these exist somewhere, I haven't personally seen one in the 3 years I've been here. Petty theft does occur in Tokyo, and there's organized crime as well. You don't see this kind of organized retail theft because the police would actually investigate it, rather than do nothing and cry about "the crackdown on police rights".

ksenzee 4y ago

Right, so this is a hugely political issue right now. Don't be surprised to get wildly differing answers. Republicans are pointing at public disorder and screaming about crime, and Democrats are accusing them of being fragile suburbanites who can't handle normal urban life. I'm a left-leaning independent, and I tend to agree with Democrats on a lot of their talking points, but I will say that everywhere I go I see more public disorder than I did a few years ago. There are more locked shelves everywhere, and I think people's perceptions of crime and disorder are also affected by the fact that there are way more encampments of people living in tents and RVs (which leads to more litter on the streets etc.). I live southeast of Seattle, in a straight-up middle-class area, and our local Target now has OTC pain relief behind locked glass doors. I stopped dead and stared. I'd never seen that except in a big city. As for the issue of unhoused people, which I don't think is related to the actual crime rate but is very much related to perceptions of crime, we also have some tent encampments down in my area. In Seattle (I visit the International District weekly) a year ago there were huge tent cities under freeway overpasses, actual structures hacked together on sidewalks, people living in deplorable conditions. There have always been unhoused people in Seattle but it was an order of magnitude worse than normal. In the last several months Washington state and Seattle have made a huge effort to clear the tent cities and get people into transitional housing, and from what I can tell it's working: the sidewalk shacks are gone, the tents are gone, the areas are fenced off, and by all accounts they've gotten almost all the people living there into shelter of some kind. I'm paying attention to whether I hear less squawking about crime now that there's less visible disorder.

LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
How's the housing work? Victoria and Vancouver tried this by buying old hotels and turning them into apartments but they filled them with junkies and were surprised that they soon became worse than the outdoor camps. Any solution that doesn't segregate the sick can't work.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ksenzee 4y ago

thewebcount 4y ago

It’s very much specific to particular areas. In Los Angeles, a CVS or RiteAid in a less well-off area will have things behind plexiglass. The same store just outside Pepperdine (a very expensive university in the very wealthy Malibu area) has the same things and more expensive stuff just available on the shelves without restriction.

prawn 4y ago

More extreme instances likely restricted to particular areas but much more widespread is locking up seemingly cheap stuff behind cage/plastic. In Australia, spraypaint in a hardware store is locked up but often not much else that I can recall. In Home Depot in the US, power tools even in the $30-80 range can be, amongst other things. In supermarkets in most states/cities I've been to, cheap toiletries can require help from staff with a key, plus some electronics in the automotive section. Seems to be a reaction to targeted theft rather than just value of items.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

Restricted to some areas. I live in the kind of city that most HNers would sneer at (we're kind of known for being rough) and it's not like described.