4 ms·

When you lock things up you don't sell as many of them. And when you don't lock things up, you may well have a significant percentage of them stolen. Solution:

When you lock things up you don't sell as many of them. And when you don't lock things up, you may well have a significant percentage of them stolen. Solution: Only operate in locations where petty crime rates are low and/or there is effective prosecution of petty crime. And that's exactly what's happening in many urban areas. At a place like Costco the obvious impediment to theft -- even without locking things up -- is that what you walk out of the store with is compared against your receipt. But the less obvious deterrent, I suspect, is the annual fee. Small time thieves are less likely to pony up a hefty membership fee up front.

enragedcacti 2y ago
Thankfully we have another Walgreens executive quote for that: > “Maybe we cried too much last year” about merchandise losses, Walgreens finance chief James Kehoe acknowledged Thursday on an earnings call. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that points to retailers using shoplifting as an excuse to close underperforming stores without drawing scrutiny about poor management or strategy: > For example, data released by the San Francisco Police Department does not support the explanation Walgreens gave that it was closing five stores because of organized retail theft, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2021. > One of the shuttered stores that closed had only seven reported shoplifting incidents in 2021 and a total of 23 since 2018, according to the newspaper. Overall, the five stores that closed had fewer than two recorded shoplifting incidents a month on average since 2018. But hey, you might say "how come a lot of different retailers all complained at the same time?" There was a huge push by the National Retail Federation, a group that lobbies on behalf of these huge chain retailers: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-retail-lobby-confesses-it-lied-about-organized-shoplifting-rings https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-ret... https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting-retail/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopliftin... https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statistics https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statis...

enragedcacti 2y ago

Thankfully we have another Walgreens executive quote for that: > “Maybe we cried too much last year” about merchandise losses, Walgreens finance chief James Kehoe acknowledged Thursday on an earnings call. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that points to retailers using shoplifting as an excuse to close underperforming stores without drawing scrutiny about poor management or strategy: > For example, data released by the San Francisco Police Department does not support the explanation Walgreens gave that it was closing five stores because of organized retail theft, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2021. > One of the shuttered stores that closed had only seven reported shoplifting incidents in 2021 and a total of 23 since 2018, according to the newspaper. Overall, the five stores that closed had fewer than two recorded shoplifting incidents a month on average since 2018. But hey, you might say "how come a lot of different retailers all complained at the same time?" There was a huge push by the National Retail Federation, a group that lobbies on behalf of these huge chain retailers: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-retail-lobby-confesses-it-lied-about-organized-shoplifting-rings https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-ret... https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting-retail/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopliftin... https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statistics https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statis...