Walmart’s Crime Problem
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
They say "There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart." and justify that statement by saying that if Walmart: added more greeters, scrap self-checkout, made stores smaller, it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that.
The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways. They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting, so much so that the demographics even at a store like Target are markedly different (middle class-ish).
Walmart seems to have actually extended their reach into the poorest of society, it used to be that stores like Kmart were cheaper than Walmart and the really poor shopped there, now Walmart has been nabbing a lot of their business, it comes with a lot of the problems associated.
What's a solution? Walmart's shoplifting is a symptom of social issues elsewhere: Drug usage, poverty, lacking social safety nets, criminal justice reform, and so on. If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose and that's a bigger challenge than hitting Walmart over the head for having to call the cops too much.
It is very easy to make Walmart a scapegoat, but ultimately you'd just shift the problem to a different location if Walmart stopped serving the customer base they serve.
Walmart is Best Buy times 100. Blaming Walmart is just plain dumb as its a sign of something wrong with society. I wish we'd get over blaming things and get to being honest and admit the problem is people. People can have all manner of things fixed, and yes, its harder than demanding the victim of the crime pay for it. Charging Walmart more is going to up the prices and hurt a lot more people who really cannot afford another tax.
How is it just plain dumb to call Walmart greedy and apathetic when it's greedy and apathetic? The measures cited in the article always reduce crime wherever they're implemented. Best Buy, Target, Kroger, etc use them over here in high-crime areas. Even our Walmart does. The Walmart in article that started them back up had a big decline in calls. We can't blame them for the rest but it was clear they weren't doing their part before. All for some extra $$$.
Note: All these retailers have a risk management team that knows about effects of above practices. You can bet they voiced opposition to the changes since their headaches would go up. They were then ignored to see those numbers go up on the balance sheet.
1. A set of practices that cost some money but reduce amount of damagd to it and its customers. This is the baseline response it originally had plus what many competitors are currently doing.
2. Get rid of all of those, let crime increase dramatically, pocket the money, and foot the expenses to taxpayers.
I think eliminating 1 for 2 is unethical and damaging to locals, including customers victims of resulting crime. I support allowing them to do it but encourage police departments to make it cost them as in the article. That they did a 180 after that shows this is entirely motivated by profit.
The problem has always been people. That's why we have civilization in the first place: to create a structure where people are reasonably safe from the predations of other people.
People were still people 10 or 20 years ago, but Walmart didn't have the same crime problem. Asking them to return to previous staffing levels so that their stores are safer for customers and the community doesn't sound like a shocking burden to me.
You could blame Walmart for some of the economic woes, but they aren't the ones shuttering the auto plant, or the steel mill, or the shoe shop, or automating the old labor-intensive, natural-resource sectors so they require vastly fewer, more highly skilled people.
But is that actually a problem of Walmart's creation, or is it that the pressures that encourage shoplifting became higher among those that Walmart attracts and in the areas Walmart builds in the past 10-20 years.
Increasing staffing would probably benefit the people shopping there more than it would prevent shoplifting. And the greeters? They hired 60+ year olds for that, no one was dissuaded from shoplifting because of them.
Diagnose and solve the problem, don't treat the symptom of the problem.
In addition, lack of employment correlates (and presumably causes) and increase in crime, in drug use, in depression. These are all externalities that are borne not only by the former worker and their families but by taxpayers and society at large. Someone has to pay for the increased crime and protection, someone has to pay for the additional health care costs, and so on.
These negative externalities of exporting jobs to China, to Mexico, and soon possibly to other Asian nations through TPP are never part of the economic equation.
In order to address a problem, it must be fully analyzed. In this case, there is much finger pointing at the victims of a broken system.
So, when a company exports a worker's job overseas, who is supposed to pay the additional healthcare costs cost by the unemployment? Should us the taxpayers or should those that caused the problem in the first place? Someone has to pay and we shouldn't just let events decide but rather make a conscious choice.
H1-B visa abuse is used by firms (see Disney World in Florida and Abbott Pharmacueticals in Illinois for example) to drive down IT and STEM labor rates.
You might dislike Trump, but he is against H1-B Visa Abuse and H2-A and H2-B (blue collar) Visa abuse. Meanwhile Hilary has used H1-B Visas in the Clinton Foundation (I love patriotism :-) ).
So, instead of being emotional about an issue, be analytical. I assume that most of the people reading HN are analytical and just don't emotionally lash out.
Since most Trump voters are uneducated, this is my tip: Go to Stanford/MIT/Columbia, get a CS degree and then you won't have to compete with illegals for a job. And always remember:
"Of course foreigners steal your job, but maybe, if someone without contacts, money, or speaking the language steals your job, you're shit." ~ Louis C. K.
Trump has admitted it was a mistake for him to abuse the H2-A and H2-B programs and he is against increasing H1-B (STEM) H2-A and H2-B. Whereas Hilary is for increasing the H1-B program (her backers want it increased).
Sanders agreed with Trump's position of not increasing H1-B, H2-A, and H2-B Visa programs.
The truth is that the position of Trump and Sanders care more for the jobs of professional STEM and working class than Hilary.
Be analytical and not emotional.
"... you're shit." ~ Louis C. K."
Don't know Louis C.K. but he's a jerk.
The IQ curve is a normal distribution around 100 and it takes an IQ of around 110 or so to get into college and get a degree. Many people lacked the intelligence/intellectual endowment that readers of HN has. That doesn't mean they're shit. It means that they struggle in this world in ways that many here can't fully understand.
Looking at your history (African American access to the tech world in NYC), it seems you are a troll, so I'll leave it at this: http://blog.samaltman.com/trump
"However, Trump is a different story. “When politicians talk about ‘immigration reform’ they mean: amnesty, cheap labour and open borders,” his website states. “Any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages and security for all Americans.”"
[skip]
"Trump's plan is manifold but there are two points that specifically target H-1B visa holders. Trump states on his website that one way to curb unemployment is by increasing the prevailing wage for H-1Bs. This will force the companies to give the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) jobs to Americans, instead of hiring the no-longer cheap labour from other countries. That way, more women, blacks and Hispanics will get jobs in the STEM industry. He wants to introduce a rule so that companies that want to hire workers on H-1B will be required to hire American workers first, even before greencards (permanent residence status) are issued to foreign workers."
Instead of resorting to ad hominem (trolls?) attacks, you should admit the facts which are that Hilary as Senator said she wanted to create 200,000 jobs in NY State and for her it was "do as I say, not do as I do" when she Clinton Foundation attempted to hire foreigners instead of Americans.
The truth is that Trump's position is for employing Americans for STEM jobs and not importing foreigners.
Trump criticizes Disney for replacing American IT workers with foreign H1-B workers (Southern California Edison did the same as Disney). http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/donald-trump-just-took-a-...
Trump and Sanders criticize Carrier Air conditioners for exporting jobs to Mexico. http://fortune.com/2016/02/18/sanders-and-trump-give-union-h...
There are lots of young Americans and older Americans that want jobs and Trump (and Sanders) wanted to help them. Hilary, on the other hand supports increasing the H1-B visa program which will displace even more American jobs. Both the Democratic and Republican elites support importing foreigners to replace Americans. That is one of the reasons that the Republican elite truly hate Trump. In many ways, he is more for the workers than the Hilary Democrats and that makes them very, very angry that voters and not their elite money could nominate their candidate.
http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-tech-policies-20...
"HP Enterprises CEO Meg Whitman has been outspoken on her position that Trump's trade policies would damage her company.
"I think his policies around free trade will be damaging to businesses as a whole," said Whitman, a Republican, in an interview with CNBC."
Instructive comments on Trump and H1-B: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskTrumpSupporters/comments/4umcm9/...
As for my statements on Black access and tech world in NYC, I assume you live in NYC and you've been to meetups so you know what I am talking about and can dispute it. Why don't you tell me from your own experience, what exactly is wrong with my statements.
Oh, and regarding Sam Altman and Nazi Germany, etc. I had family that came to the US in 1881 thanks to pogroms.
I agree to some extent. There is a term Walmart scale, and it is defined as things that have a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of happening happen 10 times a day at Walmart.
Walmart is targeted, for example, there might be 2x as many Walgreens or CVS locations, but while their revenues are $100-$150B Walmart is closer to $500B and they have 100,000,000 customers enter their stores every week and that is attractive to criminals. Also, I want to note, Walmart shoppers are a much larger cross section than just the poorest of society, in fact you can easily find stores where the average income of their shopper is $80k/year.
Walmart is a target for all kinds of crimes, from their parking lot to shop lifting to cons. I was recently in Bentonville pitching one of my side projects at their HQ, and this topic came up, one ongoing scheme currently taking place consists of a group going into stores with fake documentation from HQ (complete with fake Bentonville phone numbers and fake voicemail) and they literally set up a photo portrait store inside the Walmart in-store leasing locations. Walmart customers are going in and getting portraits done and the group just closes up shop and disappears (the irony, not a single Walmart customer has complained about their experience).
[Citation needed]
I find Walmarts do best in areas with minimal competition. Arlington VA is an expensive area and only the 'poor' go to Walmart which looks grungy and sit's further south. However, if you go to southern VA you can find some Walmart superstores that don't have a lot of completion stock better goods and flat out look cleaner.
As I stated I am working with them, so I have some non-public information regarding specific store numbers which I can't disclose under NDA, sorry.
However, here is some public data, the average WM shopper is a 50 year old white women with a household income of $53,125. [1] Another article showing 10% of WM shoppers make $75k-$99k and 15% of WM shoppers making $100K+, though this is based on a survey of 4,000 shoppers, so I don't know how accurate this data really is. [2] You can find other odd facts about their demographics floating around, such as a greater percentage of $100k-$150k households shop at WM than percentage of <$15k households. [3]
100,000,000 customers/week is obviously a ridiculous amount of people and reflects a giant cross section of society. Annually 80% of American shoppers will shop at WM at least once this year, see [3].
Anecdotally, I would say the newer model Walmart Neighborhood Markets are nice and clean, and I would say on par with groceries such as Publix, Meijer and Kroger.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-average-wal-mart-sho... [2] http://www.businesspundit.com/heres-a-breakdown-of-walmart-s... [3] http://brandongaille.com/41-interesting-walmart-shopper-demo...
PS: Average income of their shopper != average household income.
Store 59 is also sort of a special case, in that when they leased their first building for it in the '70s, it was at least twice the size of anything they'd leased before, and became the proving ground for their Supercenters. And they made a point of rebuilding and reopening the second building on the site within 6 months after it got destroyed by the 2011 tornado (granted, that was easier since they didn't lose much of their employee pool (no one was killed in that Wal-Mart, but I'm sure some moved away because of the housing shortage), they were all very busy at the 2 other Wal-Marts in the area in the interim).
To provide a personal anecdote, one of those multimillionaires was my father, who in the early '60s was a low level manager at a Ben Franklin "Five and Dime" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_(company) ) in Joplin when Sam Walton, who owned a set of them down in Arkansas, would regularly drive up to Joplin for airplane trips. He'd always stop by and talk to the owner and managers of this (set of?) Joplin (area?) Ben Franklins, getting a feel for what was going on here. Very smart guy (certainly smarter than the Joplin owner, who declined the offer to invest in Walton's new venture...).
Stepping back to the general question, the crime patterns in Joplin area's four Wal-Marts pretty much match the neighborhoods they're in. Before anyone can claim Wal-Mart is doing a bad job here, they've got to correct for that.
Although I can't speak to the stories people are telling of poorly managed ones, only that I've never seen or heard of such here, the stores are well run and to my observation, pretty much all the employees but some of the cashiers are reasonably happy/satisfied with their jobs/whatever.
Coincidentally I went to the Joplin store too while visiting Bentonville. Coming from Miami I have to admit I had zero interest in Bentonville aside from the business opportunity, but I was actually in awe of Bentonville, in particular the downtown area and Crystal Bridges Museum were exceptionally charming, and I was surprised to find locals actually had a tremendous amount of gratitude for WM and the Walton family (in my experience such wealth and influence can generate resentment). For what it is worth, I even decided I would return just to run the Bentonville half marathon.
(per city council member, many disclaimers apply)
It's likely many of those people will also be spending additional money elsewhere in town on their additional visits (at least, that happens in Joplin a lot, although the #1 component of that is almost certainly our 2 hospital/healthcare centers), so did anyone try to figure out if the city financially benefited at net?
Not that that matters all that much if additional crime outside the Wal-Mart is hurting its residents. Or if that politician was lying, as far too many city council members seem wont to do :-(.
As you say, the crime patterns pretty much match the neighborhoods the stores are in and that ain't in a good one.
I agree on location of Walmarts making the difference. There's at least one in Virginia Beach that feels more like a Target store, better lighting, with much nicer things and less cramped aisles. A couple of the closest ones to me in Hampton are crowded and dingy, generally much less pleasant to shop at.
If I buy groceries at Walmart or another discount grocer, my bill is nearly half of what it would be if I shopped at a "nicer" supermarket and well over half of what it would be if I shopped at a place like Whole Foods. And I actually find the experience of shopping at Walmart to be better than the experience of shopping somewhere like Trader Joe's because Walmart's large size makes things far less congested than Trader Joe's, where it seems like everyone is constantly in the way of each other.
And this is all for essentially the same produce and meats. In many cases, the discount grocer's produce is actually better quality than the supermarket's.
I once saw a Walmart in another state with a live lobster aquarium. My local friends almost didn't believe me. (I live in California)
If you want to see a really nice WalMart, then visit store 100, in Bentonville Arkansas. Curiously, this store is across the street from one of the main home office buildings.
Snark aside, the amount of central control tends to cause some unexpected kinds of 'drift' across the various stores. That central control, combined with absolutely amazing, state of the art technology in the late 90s and early 2000s led to much of WalMart's success. I heard from a lot of managers back then that sang high praise for the big computer system in Bentonville. Indeed, in late August 2005, the normal things arriving at the stores along the gulf coast disappeared in lieu of batteries, water, and other such supplies. A store manager told me, a few months later, that he knew shit was getting real when the big computer in Bentonville stopped sending regular stuff.
Unfortunately, that technology has not kept up, and actually grew in many non-useful ways to become the over-bearing beast that it is now.
So the whole concept of 'store of the community' was and is a thing. But in the past, it was a good thing. Now, not so much.
And yes, the ever spiraling expectations put on store managers to keep their comp (1 up, quarter after quarter, for decades, could only end up as we see it now. Serious understaffing, and other related problems.
1) 'comp' means 'comparable sales': http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparable-store-sales.a...
I think the best mix between prices and not being over-congested and dirty are the warehouse stores like Sam's Club and Costco. Those places require larger volumes, so they aren't really great options if you aren't buying for an entire household.
I can't say I'm much of a fan of shopping at Walmart. It's convenient for me and the prices are good to very good. (Though my overall perception is that apples-to-apples it's not spectacularly cheaper than my local supermarket.) But I find that I have trouble doing a full grocery shopping there because of a combination of selection and quality.
There's a standard superstore Walmart 2 miles from my Neighborhood Market, and I avoid it at all costs for the reasons you state.
Just another anecdote.
I like to do both.
We don't have a Whole Foods, but there is a small regional chain here that has organic local produce and grass fed antibiotic free hormone free meats and such.
I use Walmart for things like 2 liter soda bottles, frozen vegetables, lunch meats, bread, condiments, paper goods, and the like, and so save money compared to places like Safeway or Fred Meyer. I can then justify going to that small regional chain when I want a steak or fresh produce and buy their expensive grass fed beef and the locally grown organic produce.
According to statista[1], walmart.com does 91.6 million unique visitors per month.
According to statisticbrain[2], Wal-Mart stores (location not specified) have 100 million customers (not visits) per week.
[1] - http://www.statista.com/statistics/271450/monthly-unique-vis...
[2] - http://www.statisticbrain.com/wal-mart-company-statistics/
> Today, nearly 260 million customers visit our more than 11,500 stores under 63 banners in 28 countries and e-commerce sites in 11 countries each week.
> According to statisticbrain[2], Wal-Mart stores (location not specified) have 100 million customers (not visits) per week.
The source you cited looks like the location they're referring to is worldwide. They cite "Total Wal-mart sales annually" and that lines up with their total global revenue, so I think it's a fair assumption that their "Total numbers of customer per week" would likewise be globally.
This isn't true by a longshot. The 300m figure is every man, woman, teenager, child, and infant in America, and you only need one person per family going for a weekly grocery trip. And that's of course ignoring the people who don't do weekly groceries. On top of THAT, the 30% number doesn't seem particularly reasonable either (though that one is at least the only remotely plausible thing you've said).
[1]http://www.statista.com/statistics/269405/number-of-stores-o...
If all you can contribute to the conversation is pretending that stylistic choices are errors, it's probably better to contribute nothing at all.
Walmart can do more. Are the legally obligated to do so? Not unless laws are written in a jurisdiction that says stores of that size need to have some minimum security and anti-theft measures.
> He can’t believe, he says, that a multibillion-dollar corporation isn’t doing more to stop crime. Instead, he says, it offloads the job to the police at taxpayers’ expense.
I think citizens should be very concerned about the notion that instead of their taxpayer-supported police doing the policing, an expectation of corporations policing their own territory should exist. That's a little bit Snow Crash, isn't it?
According to laws in every state in the U.S., Walmart has a duty to protect its customers from violent crime while they’re on store property. Under an area of the law known as premise liability, victims and their lawyers have argued in hundreds of lawsuits that Walmart failed to provide enough security.
Note that in reality this option inevitably includes walmart cops accidentally beating up an innocent black person, a sympathetic sick mother dying in walmart jail of some pre-existing medical issues, and similar things. (All I'm assuming here is that walmart cops/jails are identical to US Govt cops/jails.)
You'll have no problem with walmart when these things occur? You're sure that the media won't criticize them for this as well?
I know of a hippy commune (upper middle class, mid 50's, entirely white/asian, yoga/meditation/etc types) that lets you operate the store cash register yourself. Admittedly the store is not as extensive at walmart, it mostly just sells organic vegan flax seed cookies. If you don't have enough cash you can just pay them tomorrow. So why can't walmart just adopt that model?
(I know, I'm hinting at the naughty and unspeakable idea that walmart shoppers are bad people who steal and commit other crimes.)
Really? I suppose that depends on where you are and whether it's a public or private college. Public universities in California have their own police departments, but they're run by the state government.
I haven't seen a lot of news stories about civil rights violations by Target's security guards. Maybe they're under the radar?
The simple fact is that any law enforcement will result in some civil rights violations. It's just a statistical inevitability. This is one of the reasons I'm extremely cautious about new regulations; part of the price of a new law is one or two more Eric Garners.
Consider the possibility that if the greeters actually prevented a significant amount of shrinkage, walmart would have kept them. The cases being referred to the cops are only a tiny percentage of the shrinkage that occurs.
It's a possibility, I guess. But I've seen enough MBAs cut costs with poorly understood consequences to be a little skeptical of that assertion. How would they even know? Did they run a controlled experiment? Or did they just say a prayer to Jack Welch and cut anything they could?
I see this argument a lot and there are never numbers to back it up.
If Walmart isn't paying the taxes it legally owes, then they should be fined and there should be charges brought. If they are, then they are already paying their fair share as determined by the law and implying otherwise is at best extremely disingenuous.
Let he who voluntarily donates additional money to the US Treasury cast the first snarky HN comment, or something.
A couple of times I've lived near corner/liquor stores that were obviously more problematic than their competitors, for example. If those stores exerted downward pricing pressure then it might be to a level that was problematic. I don't want all stores to become poorly run crime magnets because they can't afford to stay in business.
Note that this is only true in some geographical regions. In much of not-California, Walmart is one of the only convenient places to shop, so everyone shops there.
A world without walmart would have the police called to 3 of 20 small mom and pop shops and no individual shop would be considered the bad actor. A monopoly retail provider exists and 100% of retail police calls, 3 per day, will be at the monopoly provider and therefore the monopoly provider is causing crime or something. There's 3 police calls either way...
The police can't be called to Mom and Pop's shoe store for shoplifting because Walmart closed them down. And people who gotta steal shoes, have to do it at a store that's still open. So, walmart.
And this is true pretty much everywhere I've ever been that wasn't a large city or very close to one.
> Police departments inevitably compare their local Walmarts with Target stores. Target, Walmart’s largest competitor, is a different kind of retail business, with mostly smaller stores that tend to be located in somewhat more affluent neighborhoods. But there are other reasons Targets have less crime. Unlike most Walmarts, they’re not open 24 hours a day. Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots, as Walmarts do. ike Walmart, Target relies heavily on video surveillance, but it employs sophisticated software that can alert the store security office when shoppers spend too much time in front of merchandise or linger for long periods outside after closing time. The biggest difference, police say, is simply that Targets have more staff visible in stores.
More than half the paragraph is concrete reasons that Target would be expected to have much less crime: smaller stores, more affluent clientele/location, not open 24 hours. All of those aren't arbitrary tweaks that Walmart is refusing to make to cut down on crime; they're parts of the actual service niche that Walmart is providing.
I've got no particular love for Walmart (I've never even been to one), but somehow conversations around it seem to make people completely shut their brain off, as in garbage articles like this one. One of the most pernicious threads running through coverage of Walmart seems to be the idea that you have to prove yourself worthy to receive government services: serving poorer neighborhoods and having flexible hours means that you're asking for crime and are somehow abusing the legal system, just like paying the legal minimum wage gets twisted into "the government is subsidizing Walmart shareholders"[1].
Laws can't force people to be civil. Civility is part of culture. And when civil society starts to break down it really can't be fixed by anything other than a cultural change.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...
You could argue that people in poverty live in places where housing is dirt cheap, but those places have almost no jobs and especially no jobs for people with criminal records.
It's a definition of poverty that a) means you can 'fix' poverty by making rich people poorer, and b) morally legitimises envy.
You should do some research before rejecting it as nonsensical. It's well-known in security and retail industries that those things reduce crime. They're textbook practices. It's because most criminals are opportunists and chicken-shit. The thought that people are paying attention gets in their head. That item they want is worth some risk but not that much. Plus, these practices are what the Walmart declared as a public nuisance instituted and calls declined sharply. These practices are also what Target does given they're very serious about security. They had a fraction of the calls.
"They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting"
That's also true. It's why the crime will only get lower, not disappear.
"If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose"
That's true for the ones that remain after the above methods. In my area, the old timers say they didn't used to have many problems with shoplifting. The reason: the employees took turns beating the crap out of anyone they caught threatening their jobs. Employees are more apathetic these days plus cameras mean they'd go to jail for stuff like that. So, the same places get robbed regularly. Thieves also usually get off easy in court. That's already low to moderate risk for high-reward items. Walmart eliminating the remaining methods of crime reduction, externalizing things to taxpayers, knocks the risk down to very low. Crime will stay up in such places.
The article doesn't make this explicit connection you're making, and it does justify expert recommendations by pointing out that other stores that follow such recommendations (including Wal-Mart itself in times past) reap real benefits.
...ultimately you'd just shift the problem to a different location...
So there's a constant level of crime that can never be changed? That's elitist, maybe racist suburban thinking. It's also very much in opposition to modern crime-prevention philosophy. It's a pretty huge generalization to throw out when you're complaining that other people aren't justifying their claims.
Income. US stores. Walmart us stores
0-20. 16. 16
20-49k. 32. 33
50-99. 30. 31
100k plus 23. 21
This chart was from Doug's 10 14 15 22nd investors meeting. Page 24 slide of his presentation. ( AC Nielsen is the source credited on the slide)
This shouldn't surprise anybody: poor middle class or Rich everybody tries to save money
But still, 1 in 6 < 20K and 1 in 2 < 50K
Thus, for half of their customers, and especially 1 in 6 lowest income, Wal-mart does a tremendous service in helping people to stretch their incomes.
If you've been reading the news recently for the past two decades working class people in these wage groups have not seen income growth. Wal-Mart has helped them to still live.
No board member agreed to be interviewed for this story, but the company disputes that it puts profit before people.
That's the thesis of the article -- that there's a forced choice: either people or profits. And WalMart is choosing the wrong option. It's hackneyed, it's cliche, and if you want to run with it you'd better have something more than just a bunch of opinionated interviews. By choosing the right 20 people, you can get them to say just about anything you'd like.
Where there's such a high-volume movement of people, especially involving at-risk populations, there's going to be crime.
There are about 6,000 WalMarts in the United States. Worldwide, Walmart serves 260 million people at 12,000 stores every week, employing about 2.5 million people -- 1.5 million people in the U.S. alone. In 2013, the FBI reports 367 violent crimes per 100,000 people/years.
I found this out in one minute of searching the internet. All of this is relevant context for a story like this.
I'm not a statistician, but doing some simple math, assuming those 260 million people served every week just stayed at the store year-round, every year there would be 954,000 violent crimes committed at WalMarts worldwide.
Of course that's just funny numbers, but even back-of-the-napkin math shows that 1) whatever number we get for estimated violent crimes at WalMart, it's going to be a big number, and 2) with a dataset that large, it's far too easy to cherry-pick individual crimes to make a case where none may exist.
There still may be a story here. Beats me. Why am I digging around for stats online when some schmuck who wrote this was supposed to be doing all of that before he wrote it? And including it in the article?
ADD: You know, if you know a few cops who think the crime down at WalMart is just out-of-control? That's a great story. Write it that way.
Well, and a victim of the policies they and their shareholders advocate that put more people in poverty. Arkansas is about the third poorest state. Maybe a little less trickledown economics would result in a little less shoplifting.
I know how you feel. Its completely absurd to blame a corporation that tries to provide very cheap goods for crimes committed against it.
It isn't like they are leaving bottles of prescription painkillers near the exits with no one to watch them. Or anything else that is clearly negligent.
> What's a solution? Walmart's shoplifting is a symptom of social issues elsewhere: Drug usage, poverty, lacking social safety nets, criminal justice reform, and so on. If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose and that's a bigger challenge than hitting Walmart over the head for having to call the cops too much.
Yeah but that requires work and blaming corporations is in vogue.
> [...] it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that.
There a bit of evidence that self-checkout systems increse rates of crime.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p043gmxh
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/08/02/self-service-c...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/03/checkout-serpent/
Similarly, walmart should be prevented from doing things like allowing the homeless to camp in the parking lots. Target is the pioneer here - they force the homeless to illegally park on the streets where the cops can harass them until they leave town.
In short, rather than having all the crime in one spot, we can spread it around the community! This won't help things, but at least we won't have a single unsympathetic scapegoat to blame.
(Also blame walmart when it does try and stop crime and the inevitable results occur, namely criminals being hurt/killed as part of the law enforcement process.)
I can't think of a better illustration of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics than this article. Poor people steal and hurt people but we can't blame them. Walmart is nearby so blame Walmart!
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
Run a private police force that inevitably harms criminals during the law enforcement process? (The article criticizes them for doing this.)
Maybe walmart can run it's own on-site jail that way the cops only need to come once/day? I'm sure a private walmart run jail won't attract the same criticism, particularly when the inevitable bad things happen in it.
Or maybe they can hire more security guards to follow around suspicious people in the store. I'm sure that will help stop the criticism, even if the demographics of suspicious people don't correspond to population demographics.
From what I can tell, the problem isn't walmart but the people who shop there. But this is obviously a politically unacceptable conclusion, so walmart makes a convenient scapegoat. And they'll remain one no matter what they do.
But say having someone present at an entrance for much of the day clearly cuts the number of shoplifting incidents. It's pretty reasonable for the police and town to push for that staffing if it is less costly than handling the displaced incidents.
A friend of mine was a Target store manager. According to him, Target had a more symbiotic relationship with LE, vs Walmart which just seems to suck resources dry.
I expect the police to protect my home but I know they can only do so much. If I leave the key in my front door and people come in and steal my stuff, that's still stealing. But the police would be right to complain if I routinely leave my key in the door.
The argument here is that perhaps Walmart, as a large retailer, should take security measures, just as a homeowner should not leave his key in the lock. Yes they don't have to have security, but then it may not be reasonable for them to demand immediate police response, just like I might not expect the cops to help me every day if I leave my key in the lock.
The clause you added about rape is just wrong in so many ways.
Yes, and in fact am legally able to.
> The argument here is that perhaps Walmart, as a large retailer, should take security measures, just as a homeowner should not leave his key in the lock. Yes they don't have to have security, but then it may not be reasonable for them to demand immediate police response, just like I might not expect the cops to help me every day if I leave my key in the lock.
But that's not how criminal justice works. It's not to protect and serve those who are doing everything to protect and serve themselves, it's to protect and serve everyone regardless of their ability or even willingness to protect themselves. Would you blame the victim of a break-in for not owning a gun?
> The clause you added about rape is just wrong in so many ways.
Indulge me - name one way in which it's wrong.
What's the difference between that and Walmart under-staffing?
"Privatise the profit, push the risk/cost to the local community"
The state needs to spend money understanding the structural issues of crime in their state and implement interventions with tax money.
Here is a plan: In NY City where I live there is a state cigarette tax of $4.35 and a city tax of an additional $1.50 for a total of $5.85 per pack of cigarettes.
Oklahoma, the state first mentioned in the article, just rejected a cigarette tax increase to $1.50 http://kfor.com/2016/05/19/democrats-republicans-clash-over-...
Raise the cigarette taxes to $3 or $4 per pack, the smoking rate declines and healthcare costs from tobacco declines.
The cigarette tax revenues can be put into plans that help to solve the structural problems of crime (unemployment, law enforcement, whatever). The State of Oklahoma should study the crime problem and use the additional revenues from an increased cigarette tax to help solve the problem.
But isn't the taxpayer in this case the store itself? If the store isn't paying enough taxes to support the PD, how is that the store's fault?
London Met police costs - http://www.met.police.uk/foi/pdfs/disclosure_2014/august_201...
vs.
One should blame the victim for theft; victims bear responsibility for securing their possessions.
That's why a person leaving their house unlocked and getting robbed is used as an (unacceptable) analogy to a person getting sexually assaulted when they walk down the street at night in skimpy clothing. The "Victim could easily have done something more and chose not to" aspect is already taken as a given in the unlocked-door scenario.
From that point of view, getting robbed would be a minor punishment fit for such a minor crime, while getting raped would be a major punishment, disproportionate for such a minor crime.
And if you're talking about my personal opinions: I think the two states (leaving your door unlocked and wearing skimply clothing) are completely separate, and the arguments that unify them are flawed because they move the responsibility to not get raped from the rapist to the victim.
But the sharing of responsibility for petty theft between the thief and the person who fails to take basic measures to secure property (like locking doors) is already culturally-accepted for reasons I don't know, which is why the argument that "wearing skimpy clothing is the same thing" is even made. I think it's possible to argue that people who leave doors unlocked shouldn't be considered to have done something wrong, but I hear almost nobody making that argument.
I hear this every once in a while. My country used to be a police state and people often say "back then we could leave our windows open without fear" to argue that we should go back to authoritarianism to reduce crime.
Could the troublemakers simply be attracted to Walmart and would go elsewhere if things were different? Walmart might even be doing the police a favor by concentrating them all in one place.
Walmart has a 30 year history of offloading the healthcare and social costs of its employees onto local hospitals and county agencies. Of course they offload their security. In perhaps 50% of their market (geographically) they're a retail monopoly. They rig the game because they can.
The high health care costs are externalities created by state and city policy (and sometimes federal policy) that create an additional burden for employers such as Walmart which creates an additional burden for customers and employees. The higher health care costs result in lower wages for employees while resulting in higher prices for customers than in Wal-Marts case, many can ill-afford.
For example, most of health care costs are from those with serious chronic disease (the highest category is the 9 million "dual eligibles" -- people with disability that are on both Medicaid and Medicare).
These chronic diseases are from smoking, obesity, lack of exercise, air pollution for starters.
The fixes are raising the cost of tobacco through taxes, banning smoking in public places, hard hitting anti-smoking TV ads, ....), taxing sugar added beverages as Philadelphia has just done, lowering air pollution by getting the highest polluting coal-powered electric plants shut down, and in the Northeast and Midwest, converting buildings burning #6 and #4 fuel oils to less polluting #2 or natural gas.
The more of the healthcare cost externalities that are borne by private firms that are a result of government policy that government must pay for, the better for all of us. Only when the costs to government are high enough, will they implement policies that will reduce the high costs of health care.
Not many stores I would've dreamed of doing that in ('twas only teenage hijinks anyway), but it's true when you have a big crappy commercial space where crap is just laying around (Walmart, kmart, Ross, etc.), it really gives the impression that the purveyor doesn't give a crap about their crap.
On a good day, the Wal*Mart in my area looks OK but on a bad day it looks like the aftermath of a frat party. On a day like that it looks like a ghetto store and just doesn't feel like a safe place. The local Target on the other hand could use more people at the checkout lines, but has a lot of staff on the floor to keep the store looking good and help out if you need to find something.
No wonder they call the police when they want shoplifters choked out: police don't get prosecuted for that.
This is much ado about nothing. All big companies run periodic "let's take a shit on society to save some money" programs. They find something that costs a little money (e.g. a modicum of private security), the absence of which won't cause them to go out of business immediately, and they stop doing it. Even if they eventually have to restart in most locations, they still save money over the interim. If society really wanted to end this practice, society would stop bending over backwards to coddle large corporations, or even to allow them to exist in the first place.
TFA describes problems in lower-income urban and suburban settings. Maybe these are the Wal-Mart stereotype, but Wal-Mart has stores in many other communities that don't fit that mold, and which may not have seen the crime wave described here. The mayor in TFA had the right idea: declare problem stores a public nuisance to force Wal-Mart to do something. What Wal-Mart will do, was also identified in TFA: hire a bunch of off-duty cops. It kills three birds: security will actually improve with cops on the premises, police chiefs won't publicly criticize a business that's paying their subordinates lots of money, and the cops they hire will use the resources of the whole department anyway. Again, however, this expenditure will only be required in those special communities that have lots of potential criminals.
edit my comment was poorly worded. The seabrook PD is constantly at this walmart instead of doing other things and the revenue isn't offset to hire more officers.
Seems to me that the criminals who commit crimes at Walmart are costing the PD a fortune. Although — surely it's easier for the police to patrol the Walmart and catch criminals there than troll through the entire city hoping to catch them?
If you have any say when your community does have revenue, it might be worthwhile to support solutions that don't amount to more police making more criminals.
That in a nutshell is one of the real problems with crime in the US. It's unpopular to expect people to behave in a civil manner. Instead we tolerate their uncivil behavior by blaming schools, parents, churches, and now police for making them criminals. Forget personal responsibility, that's for suckers.
Did the crime rate in the town overall go up?
WalMart markets itself to a demographic most likely to commit crime and doesn't adequately set up it's own security to prevent crime in and around it's stores.
That is, instead of spending money on internal security resources it offloads it's security problems on the local police. Crime is being punished instead of prevented.
It should be put into law that businesses with lax security share a greater portion of the public cost of the crime which results as well as punitive measures for the irresponsible situation they created.
That sounds like a fantastic way to disincentivize any company from providing goods and services to the poor.
Giving the population most vulnerable to falling into crime an easy opportunity to steal is bad for the poor.
Providing goods and services to the poor but not ensuring a crime-free environment is bad for the poor.
If not enforced, companies that _do_ take the responsibility for crime prevention will be at a competitive disadvantage.
You're not helping the poor by allowing slums and shitholes to exist on the false premise that the small apparent savings to them is worth the degraded conditions. You're just allowing profiteering from the poor because poor customers are much less able to demand better conditions.
> WalMart is #1 in revenue and #15 in market cap, I don't think there are any problems with incentives there.
This is because we haven't passed ridiculous laws like the one you are proposing.
WalMart can't effectively compete in the middle-income market. It has image problems, it would have to do a huge overhaul, the space is already filled with many others. If it leaves the low-income space it will leave a huge opportunity for others to enter.
Nothing can legislate away the low-income market and as long as it exists there will be companies who want to enter it. Laws can shape what that market looks like and what environment is for the people in it.
It has image problems because it competes in the low-income market. If that weren't a profitable space for them, they would change their image overnight.
> If it leaves the low-income space it will leave a huge opportunity for others to enter.
If Walmart can't make it work, I doubt any other company could.
> Nothing can legislate away the low-income market and as long as it exists there will be companies who want to enter it. Laws can shape what that market looks like and what environment is for the people in it.
This is just objectively false. Of course you can legislate away the low-income market. It's done all the time. The state can absolutely strangle a market with too many policies and regulations or take it over completely.
It seems like paying off-duty cops would be the best solution. Lots of businesses with security gates already do this.
Errr, they did, back in January, at some majors costs in hours people are allowed to work, their bottom line, but not their absolute stock price (weasel words because I didn't check to see how they're doing compared to the general market).
We can be sure this also came at a cost in their anti-shrinkage and general anti-crime efforts.
Kind of a tough question, because to define concentration you need some notion of area, and you might just redistribute it across the boundaries you draw. Still, this is probably possible at least for smaller towns.
The response to having too many petty crimes is to not call the police? This whole situation is bizarre.
The shoplifters are still the ones to blame for the shoplifting, but it's not entirely unreasonable for the town to demand some level of performance from the store rather than happily providing expensive police to deal with a problem the store could handle with cheap employees.
They're refusing to look at the demographics. The criminals have nothing to do with my Dad in his fancy RV. The article is close to understanding the problem is socioeconomic class but for political reasons can't say the real problem, so, um, it must be the campers, yeah they must be the problem.
Another peculiar logical and demographic problem is the article implies corporate spending on employees will magically reduce crime, much as hospitals hiring more ER nurses will reduce shootings.
Also, I could direct you towards the average market rate in Nepal or Shenzhen Province in China, and we could have a fun conversation about Walmart's exploitation of the third world, but we'll stick to the goalposts we have.
I don't expect execs to learn a lesson, though. Cost-cutting fits in much better with our managerialist culture. Decreasing waste mostly has to happen when employees doing or very close to the work spot opportunities for improvement. But any fool can look at a corporate budget, pick out the biggest expense, and say, "Well, let's cut that by a lot."
EDIT: And the downvotes proves that the demographics changed a lot. Why come here if I can browse CNN, Bloomberg and WSJ by myself? There is a lot of comments there too.