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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

At a local Safeway woman loads cart with bottles of liquor. Walks out. She yells “I know my rights, I know my rights”. What are the cashiers and security going to do? Nothing, they let her go.

At another place kids get caught stealing they turn over a display and run out. Again, nothing done. All those costs are borne by the paying customers.

People are gonna get sick of it; the progressive supes are gonna rue this move. The DA race in SF was close. I think it’s gonna go the other way next election.

Also word on the street is apparently thieves prefer SF to Daly City because San Mateo county doesn’t play as nice as SF.

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What you are describing is a particular sort of story that's meant to inflame and probably speaks to where you get you news, which sounds like it's political and partisan.

Both of the things you describe are corporate policies. They have nothing to do with state law anywhere, and they are there because of liability. Safeway doesn't want to get sued for 1) if an employee is an idiot/racist and misidentifies someone and harms them 2) employees get harmed substantially trying to stop a shoplifter. In these cases you have rare and small losses that are miniscule compared to bad financial outcomes of intervention.

It would be easy to stop, but that costs money. It's a very simple business decision for retailers: is the cost of loss prevention higher than the loss.

The fact that this surprises you is surprising to me, this problem is many decades old in retail.

Car burglaries are a much different dynamic, and another poster mentions that it's a felony that was reclassified to a misdemeanor, and that law probably does need to be changed and is a problem for lawmakers.

edit: and can we raise the elephant in the room, which is that this is fairly solvable with a national facial recognition database and fairly low end iptv/image capture tech?

One point is that grocers shouldn't have to fend for themselves against crime.

Supplying the public good of crime fighting is the main reason to form governments in the first place.

The police can't be in every store all the time. Presumably the police did show up and file reports about these crimes, but when a shoplifter is running away and the window to catch/arrest them is <60 seconds, I don't know what more the police could be doing.

I can think of a few San Francisco retail locations where blatant theft happens maybe every 15 minutes. The Walgreens at 9th and Market, the Gateway Safeway, the CVS at Pine and Kearney. The city has a task force for poop (much of the city is treated as a literal toilet); petty theft is almost equally visible and problematic.

The Safeway at 4th and King was basically a free market for crackheads. I lived nearby for five years and I would see shoplifting every time that I entered the store. I'm not even exaggerating.

So how have other cities solved this?

Or do you claim it's like this in every city?

First of all, grocers do not fend for themselves. They don't have private armed security and prisons. They call the police. It follows a completely normal and established process for reporting a crime and investigating it, then goes into the criminal justice system if necessary.

Beyond that what do you propose? Put a police officer in each store 24x7? How much does that cost and is that cost socialized? What if a police office causes issues with customers? What does the reporting structure and chain of command look like? Who has ultimate authority in that situation, the police office or the store? How is the cost borne by the store? What is the share of private and public burden in officer benefits/pension?

None of those questions involve the internet and closed circuit monitoring is almost 50 years old. The status quo reflects a lot of thought and money invested into the problem.

Two solutions:

A) Clerk warehouse model:

Stores can allow shoppers to browse through aisles of display items, sample items, boxes, or whatever else causes them to feel like a consumer, take tickets for what they want, then bring them to a counter.

After payment is received, someone else comes out from a secured, monitored area with all your items in a cart.

It wouldn't be too difficult to develop a system to allow people to visually browse for and select meat and produce items.

B) Strict club model:

Store is not open to the general public, but club members only.

You can't be club member if you are under 18 or don't have a provable source of income. If you violate the club's code of conduct, your access is revoked.

Entry is strictly controlled. You can't enter the facility without proof of membership. All purchases verified upon exit.

Both are well established and used in full or part by various retailers.

A) Cigarettes. Always behind a counter for age checks, but mostly because of loss prevention. Top shelf liquor, electronics, razors, and batteries often have similar constraints because they are compact and resalable. What is the loss of sales compared to theft loss and clerk staffing requirements (or implementation of the technology).

B) Club model suffers losses just the same. You can counterfeit a membership, and you might have issues validating on entry otherwise. Faster validation on entry might result in capex, and again you have a loss prevention/loss cost benefit decision to make.

Nobody is throwing money and low margin grocery chains. So cash flow positive operations are a big concern.

Clerk warehouse model is common in the third world.

I'll tell you how it's done at my Vons and Ralphs in my neighborhood in LA. They hire private security, one during the day, and two at night. They have to fend for themselves, as even if someone gets stabbed (like what happened to two people at the ralph's in september), cops aren't going to get there until blood has been spilled and the assailant has disappeared.

In the case from September, the suspect still hasn't been found, even with security footage and multiple witnesses and a description. Even at the vons, my regular shop on account of the stabbing at the ralphs, about once every other month the security guard has to bear hug and haul out a destitute person who decided to get belligerent with a cashier or customer. And this is a neighborhood that commands 1br rents north of 1.8k, but functions like Mos Eisley.

The solution is some sort of hired security, whether police or private. The ralphs situation could have been much worse without security guards.

I get neighborhood news from one of the various social neighborhood apps. These apps aren’t political or partisan in so far as I can tell. In my neighborhood there are lots of progressives but after a few years even some of the died in wool progs see that there are problems.

And to your point. Yes different crimes but the point is there has been a surge in both as well as a new crime in the form of package theft.

Hasn't anyone ever watched the opening scene of Pulp Fiction? Tarantino got right to that... no one is going to stop if you if you decide to rob a diner.

> “I know my rights, I know my rights”. What are the cashiers and security going to do? Nothing, they let her go.

I've seen a shoplifter (also in SF, Safeway) take it to the next level, repeatedly yelling, "I'm pregnant! The guards are killing me and my baby!". None of which appeared to be the case, and security was as nervous as you might imagine.

This kind of stuff happens a lot at Safeways in SF (also Starbucks and CVS, but mostly Safeway it seems). Other times you'll just see someone running out the door, guards look into the distance for a moment and that's that.

My wife calls them Unsafeway, heh.

I find it hard to imagine that. How do they stay in business?

At my supermarket, I have never observed proper going-out-the-door shoplifting. I am still able to get offended when somebody eats a grape that they haven't purchased. I'm sure worse crime happens, but in-store grape consumption is the worst I've ever observed.

My local Safeway in a middle class area of the South Bay Area also has a significant shoplifting problem. It's often kids who come in after school and steal small items, as well as homeless adults. Unfortunately the management appears to have a policy of not prosecuting or even confronting shoplifters. I sort of understand why they don't want to do anything, but it's disappointing because tolerating lawlessness brings down the whole neighborhood.

Technically, all of the customers like yourself are paying for it.

In So Cal, a supermarket I go to remodeled and removed the entrance closest to the liquor, leaving only one (rather busy) entrance where a security guard is posted.

I've seen people stealing liquor there as well.

I believe what you’re describing is nation wide and doesn’t have anything to do with SF.

Most companies tell their employees to not stop shoplifters for because they don't want to risk a lawsuit, not because they legally can't do it. I've seen loss prevention employees at my local Target detain shoplifters until the police arrive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper%27s_privilege

Target reportedly also does this so they can wait until you accrue felony amounts via repeated thefts, and then swoop in with a specialized team.

Whether or not this is on the employer's mind, I also can't imagine risking getting shot over my $12-$14 an hour retail job.

My retired grandfather works at Wal-Mart part time just to get out of the house, and he said the same thing. He was working on black friday last year and was assigned to a display where the item was limited to one per customer. He said a big guy came up to him and asked what my grandfather would do if he tried to take more than 1. My grandfather told him that they don't pay him enough to try and stop people from breaking the rules, so the guy grabbed an armful of the item and left.

Well, just imagine that you can’t risk losing your $12/hr job, either.

One of the few upsides about a $12 an hour job is that it's easy to replace.

Not everywhere, not for everyone, and if you're making $12/hour, there's a decent chance a day or two out of work is going to put you in the red if you're not already.

It’s the frequency and brazenness of the crimes that’s out of line with respect to other stats.

Sure, but the underlying difference is that people actually know their rights, not that SF is somehow soft on crime as implied.

It’s almost as if you’re wanting to imply shoplifting is a right.

They are not imploring a right. I could make s citizens arrest under my rights but people will tell you, it’s a losing proposition because you subject yourself to other frivolous claims that take money and time to clear up.

So the reason people aren’t detained for police is because police will do very little in these cases because they are classed as misdemeanors. So why risk lawsuits, etc. when there is no upside?

> I could make s citizens arrest under my rights

Very debatable. If you as a non-LEO attempt to detain someone who you suspect of having committed a crime, and they feel threatened, you could easily end up in jail.

“They did a crime” does not, in fact, give you the right to crime too.

Edit: Can someone help me out? I’ve posted a bunch of controversial opinions in this thread, so why is the one factual claim the thing getting downvoted to oblivion without comment?

Am I somehow wrong about this? Like... can I actually crime someone just because they crimed someone else first and I don’t want them to get away with it?

I need to know this.

> so why is the one factual claim

It's not factual - it's false.

> Am I somehow wrong about this? .. can I actually crime someone

Making a reasonable citizen's arrest is not a crime. That's what you have wrong.

(And you don't 'crime' someone, that's a noun not a verb.)

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

In most places people can be stopped. Mega business tends not to chase them because they can absorb the costs, making possible litigtion not worth it. The small business owner is the one made powerless by these laws, which are, indeed, different from the rest of the country.

Their customers absorb the costs. Always.

Except SF is soft on crime ... we have the lowest arrest and conviction rate in all of California.

The right to steal unimpeded?

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