Let the market handle this. Simply close stores with high theft rates, which will happen anyway since they’re unprofitable.
It's clear that Prop 47 and the general mentality that property crimes don't matter and prosecuting them is racist has failed.
Price of rent is a function of housing supply and demand. Rent control just pushes the costs to less visible things like security deposit, maintenance, etc.
I don't think "reselling rings" are that easy to crack down on, they probably are not rings at all rely on apps and services and operate on a more individual basis. The very framing of such is just used to justify greater police budgets, but this is something far harder than even the drug war to win. The only way to win it is to make sure entrepreneurial sorts find it more profitable to do things legitimately than it is to plunder goods, and ensure jobs and job training are more accessible than a life of crime.
I don't ever remember thinking of drug dealers at any school I went to as "ambitious". Some drug _users_, yes, but they never stole stuff to fund their drug habit. It was more like recreational, responsible alcohol for them. And now that we all have careers it's pretty clear who was actually ambitious and who wasted their parents' money.
Not sure I want that. When the state refuses to protect private property, the market solution tends to look more like Vito Corleone. That's especially true when it appears certain organized crime groups are perpetrating coordinated thefts like the one at Nordstrom. The big corporations can't afford to to have mafia payments on the books, but they can afford to pack up and leave or encase everything in cages. The local mom 'n' pop store will be willing to pay a bit for protection.
In the past stores had Loss Prevention departments which were tasked with this stuff. It's never been the case that nobody shop lifted, its just now that the economic race has led retailers to externalize and cut costs.
It's very, very annoying to have some mall cop following you around, so now its a camera, later it will be many more and much better cameras with a lower paid employee with much less engagement with their occupation. I reject that it is an impossible task for national retailers.
I suspect walmart has a workable model: They move stocking into the shopping hours and use all of their employees as a micro-scale surveillance network.
Why should society foot the bill for for police and such to watch private property like this and essentialy persecute the population because the national retailers don't want to invest in the cost of doing business?
Inside of a store, it's completely reasonable and totally possible to just have an employee around.
Policing organized crime is the job of the FBI, if my knowledge of this stuff is a little bit correct. All of this surveillance garbage we've been ignoring for decades was supposed to solve these problems, but it is clearly not capable of doing so.
While that would indeed he instructive, it also would be quite destructive. I hope California can return to protecting the liberties that were already well-understood 200 years ago without going to such extremes.
Pharmacies and grocery stores being forced to close due to unchecked theft inflict pain and major lowering of quality of life to people around the neighborhood, and especially to people that can't just drive to the next store.
Also "just use online", may not be a solution. Medicine (especially pain pills), are continuous target of thefts.
Once the stores are closed, then the organized criminals move into homes. Next you will have to start installing heavy iron bars in your home. If you walk in parts of brooklyn, you'd see older homes that had massive bars even in 2nd floor windows, just to keep the people safe.
The market just doesn't solve the collapse of society. Unchecked theft costs to all society.
The elderly people with this wealth don't care - they can afford to live in places where this isn't a problem. Everyone else (young and old alike) can take a hike as far as these rich old folks are concerned.
That's...so reductive as to be actively misleading. "Have", "most", and "wealth" all deserve several asterisks.
Are we all supposed to own farms? How does that work with 330 million Americans? Who is going to have time to do things like design the hardware and software that power the devices you use to post on the internet--they don't have time to do that and work their personal farm for food...
Or: farms task themselves with producing food in the same way programmers task themselves with producing software.
The answer is, I don’t know why people do everything they do, but the labor market sorts itself out according to incentives, ability, compensation, laws, education, the dispersal of information and any number of factors.
We have farms and they are really good at what they do because we have food that is readily and cheaply accessible in abundance.
However, let's put this in context - when was the last time you did something, purely altruisticly, without any expectation of recompense? I think the people who do that kind of work are exceptional and exceptionally rare (assuming you are such a person). Even in those cases, those exceptional people choose problems where they can do the most good - and even if it can be argued that a community grocery store is such a place, it "competes" with various other local and global issues.
I imagine you need to get paid yourself in order to support your lifestyle.
Imagine someone were to approach you and ask the fruits of your labor for free - "qbasic_forever's software is a community good, why won't he simply do it for free?" I'm sure you have a variety of reasons, but most people's answers would be: life requires resources, so I must acquire those resources so that I and my family can live.
The grocery store owner and employees are in a similar circumstance. Or perhaps, a worse circumstance: "why should we continue to provide for a community which constantly steals from us and makes it harder for us to live?"
I have a very hard time answering this question - so I sympathize dearly with the grocery store owner.
Why should the owners of that supermarket go into ruin just to give you another shopping option? Why is it their responsibility to keep you fed at all?
Also, shoplifting is like calling firefighters to water your lawn, because, see, it's free!
Finally, they do have charitable "food delivery" places - they are called soup kitchens, but they are intended for people who can't afford food at all, not necessarily for people who have the money to buy what they need.
https://thegrocerystoreguy.com/what-is-the-profit-margin-for...
Really many factors bring even some losses to be unacceptable.