‘Maybe we cried too much’: Walgreens hints it exaggerated shoplifting surge | Hacker News Reader

‘Maybe we cried too much’: Walgreens hints it exaggerated shoplifting surge

theguardian.com

33 pointsbraingenious12 comments

The article claims in its title and first paragraph that the shoplifting problem was "exaggerated" or "overstated", but the rest of the article doesn't say anything to that effect? It merely says that theft levels "had returned to lower levels after a brief rise", which seems like a case of "hindsight is 20/20", rather than some sort of intentional deception like the article is trying to imply.

Can't help but feel this article was written in bad-faith. It feels desperate to counter the narrative of rising crime being an issue. Truth is crime has risen in the last couple of years and it has resulted in the severe deterioration of the quality of life in affected populations. The facts are clear and are not on the crime-downplaying side.

I wish crime would be a bipartisan issue since it leads to severe consequence for everyone alike. Alas, the partisan calculus being played demands inconvenient narratives be shut down, without any exploration of the causes.

I said as much here at the time; Walgreens wanted to close stores to cut costs (and perhaps to meet the costs of settling opioid sales litigation), and had said so in SEC filings earlier in the year.

But 'crime wave shuts down stores' was an easy story for many news outlets to run with during an election cycle. An interesting parallel data point was that Fox News coverage of crime dropped by more than half in the weeks following the election: https://www.thewrap.com/fox-news-violent-crime-coverage-elec...

Why would they shut down the stores if they were profitable?

Where did I say they were all profitable? I presume some are and some are not.

This is anecdotal, but I’ve heard from a regional manager in a non-shoplifty area that Walgreens isn’t happy with the profitability of the retail side in many of their full-sized stores.

Why does an employee ever change jobs?

Because operational funds could be deployed elsewhere for higher return.

I suppose it's good of Walgreens to come out honest about what they think about their data in regards to inventory. I don't think they were necessarily wrong to attribute retail shrinkage to theft/shoplifting though. There was definitely a surge in shoplifting and reselling of merchandise within SF that we didn't see before the pandemic.

While the shoplifting per population may have gone down, it may have gone up in the aggregate since SF definitely had population influx from 2015+ (and before). http://www.cjcj.org/news/13219

I feel like these figures are also muddied since SF didn't really try to enforce the shoplifting laws that had value of $950 or less (Prop 47). Perhaps someone who's more knowledgeable about these laws & statistics could chime in?

That's not quite true. Prop 47 made those crimes misdemeanors. Police lowered enforcement as a political protest or not caring about doing their jobs.

It was pretty obviously bogus when Walgreens was closing stores supposedly due to theft, yet CVS stores nearby were doing fine. A perfect real world A/B comparison.

Renegade Cut did a video explaining some of the bullshit. Highlights just how little shoplifting affects the bottom line.

"Let's talk about shoplifting" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGB7QnOZj3g

Discussed yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34275494 (3 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34270567 (4 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264830 (4 comments)

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