With sufficient staffing and instant mobile checkout, stores can implement a fully secure experience. The caveat here is "sufficient staffing" of people who can use a mobile checkout solution.
I live a few blocks away from a Walgreens that is now closing at the end of the month. I've personally witnessed a shoplifter actively shoplifting nearly every time I was in the store over the past year to year and a half. This was a half dozen encounters at least, of varying degrees of audacity from teenagers stealing some makeup to outright crews doing a mini flash mob style raid.
In every case staff (and security) were tailing them, and in one instance outright confronting them nearly to the point of physically blocking them. The shoplifters do not care - they know they cannot be touched by store employees, and they also know the police literally will not show up to the call. These are folks filling up entire baskets full of high value items for obvious resale while everyone simply lets them do it.
Perhaps this is an outlier, but based on talking to employees, seeing it with my own two eyes, it's fairly clear to me Walgreens Corporate is simply walking it back and taking an L in these locations vs. bothering to step into a hyper-partisan political topic.
This is a wild shift in societal norms and values from when I was working retail jobs in the mid to late 90's. We were enabled (and willing) to outright physically detain shoplifters to the point of physical restraint if they fought back. Police and prosecutors would have our backs strongly. This rapidly changed towards the end of the 90's into the early 00's.
Society starts failing when the answer to every problem is call mommy and daddy (the police) and stops enforcing basic societal norms by itself. We are witnessing the transition from a high trust society to a low trust society in many areas of this country.
Complex societies seem to have a few basic options:
1 - Enforce social laws 'locally' without official government sanction; neighborhood heroes if you're polite, the mob if you're looking at the U.S. big cities in much of the 20th century. Behaviors change through fear.
2 - Enforce statutory laws via government punishment: fines or community service, imprisonment for repeat offenders, etc. Behaviors change through removing people from the society, or scaring them into fearing punishment.
3 - Don't enforce any laws. After all, shoplifting is a victimless crime. People need to eat and they need medicine. It's not against the law to be poor.
4 - Change societal norms through shaming and education. After all, people don't realize the impact they're having, if you finger wag and lecture to them, they will understand the bigger societal reason to be nice.
In cities like NYC, SF, Philly and Chicago I seem to be seeing all of these, with a de-emphasis on traditional #2, the government punishing people. We like to blame police for not showing up, but district attorneys are specifically avoiding to prosecute [1], so police aren't going to waste their times and risk themselves.
We have judges attempting diversion programs like making defendants write essays or attend some event where they can meet victims to gain empathy.
Then we have a huge number (according to voting patterns) of Millennial-age folks who are deeply against police, against incarceration ("the carceral system" as they refer to it) at any cost, both as they're viewed as historically racist.
What will happen now? Well as usual the middle class and poor will suffer - the rich will always have their deliveries, private security, and seclusion from the street thuggery we're pretending is inevitable and perhaps only started during the pandemic (an argument being made by our politicians).
1 - See page four of https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Day-O... ("The Office will not prosecute the following charges...")
It's absurd that a sitting DA can just choose not to prosecute whole sections of the law. I get that prosecutorial discretion is a thing, but that has to be on a case-by-case basis, and not declared outright that a whole class of crimes is unilaterally decided by the DA to no longer be a crime.
Shoplifting is a victimless crime? Wtf?
I cannot emphasize this enough. There is no amount of police presence that will make society work if enough members choose to violate the law and each other, and that "enough" is a smaller percentage than most people think.
>Police and prosecutors would have our backs strongly. Prosecutors still have your backs. The idea of NOT prosecuting a shoplifter is pretty much a non-consideration anywhere, and even in the small part of california that people claimed the DA did prosecute saw them voted out. It's police that just seem to ignore crime in some jurisdictions. In my local supermarket growing up, the store manager and local police RELISHED going after shoplifters. It was stupid easy, a few cameras and a bored officer is all it takes.
This was also in a dirt poor community where small time crime was a regular thing for most people, think "White trash" area.
This anecdote should clearly not be generalized to the entire country, but average retail shrinkage is supposedly around 2% which includes pretty much any reason you can think of, including someone returning a box of bricks instead of the product, a minimum wage employee dropping a bottle of soda, a customer putting the frozen peas on a random shelf instead of back in the freezer, etc. Shoplifting as something that harms a store's income is an extremely local thing IMO.
I have worked with a handful of amazing people like him. Taking pride in such things is great and is what I am mourning in these (risky) posts.
> he never once talked about shoplifting as a driver of that shrinkage. It was ALWAYS waste, or backroom theft, or poor stock handling and planning.
Agreed. Employee theft was always by far the largest form of shrinkage while I was working retail. It likely very much still is or I'd be absolutely surprised.
What is not discussed is the elephant in the room. You start letting retail theft creep up like this - not just in numbers but in blatant in your face crime - you will start seeing backroom theft skyrocket. People eventually become demoralized and while it's complete anecdote I'm personally seeing it now. Eventually theft is going to become normalized if we continue down this path. Why work a $20/hr retail job when someone can walk in, take $1500 worth of product, and walk out with zero consequences. It adds up.
I also cannot agree that shrinkage is not a major problem for most retail stores. A major chain can likely hide it via averaging it out, but for a mom and pop/small chain in a rough area (the type of places I worked for) shrinkage was a major factor of profitability. You have to sell a lot of candy bars to make up for a single one being stolen when you are operating at 10-20% margin.
I also completely understand this is very widely distributed through the country at the moment, and I live in one of the worst off places for this sort of thing. My perception is certainly due to that fact.
At the Walgreens near where I live they sometimes have a security guard at the door, sometimes not. They only allow one of the two doors to open.
If the guard isn’t there you’ll see teenagers walk in, dump a bunch of their stuff in a backpack, grab as much as they can carry, and walk out. They come back five minutes later and do it again.
This is with a lot of staff on the floor, who recognize them when they come back in.
The staff have likely been told not to try to stop them, because it’s a liability for Walgreens. The security does seem to help but even that doesn’t completely stop people from trying. I have seen the security follow people they recognize into the store and then end up chasing them out but the perpetrators still get away. Even more security might help to block the door in that case, but that’s the only useful mitigation I’ve seen in these cases.