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Comment by c420 | Hacker News Reader

What's missing from what Target and others are trying to have us believe is that employee theft and corporate ineptitude account for 56% of "shrinkage". Also, external theft is trending down while internal theft is trending up.

"While retailers and the NRF are increasingly saying crime is cutting into profits, losses from internal and external theft last year were largely on par with historical trends. They made up 65% of total shrink, the survey found.

External theft, which includes organized retail crime, was again reported as the largest source of shrink last year at 36.15%, but that was slightly below 37% in 2021. Internal theft, or goods stolen by employees, rose slightly to 28.85% from 28.5% in 2021. Process and control failures and errors made up 27.29% of shrink in 2022, up from 25.7% the year prior."

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/organized-retail-crime-and-t...

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> Target and others are trying to have us believe

I doubt Target or other are "trying to have us believe". Closing a store is quite a big business decision, it's not likely they are doing that in order to promote a thesis.

While I don't dispute your numbers, it is entirely possible that they are correct as an average, but Target has 2000 stores in the US, and they are closing only 9.

Is it a big business decision or is it just 9 out 2000.

Closing a store is definitely a big business decision.

I mentioned 9 out of 2000, hoping that it is self evident that a statement about stable average theft over 2000 does not contradict the fact that in the extremes you can have a large increase in theft that results in unprofitable stores.

The argument isn’t that they’re closing the stores to promote a narrative, but that after deciding to close a store, they will spin it as favorably as possible.

So if the spin is not real, what is the reason, and why does it needs to be spun?

The people who would be shareholders are ones that would also be a lot more worried about crime in general.

These people are also more usually on the side of cops. Especially when it comes to “rioting”. The events of 2020 has allowed for a new boogeyman to be used in these decisions and it basically softens the impact.

> The stores include the East Harlem location in New York City, two locations in Seattle, three locations in Portland, and three locations in San Francisco and Oakland.

These are all growing or at least stable cities with strong economies. It seems unlikely that they were forced to close these stores for some reason and was forced to come up with a post hoc rationalization.

They’re also (mostly) all known for their recent spates of looting.

What’s favorable about announcing that you’re closing a store due to theft?

Which does the market respond better to:

- We closed a store due to a miserable economic outlook: https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2023/08/12/consumer...

- We closed a store due to crime

Some people assume if you're denying the retailers' claims on theft, you're really just burying your head in the sand about crime... but no.

Target is a corporation. A decision like this is not made so transparently and neatly that you can package up it up in a headline. Whatever ends up as the headline is what Target wants to signal, not just to the market, but to its own stores and employees.

Can we please stop being armchair experts? Go to the target stores in question, you can see people walking out with phat stacks every single day while staff can do nothing except watch.

Pretending theft isnt a problem is naive at best but lets be honest its agenda pushing.

Can you not project your own armchair tendencies onto others?

At Target's scale any operational risk is large enough to be held up as justification for closing a store, and no single operational risk is why they'd close one, let alone 4.

They could have thrown darts at a board and anything from consumer spending to labor to climate change would have applied without a single fabrication: their footprint is just that large. In the end Target framed this as closing stores for safety reasons: https://corporate.target.com/press/releases/2023/09/Target-C...

Target did not choose to close stores for safety reasons. They're facing massive economic headwinds, a tepid outlook, and need to close cut costs. I shopped at one of the stores they're closing last week: people steal out of stores with infinitely worse margins than Target, and it's safer than stores down the block.

They didn't just look at safety like the press release implies, they looked at a laundry list of factors: ones that the people who wrote that press release wouldn't even know exist, and decided on a strategy, then iterated on that strategy and the positioning until it came out like it did.

I really thought I headed off the inevitable political soapbox speakers by stating as plainly as two letters that my comment wasn't political commentary but somehow you turned "n" and "o." into... "I think it's ok that they're stealing".

Not all of us have had our brains so absolutely rotted out that everything is part of a political agenda. Maybe it's because I wasn't born here but at the end of the day I can't relate to the kind of animalistic governance-turned-team-sport sickness that some people seem stuck on.

It is agenda pushing. It is very obvious from a boots-on-the-ground perspective that safety and crime is a HUGE issue at these particular stores. This lines up perfectly with the statements, narrative and statistics that Target and CNN are making. There is no reason to doubt the veracity of the story except ______. Fill in the blank, please.

> Not all of us have had our brains so absolutely rotted out that everything is part of a political agenda.

You are actively participating in a heavily politicized forum and are perfectly aware of the current cultural and political zeitgeist. I don't believe your holier-than-thou claim.

"The press aligned with a press release"

One Target accounts for half the shoplifting in the entire city of San Francisco. https://sfist.com/2021/11/24/half-of-all-reported-sf-shoplif...

Things got worse since then and they're now robbed an average every 10 minutes: https://sfstandard.com/2023/05/09/every-10-minutes-downtown-...

It has more security than the store closing, and has more homeless people due to its central location: Target didn't close it because it makes more money.

There's no agenda in not being deluded enough to think Target won't put profit over safety.

No.

The press aligns with the lived experiences of literally any person who shops at those stores with any regularity.

To think that Target stores in the heart of SF and Seattle couldn't have enough business to be profitable outside of theft is what is "deluded". The primary cause of these particular stores being unprofitable is clearly theft and crime.

Whether you realize it or not, you are simply not making a serious argument. You have no evidence for your claims. You are pushing an agenda.

> employee theft and corporate ineptitude account for 56% of "shrinkage"

On average. Across all stores. Across the whole industry. In 2022.

It's not missing. They are closing 9 stores where this clearly doesn't hold up.

And those stores are in cities with extremely lax policies towards theft.

While I don't doubt those general numbers, it seems likely that the 27% of "control failures and errors" are relatively consistent among stores while "external theft" could be magnitudes higher in some locations in others.

I live in Brooklyn and things like toothpaste and detergent are in lock and key in Target. I just end up ordering them on Amazon.

Within the last 6 months, a local Target I use has refitted most of the store with locked sliding doors for shelves and anti-theft tags for larger items. I noticed that high priced groceries like steaks also tend to be permanently ‘sold out’. There is an open street market nearby that sells products that match closely with what the target sells. Homeless tend to just hang out in front or inside. Wasn’t like this several years ago, so times are clearly changing.

Or maybe just occam's razor: the stores are unprofitable due to mostly theft, internal and external.

So Target is closing them down.

Comparing rates to 2021 seems to me to be a bad faith argument, since they would almost certainly argue that the reason goes a little further back than that.

You are labeling statistical noise as trends. I think it's you who is being manipulative, not Target.

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