America's shoplifting problem, explained by retail workers and thieves

I think that cuts to the heart of the basis of morality.

Do we need the threat of consequences in the afterlife, if there are no immediate consequences to the self? Are we allowed to do whatever we want now, if we can absolve ourselves of consequences in the afterlife?

And if you don't believe in an afterlife, Do we recognize that these actions can hurt others? Do we have empathy for those that were hurt and try to make them whole? Do we more strictly punish those that abuse that empathy? How about people who simply don't feel any empathy for others, how is that dealt with?

I don't have any good answers for these questions.

Some of the largest protests in US history were in opposition to this state of affairs and they were met with violent repression and police being rewarded with even larger budgets WITHOUT the requirement that they actually enforce laws.

Sometime decades ago, the police just stopped policing.

I don't have all the details. We can infer and speculate a bit that it didn't happen at the same time everywhere, all at once. But it can't have been much later than the 1980s or early 1990s, or I would have noticed.

The only thing that the police do with any earnestness or initiative are drug busts, and this is plainly because when they do drug busts they get to keep the proceeds whether that is cash or fast cars (that get new squad car paint jobs). They do the other things (local) politicians want, which is some ticket quota revenue collection once in awhile. They continue to begrudgingly take stolen car reports, because if more than a few voters complained they weren't doing that, eventually some politician somewhere would lose an election or be forced from office.

But there are no repercussions for refraining from any other sort of police work. Those scenes in The Wire where they're trying to convince rape victims not to report it (in that scenario, so their stats would look better)... not just narrative device. When we hear about them not going after a school shooter killing kids in classrooms, and we're straining our brains to explain it and the only thing that comes to mind is cowardice? Well, I've got a simpler, though no less bizarre explanation... it just wasn't in their job description.

This isn't accidental or temporary or bad management. You have Police Chiefs going on Twitter and chastising the public for believing that they should be able to park cars and not have their windows smashed and contents stolen. It is a matter of policy that they no longer do policing. This is backed up by case law that makes it official that they have no duty to the public to protect them from any crime.

Most of all though, you have a public that is somehow willfully ignorant of it, thinks that maybe they're just doing a bad job but doing the job, and if they're patient new people will be hired and maybe they'll start doing it moderately well again. It's baffling.

It sounded convincing until someone actually researched it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/27/how-year-o...

Truthfully, the proliferation of crimes like this is a symptom of systems collapse because it evidences the unravelling of a lawful society (or, at least, the pre-existing social order, which may not have been generally “lawful”.)

I've had this exact thought while waiting to pay for my purchases and watching people carry armloads of stolen items out the front door.

??? Petty crime by any reasonable definition is an inferior good, above a (not actually all that large) income people stop doing it. It's not entirely clear how punishing it harder is actually going to help until you actually help the truly desperate. Now, once you do and the only people left shoplifting have no claim to any kind of "well I had to because I couldn't afford <necessity>" then you can bring the wrath of god down on it.

Target is't losing money because people are stealing gallons of milk they actually consume, it's because organized gangs empty the entire shelf of laundry detergent and flip it online. The romanticism here is ridiculous.

We need to keep in mind most of this shoplifting is not out of desperation or people needing things in most cases. Despite what people like to complain the US does have some social programs and beyond that almost every major city I've been in has multiple food banks and other organizations that help with people in extreme need. I'm not saying they are perfectly adequate, and I'm not trying to be scroogesque by saying "are there not workhouses or prisons?", merely to point out that first off there are lots of people that are desperate that don't turn to retail theft. In order to frame the real root of the problem.

It's organized crime. Here's how the scam works, there are various drug addicts, they will do anything for their next fix, they are the ones performing the actual theft. They then sell what they steal to the middle managers who will give them money or drugs for the merchandise. The middle managers then turn around and deliver it to what I'll call "HQ" which then turns around and sales it online, and they are able to underbid their competitors by virtue of having very low operating costs.

There was a wonderful article about how this scam was being run with a baby food ring operating out of Florida, but it is a similar story in multiple areas.

I put this out there to disabuse some people of the seemingly naive notion that these poor shoplifters are noble "Jean ValJean" types trying to steal bread to feed their family, and the truth that many of them, although held captive in the throes of addiction and mental health crises, are cogs in a machine of organized crime which although viewed microscopically doesn't seem like a big deal, when expanded up cause true societal destabilization.

If people are desperate enough to eat the seed they know they need for the next crop, policing seed use more strictly won't make the people less desperate for food. In fact, it probably makes them more desperate.

Why would you think being less tolerant of shoplifting would make the people less desperate?

That assumes they are desperate, and not just find it easier to steal than to work.

This isn't due to some kind of "woke" policy. You can't expect minimum-wage workers to literally risk their life trying to stop a potentially-armed shoplifter. The company sure isn't going to pay their healthcare costs when they get stabbed or shot, so why would the worker care about a slightly lower profit margin?

For example, I saw all the time a store would receive a case of merchandise from a vendor containing 100 toothbrushes, the computer says it's a qty of 100 for $2.99, but the receiver scans in the barcode for the whole case instead of the individual toothbrush and puts in a qty of 100 received. Now the retailer thinks they should have 10k instead of 100 brushes on hand, which gets picked up as a loss. I've seen similar things where the case pack sizes or prices were fat fingered by the corporate buyer and wrong in the system causing massive perceived shortages.

And of course, already you have people like jaepa say elsewhere that ackshually TX has a higher dollar amount for when shoplifting becomes a felony.

TX doesn't have DAs that refuse to prosecute misdemeanor shoplifting charges. CA does. That's the important difference, not so much the dollar amount.

Do you mean morale or moral? The sentence reads a little differently if you actually mean the latter.

I've seen a non-trivial number of people online who work in retail say they are looking the other way on shoplifting, and others should do, because people are in need. However, this is short sighted. When all the stores close, there are no more places to shoplift from, the jobs go away, and even the people who did pay lose their options for buying goods. It's bad all the way around.

Maybe local governments can work with retailers and the community to setup local food banks, and shops for donated food, clothing, etc to give people an alternative to theft.

I understand minimizing consequences for people in difficult situations. But in those cases the government needs to reimburse the shop and provide services to help the theif get out of their difficult situation.

Simply turning a blind eye is not an act of sympathy. It's apathy.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...

When self-checkout stations were introduced at my local grocier, they were a convenient way to checkout fast when you only had a few simple items. It was always a user-hostile experience, but it wasn't a big deal when you only had a few items.

Now there are so few cashiers ever available that I'm regularly forced to use self checkout with a few dozen items. And the experience has only gotten worse.

Same, but that's expensive and these stores often operate on very thin margins.

I worked at a k-mart when I was a teenager, 20-something years ago. The store had a problem with shoplifting and did hire a security guy to come in. He got some arrests for "petty" shoplifting, but it took something like a year to nail the big one. It turned out that the employee who had installed the cameras had been doing a ton of shoplifting. They eventually caught him because he made a mistake and did something on-camera.

That solved the shoplifting problem, but the security guy probably cost more than they saved. At any rate, the store closed down a year or two later.

https://x.com/rottenindenmark/status/1596614556448882688

He also covered an article a while back about a Target in (I believe) Brooklyn allegedly closing because of OCR only to reopen three blocks away. Yep, that’s gonna stop the alleged hordes of roving gangs of shoplifters.

It’s hard to make any conclusive claims without more evidence, but both retailers and police seem reticent to give any hard numbers.

Also, when you say "manufactured moral panic", who do you think is manufacturing this? Perhaps the retailers, in order to justify the closing of their lagging stores in bad neighborhoods? If you follow the store closings you see this is not always the case, e.g. the Cotopaxi example I sited in my comment above (https://sgbonline.com/cotopaxi-closes-store-in-san-fransisco...). I can provide many other examples.