Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

I walked into a Walmart in urban California last week and the men's socks were stored in locked cabinets. I don't need statistics to tell me that the crime in that neighborhood is off the charts and it's not a place I want to live or work.

Are there safe parts of most cities? Sure! But life is usually more complicated than "that's just a {insert my political adversary} talking point", and this is definitely one of those cases.

View on HN

I don't know whether it's driven by shoplifting, or maybe the company being "proactive".

At least 2 Target stores here, in a very expensive university town, have recently installed rows of locked glass door cabinets, for securing products like... soap.

One of the locations, I'd expect to have some shoplifting shrink, though not too bad. The other location, a lot less.

(Also, anecdotally, the employees seem more aggressive lately about approaching people to "help". Which tends to come across as insincere and likely a Loss Prevention tactic, which is creepy and offensive, and makes me leave ASAP. Which I guess they might chalk up as an LP win. Nope, I was there to conduct commerce. Now they've made me dislike in-store shopping as much as I dislike their often abysmal Web order pickup experience. They're not nearly the worst store, brick&mortar or online, but I don't understand why they're moving in the direction of trashy with the image.)

Daily necessities being locked up is evidence that petty crime like shoplifting may be up. People shoplift necessities when they can't afford them. Nobody is stealing socks for meth money, they're stealing because their feet are cold and they don't have the money to pay.

And why, you might ask, is shoplifting up? Might have something to do with the historically horrific levels of income inequality in the US.

>historically horrific levels of income inequality in the US.

You can have high inequality and low % of extreme poverty

No, actually—shoplifting may have historically been primarily for personal use, and that may still be the primary cause by number of shoplifters, but organized gangs of shoplifters who steal large amounts of stuff to resell online are very much a thing [0] that's widely reported on [1] across many news outlets [2] and government groups [3].

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/organized-crime-rings-p...

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-04/eight-ar...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/business-health-government-and-po...

[3] https://www.chp.ca.gov/notify-chp/organized-retail-theft-pro...

> Nobody is stealing socks for meth money, they're stealing because their feet are cold and they don't have the money to pay.

Or, they might be stealing these items to resell. This is the case in NYC.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/08/organized-theft-ring-that-ta...

I think this is just a Walmart thing. I saw the same thing in a Canadian mountain resort town and it made me laugh out loud.

I live in South America and I've never seen such products locked up in a supermarket.

Usually it's just liquor and cigarettes if there's anything locked up at all.

This kind of stuff is so funny to me, because it's ignorant of every other store nearby.

You know what I did in Seattle a few months ago? I walked into a Target and they had everything locked up behind cabinets. The entire place looked like it was ransacked, with most of the shelves empty.

I went next door to the Safeway and the HMart. Literally not even a block away, and nothing was locked up, the shelves were stocked and everything was fine. That Target wasn't even in a high crime neighborhood; it was just mismanaged to shit.

I've definitely seen this with Targets, but I have a lot more confidence in Walmart's ability to tolerate a decent amount of shrinkage in order to avoid customer inconvenience. When I see a Walmart acting this way I get worried.

I've been to Walmarts in the ass-end of nowhere that have stuff locked up. The shrinkage problem is in part because of the self-checkout hole these stores have dug themselves into and the fact that staffing continues to dwindle.

Where in Seattle does an H Mart, Target, and Safeway co-exist within a block of each other?

The Target is now closed (for 'retail crime' reasons) , but this was in the UDistrict. It's only slightly embellished, since the Safeway is approximately one block north of the Target's prior location (4535 University Way NE) and then the HMart about one and a half blocks down.

The same thing happens in a Walmart on 5th Avenue. You would need statistics.

The same thing does not happen in my local Walmart. The only things behind locked cabinets are expensive electronics.

I'm not sure what 5th Avenue you're talking about, but I'd be very surprised if crime in that neighborhood isn't much higher than crime in mine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com