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Comment by speff | Hacker News Reader

That seems like a really small number? To compare - total US retail shrink in those years combined was a little over $300B[0] - averaging about 1.5% of sales. $1.5B seems like a rounding error when talking in those terms.

[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-retailers-cite-rising-theft-...

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I think their point was that this was all that was recovered, from the approx $20b stolen each year through wage theft. I believe wage theft is one of the largest value crime by $ amount in the US - but is very rarely prosecuted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

Actually it turns out fraud and white collar crime takes more out of the American economy.

I skimmed the article - any significant concrete numbers were all sourced to the EPI site linked by the GP. There's an unsourced FBI chart that says >19B in 2012, but I couldn't find the actual numbers when I looked. Frankly - I don't trust this claim if the only one actually putting big numbers on it is one publication.

EDIT: I'm going to cast more suspicion on the FBI graph. According to a 2022 report[0], the number of robbery offenses reported in 2018 was 1691 cases. The median loss being about $2k. Doing some caveman-math, that's about $3B lost to robbery in 2018. Unless we went through some insane spike of lawlessness between 2012 and 2018, I don't see how $340m in 2012 jumps to $3B in 2018.

[0]: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

1691 * $2k is about $3M, not $3B.

Caveman math indeed. Thanks for the correction - that's a pretty big error. Though then I'm not sure what to make of the discrepancy between the numbers. They still don't square up w/ the Wikipedia article any way you look at it

You are comparing ACTUAL recovered wage theft numbers to industry trade group estimated numbers and making claims/drawing conclusions off of two totally differently types of numbers?

Why not compare recovered to recovered, which are pretty close to each other? https://hayesinternational.com/news/annual-retail-theft-surv...

That business appears to steal as much from their workers as criminal theft rings surely is kind of a big deal (based on the matching ACTUAL recovery numbers).

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