The result is we're going to all get punished for it. Increasingly we're going to see a return policy that is less and less flexible until one day it is eliminated altogether.
Memberships also give retailers a way to kick miscreants out of an entire chain (vs. trespassing them from one location) and keep them out without risking a lawsuit for profiling or other verboten activities.
If I opened a store in San Francisco tomorrow it would be some kind of membership only deal, maybe a co-op to appeal to local politics. No way would I allow the general public inside unless I were selling bulk concrete or something else equally impossible to shoplift.
What makes more sense is store sized vending machines. Pay for what you want and it is dispensed. Order on site or online. I'm surprised no one is doing this on a wide scale yet.
The truth is we have tried it and on a large scale: The Automat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat). Don't see to many of those around anymore, except maybe analogues in Japan.
With some perspective on the idea, would you invest in the retail real estate, the technology development, and later maintenance, and then still need to have staff to stop people from just breaking into the machine?
The truth is I expect stealing from a delivery van is ultimately simpler... or simply stealing the package off the porch easier still. The issue isn't the ease or difficulty.
Where I expect consumer delivery businesses to do better in the face of theft is on the cost of theft (assuming a certain scale in the delivery business). Given the economies of scale of a warehouse and the delivery model vs traditional retail locations, I bet means the loss for any item stolen from the van is less than that of the same item stolen from a traditional retail location.
But I think people still do it, I don't know if they still do it but Costco would check your receipt against what was in your trolley when I shopped there, if I remember correctly (10+ years ago).
They don't check at the food court, either. Wouldn't surprise me if people have stole stuff via the big pizza boxes.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/costco-winning-war-against-re...
I think you'd be surprised.
And in any case, some shoplifters will obviously be dissuaded by the need to get a fake or stolen card in the first place.
Which was literally the shopping experience before Selfridges "revolutionized" the department store experience by letting customers have direct access to goods for sale.[0]
Before that everything was behind a counter and you have to be served and monitored. Even the grocery store was a similar experience, whereby you would give the clerk your list and they would select everything for you.
Everything that is old is new again.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_store#Innovations_1...
That way they only have to hire two employees. One to drag carts around the parking lot and one to drag keys to all the locked cabinets of soap and shampoo and diapers and whatnot.
With robots doing the picking and packing the employee problem becomes reduced, but it might take some serious innovation to reliably get customers to leave with more products than they went to the store to buy.
This is only true in ways that don't matter, because you count "any population" being large enough to obviously include miscreants. Most people do not shoplift, and therefore there are MANY ways to slice a population which will not include shoplifters.
People that steal a lot would have high insurance rates and would eventually have to order all their food from one of those stores with the prison bars in front.
People that don't steal would have minimal to no insurance rates and would not be paying shrinkage for those that do.
You can have that, but it doesnt exist, so it isnt helpful. We can have many good things, but unless they are --paired together-- with the potentially bad things, you end up in a bad place.
Talk to anyone who has been randomly deplatformed off Uber, CitiBike, etc.
YouTube bans are a killer for a lot of people who support themselves that way.
All stores are basically charging you an insurance rate it's just under the current system it's baked in with the assumption you're as equally likely to be a thief as anyone else.
A few centuries ago, people fight to get public courts with clear rules. No we are making the courts private to save a few bucks.
That is, the insurance is the appeal. It's allowing you to appeal that you're not a thief so you shouldn't pay full shrinkage premiums. And even if you think one insurer is wrong, you can go with another one, even while shopping at the same store -- providing you more appeal options than before when previously all you could do was just leave and go somewhere else if you disagreed.
For a vision of the future, look at YouTube videos of walking tours of San Francisco and Oakland. Entire streets for lease, 38% commercial availability rate. The Crocker Mall and San Francisco Centre Mall are empty, the latter for sale, losing over $1 billion in value.
Probably doesn't matter though, because most people ditched shopping and do everything online now.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/auction-san-franci...
SF Centre Mall tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN3JXQoM9AU
SF Crocker Galleria tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzuSQSA3brA
What could motivate people to theft? They must need something awfully badly. Perhaps fixing the underlying requirements could help.
Desperation leads to crime, true.
But also true: a lack of societal norms leads to crime. Any time we advocate or demonstrate disrespect, cheating, injustice, cruelty, unwarranted rule-breaking, doxing, or any kind of mob mentality we are contributing to it.
And yes your favorite political villains are all guilty of this, but we need to start with ourselves and the people close to us.
Curious how you reach this conclusion from the point that they do it for money?
> They want money
> It's just a job to them.
That's pretty much exactly how most people meet their needs: do a job for money. That they are stealing things other than what is directly needed is a distraction from the point that they are stealing to meet their needs.
Steal baby formula to sell on the black market? May or may not be meeting needs, but it definitely isn’t direct!
Yes, this is my point. It can't be concluded that they are not stealing to meet their needs.
Well, right, but that's not what I was refuting.
So yes, I am refuting what you are saying.
You're not. You acknowledge my point
> Stealing to meet abstract secondary needs
But do not refute that this is the reason for the theft, only argue that it is wrong regardless. My only point is that the theft is "a matter of meeting peoples needs".
> criminal for a reason
I'm not sure of your overall point. Stealing bread to eat is also criminal for the same reasons.
Unless you think anyone was proposing they did it to set it on fire instead?
Needs are also often defined arbitrarily, and many people steal because they ‘need’ more drugs, for example. So, who cares?
I thought they'd be defined as real needs like food, warmth, safety. That seems a reasonable assumption.
> then there is no point
No, there is a point. The commenter I initially replied to wrote
> This isn't a matter of meeting peoples needs
My point is that this statement seems to be false for the reasons that I've given.
Wages have stagnated for decades as prices have increased. What possible solution is there other than to address the biggest elephant in the room.
Kleptomania
> They must need something awfully badly.
Dopamine
> Perhaps fixing the underlying requirements could help.
Prosecution (not just lip service)
When I was working on a site a decade ago where people were constantly defrauding the users we built a lot of tools to creatively deal with these people to make them less effective. It became very clear that law enforcement wasn't prepared to deal with the problem (at the time at least, maybe they've gotten better) so we had to figure out anything that we could do to protect our users.
The fact that you're essentially only allowed to play defense is IMO the reason it keeps happening. If we were able to hire a cybersecuurity company to hack the people defrauding our users for us, we would have done it in a heartbeat and it would have been worth every penny. It always seemed like, in the US at least, this could have fallen under the 2nd amendment as a self defense response.
That reported number did not go up, which was bad for the narrative they want to push, so the National Retail Federation, the largest lobbying organization for retail who publishes shrink stats for decades has suddenly stopped publishing that stat.
National larceny rates in at least the US (but I'm fairly sure most Western countries) have consistently gone down for decades. There's significantly less shoplifting now on average than there was in the '80s or '90s.
Retailers have no reason to report crime they do not expect to be investigated or prosecuted.
Don't say insurance because nobody is reporting shoplifting to their insurance.
Big retailers just bake crime into the cost of goods sold.
Of course, you cannot know, but statistics is quite clear that shoplifting decrease is way more probable than increase, and you need some other reasons to advocate for increasing shoplifting. So when somebody does that, it’s highly probable that not because shoplifting is actually increasing.
possibly, but are you seriously comparing now to the height of the crack epidemic in the US?
https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/191247/reported-larceny-t...
This is still an utter bullshit narrative. Not only does "the state" not even try to go after coordinated shoplifting rings, but shoplifting has not statistically increased
Shrink has not increased.
The National Retail Federation, the lobbying org publishing industry wide shrink statistics suddenly declined to publish the numbers this year, while instead pushing forward a survey of their members that say they all feel shoplifting is worse.
Why do you think they would suppress that data unless it doesn't align with the narrative they are selling?
edit: thought crime police?
You can't really do anything about shoplifting until after it happens. It's not a crime until it's been committed, then you can prosecute. The issue is there is a base level cost to do so, and it's going to take a very large amount of shoplifting to balance that. We as a society have basically accepted that certain crimes don't go punished, and it seems like low value shoplifting largely fits that category.
In turn, large companies have decided that they will instead collect data on their own until they have enough to make it a high value issue, with proof. Then the state will prosecute. The issue here is that companies do not get to illegally collect data, they still would have to do so within the bounds of the law. So what are those bounds? We say the Government can surveil us with impunity, but only for terrorism or whatever else gets brought under that umbrella. For "petty" crimes the government would need permission to collect the amount of data that these companies are and then build their case with that.
This isn't to say that shoplifting is okay, just that society doesn't seem to care all that much. Our reaction to companies taking actions like these will also show how much we seem to care about them as well. Spoiler on that last one: we don't seem to care (in the US).
That's what Trump/MAGA america wants. They want to see some dude who steal stuff get shot for their crime. They will gleeful cheer it on.
That's already the law in a huge part of the country.
> They want to see some dude who steal stuff get shot for their crime.
Places like Qt (gas station chain) in AZ have armed guys that are trained to shoot if lawful (armed robbery, etc).
The way to solve this problem is to make the cost significantly higher than the benefit. Suggested reading: Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs. Of any person who has ever run any country, he solved this problem in the most effective way.
1) Execution for drug trafficking without violence
2) A slight majority of the populace eligible for public housing gets it via essentially a regressive tax system where a gigantic slice of the populace (immigrants) fund the housing they can't use, creating a very bizarre government-imposed scenario where housing actually becomes radically cheaper the better positioned you are to be wealthy.
Of course there are arguments for both.
2. Same as in USA. I fund a lot of housing I cannot use via my taxes.
Singapore's is regressive; they tax their massive % of population of ineligible immigrants so the citizens can have it essentially without means testing. It functions largely as a transfer of wealth from less rich to more rich.
A Walmart in AZ has sent gigantic bouncers after me to detain me on suspicion of shoplifting a $5 bag of cat litter. In my state they are allowed to kidnap/imprison you until police arrive if they have 'reasonable suspicion' you're in the act of shoplifting, so yeah have fun guessing whether the guy with the walmart badge is actually security or just a rapist.
Also many stores have shot themselves in the foot by placing items for sale outside the front doors... thus a shoplifter could claim they just stuck something in their pocket because they forgot they needed a pumpkin and thus needed a cart, or something to that effect.
If you stop someone and can't document these four points, they can challenge the stop, and you're up for a LOT more losses from the unlawful detainment suit.
So basically, they value upselling people at entrances more than limiting liability, and a savvy shoplifter can sue for a lot of money if the store allows reusable bags, since that removes the ability to charge for "concealment" given that by selling Safeway or whatever branded opaque bags, you have implicitly consented to "concealment" of merchandise.
AZ:
>C. A merchant, or a merchant's agent or employee, with reasonable cause, may detain on the premises in a reasonable manner and for a reasonable time any person who is suspected of shoplifting as prescribed in subsection A of this section for questioning or summoning a law enforcement officer.
https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01805.htm
i.e. all they need is reasonable cause to suspect you are shoplifting. When I was detained no one ever saw me steal anything, I openly grabbed the cat litter, scanned it at the machine, paid for it, grabbed the receipt, then refused to show it to the receipt-checker (not about to slow down for that bullshit since it is now my property) so they just sent some dudes out to grab the cart out of my hands.
The store here almost certainly overstepped the law, and you allowed it to happen.
Unless by "let it happen" you mean I didn't let it happen then sue walmart, which would have zero deterrence effect on them as any lawsuit for a few minutes unlawful detention would be a rounding error on their balance sheet, and likely at my own expense since it's basically my word against another's and his army of corporate lawyers.
Makes me wonder if maybe you're being accurate, since you'll telling an unusual story and inventing reasons not to seek redress.
Also it'd be a criminal matter, not just a civil one -- having their LP have to get bailed out of the county jail sends a message.
First of all; in times long past, retailers had zero shoplifting incidents, because every order was fulfilled by their employees, who would pick from the stock room and present the customer with a ready-to-take bag of their goods, and a purchase receipt. Shoplifting in this context was basically impossible.
The advent of customers picking out their own goods let to the introduction of customers attempting to leave the store without paying, but it also saved retailers incredible amounts of money, not having to pay to have employees both stock and pull orders.
However, because nothing is ever profitable enough, much further down the line (and, worth noting, when crimes are at historic lows) we get self checkouts, which are basically honor boxes with speakers. And that's fine, I love self checkout and my only complaint with it is now retailers are over-reliant on it, and, again in the name of cost-cutting, have 6 to 10 registers overseen by one worker, who has to sprint between them to sort out when the stupid things can't detect a light item, or have a conniption fit when you don't place a 75" television on them, and of course they have to also make sure all of those registers are ringing up the correct items, which has itself then given rise to bag checkers at the door.
And to be clear, I'm not like, endorsing any particular system here. I don't care how stores want to convey products to me terribly, just make it clear what the fuck I'm supposed to do, and I'll do it. What I am saying is retail theft is largely enabled by retailers who do nothing but chase the bottom line and constantly try and make their stores work with fewer and fewer people who are less and less skilled over time and are then SHOCKED when someone just takes something, because their ludicrously under-staffed stores are incredibly easy to steal from, if you want to.
And I would ALSO point out that throughout this long history, the cost of slippage has been built into the business, because theft is far, far from the only reason a product that is purchased wholesale may not make it all the way to a paying customer. Retail supply chains and especially grocery ones are simply AWASH in waste, and somehow, all the time, these stores make money.
So no, as a customer and taxpayer, I don't particularly give much of a shit about shoplifting.
Depends how you count. If suddenly any theft below $900 is now a misdemeanor (as opposed to, say, 100 previously), then sure, the crime stats will show the crime is low because many retailer simply won’t bother to report it.
I think once this whole idea of crime became a political issue recently, all these stats should be taken with a huge grain of salt
This is a wrongheaded way of looking at it, since in a competitive market, those cost savings will eventually be passed onto the consumer.
If you think they just kept those new profits forever -- where did they go? Because grocery is an infamously low-margin business to be in, even now.
NEVER. In my LIFE. Have I seen this in action.
Literally every single category of product that I buy is more expensive now than when I was a kid. As far as I'm concerned this is a straight fucking myth until I see proof.
Like, surely, nearly 40 years on this planet, surely, by the law of probabilities, I would've seen SOMETHING get cheaper. SOMETHING. ANYTHING.
And before anyone says “TVs got cheaper,” yeah—because they’re made in sweatshops with subsidized rare earths and sold at a loss to get you into the ecosystem. That’s not market efficiency, that’s strategic manipulation.
Then show me the profit margins? If they just pocketed all the money, where did it go?
> Literally every single category of product that I buy is more expensive now than when I was a kid.
I'm pretty confident this is one of those situations where as soon as I start to lay out out examples, they'll immediately be dismissed, but just in case that's not true:
Full price video games are WAY cheaper than they were in the SNES era that I grew up in. Factoring in inflation, even $70 games today are like half the price, or close to it. Even most digital deluxe and similar versions are substantially cheaper than SNES games were.
It's way, way, WAY easier to get by with cheap or free games these days. Free games basically didn't expect in the 90s other than demo discs maybe (and those typically were still bought as part of a magazine issue), whereas now there's plenty of free games where you can just ignore the gacha/skin elements if you want, and there's a bajillion demos that can be accessed totally free on every storefront.
Indie games? In the 90s, games from small development teams would still cost the full price or close to it, something like Silksong that's high quality and costs only $20 -- even at launch -- didn't exist.
I remember the 90s, I remember how most middle class families couldn't really afford all that many games each year, especially in the cartridge era. People are practically overflowing with video games now in comparison, it's crazy how much easier it is to build up a huge library.
Really, tons of electronics are way cheaper now than they used to be. A $1500 desktop computer in the early 90s was a reasonable mid-range price; even if you ignore inflation, you can get a perfectly capable desktop or laptop today for less than that, and if you factor in inflation, computers today are way cheaper (unless you want a high-end gaming PC).
[ Insert set of news clips of various billionaires and their billions that they've gotten ever more of ]
> I'm pretty confident this is one of those situations where as soon as I start to lay out out examples, they'll immediately be dismissed
I mean, I'm going to take issue with these since they're all examples of video games which were, when I was a kid, an emerging medium. Like that's basic economies of scale, not to mention the cost of all computers have fallen substantially, why would video-games be exempt from that? And if you're anticipating that kind of response, why don't you pick more cut and dry examples? Groceries, rent, healthcare, childcare... Hell, try it with books. Books are CERTAINLY cheaper to produce today than they've ever been, and I'm not even counting e-books.
The cost of living has outpaced wages for decades, and the idea that "competition drives prices down" is a myth that only survives in Econ 101 classrooms and libertarian subreddits.
Yeah, I figured you wouldn't have an actual response.
We were talking about grocery stores. Feel free to show me the massive profit margins that grocery store companies have on their products that they apparently are all massively overcharging us for. That's your thesis, so it shouldn't be hard to find the data.
> I mean, I'm going to take issue with these
A reminder that what you said was:
> NEVER. In my LIFE. Have I seen this in action.
> Literally every single category of product that I buy is more expensive now than when I was a kid.
So I provided multiple examples against your "NEVER" that you immediately shrugged off. I'd be lying if I said I was surprised.
> not to mention the cost of all computers have fallen
Wait, so you just lied before? Why?
You asked where it went. The top 1% of earners have nearly doubled their wealth in the last 5 years alone. That's the answer. The fact that your ideology and/or ambition to join them conflicts with it does not, in and of itself, make that not an "actual response."
Money is allegedly finite, at least it is whenever the subject of making society more equitable is raised. If all those people are so much wealthier, and if the economy is indeed a zero sum game, surely you must then acknowledge them having so much more, by necessity, means so many others must have less?
> So I provided multiple examples against your "NEVER" that you immediately shrugged off.
I said "I have never seen this in action" in specific reply to you saying:
> This is a wrongheaded way of looking at it, since in a competitive market, those cost savings will eventually be passed onto the consumer.
And beyond the blatant goal-post shift there that I must remind you, everyone can see, I feel it's appropriate to tear into your video game example because I think that's a lot trickier than you might:
First, the price stability of AAA games is not evidence of benevolent market forces. It’s a result of industry standardization, publisher control, and platform monopolies. Half-Life 2 co-launched Steam in 2004 and retailed for $60–$70, a price which stuck around for a couple of decades or so, and that’s before you factor in DLCs, deluxe editions, season passes, and microtransactions. The base price may look flat, but the real cost to access the full experience has ballooned. And unlike the cartridge era, you often don’t even get a physical product—just a license to access a server.
Second, this pricing model predates digital distribution. The idea that games got cheaper because of competition ignores the fact that prices held steady even as production and distribution costs plummeted. The savings from digital delivery, reduced packaging, and outsourced labor didn’t go to the consumer. They went to shareholders and executives. The top five game publishers have posted record profits year after year, even as they lay off staff and squeeze dev teams.
Third, pointing to video games and electronics as proof of market generosity is classic cherry-picking. These are industries uniquely shaped by global supply chains, massive economies of scale, and digital platforms that eliminate physical overhead. That’s not how groceries, rent, healthcare, or education work. In those sectors, prices have risen relentlessly while wages stagnate. If competitive markets reliably passed savings to consumers, we’d see it across the board, or hell, even just sometimes. Not just in industries that benefit from digital arbitrage and monopolistic control.
So no, video games didn’t "get cheaper" in any meaningful way, not really. They got more extractive, more fragmented, and more dependent on psychological monetization models.
There just isn't a huge energy to do something about a lot of petty crimes, therefore nothing is done. Like you, many people have complete apathy for the pursuit of minor shoplifting (I'm making an assumption here that you would be against large scale crime ring level shoplifting).
There isn't the will from the people or the politicians to care about petty crimes like this, until there is. People like you have explicit reasons why you don't care, and many people have the implicit "it just doesn't directly effect me therefore why should I care" reason.
Also worth noting: any store worth a SHIT that carries high value goods fully insures their inventory too, for stealing, and for their employees breaking one getting it out, for natural disasters, for fires, for boomers driving their SUVs through the front windows, and for like... a toddler running through one on the display floor.
Like I'm just... I'm fucking done listening to the endless bitching and crying on the part of corporations about how HARD it is to do business. If it's so awful, shut it the fuck down then.
And I genuinely wouldn't care apart from this is just a BOTTOMLESS well that reactionary politicians use to constantly divert money from anything we actually need to give yet more of it to fund yet more policing that doesn't do anything apart from murder black teenagers and shoot people's dogs, and no that's not JUST because Walgreens won't stop fucking whining in the news about it, but it isn't disconnected either. Crime has NEVER been as low as it is now, the only increases of any note were the ones that cropped up during the pandemic. Apart from that every single kind of larceny and theft has been on a steady downturn since the 1990's.
Quit. Fucking. Whining. About. Crime.
Edit: I do love the down votes. It kind of proves the point. People want to complain, but don’t want to do anything about it or hold themselves responsible for the fact that they are the ones who chose the situation they are in. Literally. At the ballot box.
> Many states are completely able to stop shoplifters.
In your defense, you didn't claim zero explicitly (but did heavily imply it), but you also ignored the question
Remind me again who I should be voting for?
Or, simply google it, check it on reddit, facebook, nextdoor. It is well understood that police in CA do not respond to thefts and do not care about them. It is internalized to point that nobody bothers to call.
I live in California and no, it is not "well understood" that police do not care about thefts. I watched police catch shoplifters right in the middle of SF. As always, cities full of people aren't perfect, but don't imagine for a second that red states have it better.
Tell me, where do you live? I'd like to know what your direct experience of California is.
5 years in mountain view, CA; 1 in santa calara, CA; 4 more in mountain view, CA with frequent trips into SF proper; 1 in SF proper; 4 more in mountain view, CA. Eventually I got tired of broken car windows and police who never came to investigate. Got tired of hoboes jumping at me with knives and police not responding to calls when i reported it. I left. So the last 3 years - Austin, TX
And before you try to claim this is bullshit, i still own a house in CA in MTV and public records easily prove that and the rest of locations too.
That's the funniest/saddest part about your comment - i do not need to listen to any "fact-free news" I have the scar from the hobo knife and the voice recordings of police saying "so what do you want us to do? go file a report online, give it to your insurance". It took a while after leaving to finally understand how much I was simply putting up with and considered "part of modern life". The Stockholm Syndrome took a year or so to wear off. Now, when forced to go back to norcal, I notice it a lot more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/In...
The lowest or next to lowest is New Hampshire.... which is a red state with constitutional carry, very few gun restrictions, no background checks in private transfers, and one of the whitest states in the union next to Vermont (which I think is close to if not #2). NH is red and VT is blue IIRC.
From my point of view law enforcement gave up.