Funny. They closed stores and put in annoying security measures in high-theft locations and shrinkage dropped, and now they're walking it back a little bit because the additional security measures are costing them money in expenses and lost sales.
My local rite aid keeps the ice cream fridge and soaps (among other things) locked. There's no way this actually helps them. It might make more sense to just not carry these products if they're being stolen so much.
> My local rite aid keeps the ice cream fridge and soaps (among other things) locked. There's no way this actually helps them. It might make more sense to just not carry these products if they're being stolen so much.
An you have invented a dollar store, welcome to food desert without nutritional food and most necessary items.
I live in a big city and my point is that no is waiting around to chase down the one person working so that they can unlock the cabinet/fridge for them. Often there's not even anyone to be found to do so. I can get soap across the street at the corner store in two seconds. I can get ice cream at the grocery store where it's not locked up.
With sufficient staffing and instant mobile checkout, stores can implement a fully secure experience. The caveat here is "sufficient staffing" of people who can use a mobile checkout solution.
What kind of staffing are you referring to, and how does mobile checkout help this situation?
At the Walgreens near where I live they sometimes have a security guard at the door, sometimes not. They only allow one of the two doors to open.
If the guard isn’t there you’ll see teenagers walk in, dump a bunch of their stuff in a backpack, grab as much as they can carry, and walk out. They come back five minutes later and do it again.
This is with a lot of staff on the floor, who recognize them when they come back in.
The staff have likely been told not to try to stop them, because it’s a liability for Walgreens. The security does seem to help but even that doesn’t completely stop people from trying. I have seen the security follow people they recognize into the store and then end up chasing them out but the perpetrators still get away. Even more security might help to block the door in that case, but that’s the only useful mitigation I’ve seen in these cases.
I live a few blocks away from a Walgreens that is now closing at the end of the month. I've personally witnessed a shoplifter actively shoplifting nearly every time I was in the store over the past year to year and a half. This was a half dozen encounters at least, of varying degrees of audacity from teenagers stealing some makeup to outright crews doing a mini flash mob style raid.
In every case staff (and security) were tailing them, and in one instance outright confronting them nearly to the point of physically blocking them. The shoplifters do not care - they know they cannot be touched by store employees, and they also know the police literally will not show up to the call. These are folks filling up entire baskets full of high value items for obvious resale while everyone simply lets them do it.
Perhaps this is an outlier, but based on talking to employees, seeing it with my own two eyes, it's fairly clear to me Walgreens Corporate is simply walking it back and taking an L in these locations vs. bothering to step into a hyper-partisan political topic.
This is a wild shift in societal norms and values from when I was working retail jobs in the mid to late 90's. We were enabled (and willing) to outright physically detain shoplifters to the point of physical restraint if they fought back. Police and prosecutors would have our backs strongly. This rapidly changed towards the end of the 90's into the early 00's.
Society starts failing when the answer to every problem is call mommy and daddy (the police) and stops enforcing basic societal norms by itself. We are witnessing the transition from a high trust society to a low trust society in many areas of this country.
The "amount" of shoplifting you see while stores continue to REDUCE attempts to intervene should show you just how much of a non-issue shoplifting is to most businesses. It's more expensive for a company to pay for insurance that would cover an employee being injured trying to detain a theif or pay for an actual security guard than just to say "fuck it" to a small percentage of goods. Average shrinkage for retail is like 2%. A permanent security guard would cost like $60k to $100k a year, and yet is still super uncommon.
>Police and prosecutors would have our backs strongly.
Prosecutors still have your backs. The idea of NOT prosecuting a shoplifter is pretty much a non-consideration anywhere, and even in the small part of california that people claimed the DA did prosecute saw them voted out. It's police that just seem to ignore crime in some jurisdictions. In my local supermarket growing up, the store manager and local police RELISHED going after shoplifters. It was stupid easy, a few cameras and a bored officer is all it takes.
This is actually false. There are security guards in all the non-mom-and-pop pharmacies in Manhattan. Clearly it's worth it to pay for a guy to sit in a chair by the door as a (very loose) disincentive to steal.
I don't know what to tell you then. My father was the assistant manager of our local supermarket for 10 years, after being a sub-department manager for 20. In the many years he has bragged about making that store's shrinkage the smallest in the state, including being befriended by the CEO of the international company that had a partnership with the stores in the state and eventually bought them all, he never once talked about shoplifting as a driver of that shrinkage. It was ALWAYS waste, or backroom theft, or poor stock handling and planning.
This was also in a dirt poor community where small time crime was a regular thing for most people, think "White trash" area.
This anecdote should clearly not be generalized to the entire country, but average retail shrinkage is supposedly around 2% which includes pretty much any reason you can think of, including someone returning a box of bricks instead of the product, a minimum wage employee dropping a bottle of soda, a customer putting the frozen peas on a random shelf instead of back in the freezer, etc. Shoplifting as something that harms a store's income is an extremely local thing IMO.
> In the many years he has bragged about making that store's shrinkage the smallest in the state
I have worked with a handful of amazing people like him. Taking pride in such things is great and is what I am mourning in these (risky) posts.
> he never once talked about shoplifting as a driver of that shrinkage. It was ALWAYS waste, or backroom theft, or poor stock handling and planning.
Agreed. Employee theft was always by far the largest form of shrinkage while I was working retail. It likely very much still is or I'd be absolutely surprised.
What is not discussed is the elephant in the room. You start letting retail theft creep up like this - not just in numbers but in blatant in your face crime - you will start seeing backroom theft skyrocket. People eventually become demoralized and while it's complete anecdote I'm personally seeing it now. Eventually theft is going to become normalized if we continue down this path. Why work a $20/hr retail job when someone can walk in, take $1500 worth of product, and walk out with zero consequences. It adds up.
I also cannot agree that shrinkage is not a major problem for most retail stores. A major chain can likely hide it via averaging it out, but for a mom and pop/small chain in a rough area (the type of places I worked for) shrinkage was a major factor of profitability. You have to sell a lot of candy bars to make up for a single one being stolen when you are operating at 10-20% margin.
I also completely understand this is very widely distributed through the country at the moment, and I live in one of the worst off places for this sort of thing. My perception is certainly due to that fact.
> Society starts failing when the answer to every problem is call mommy and daddy (the police) and stops enforcing basic societal norms by
Complex societies seem to have a few basic options:
1 - Enforce social laws 'locally' without official government sanction; neighborhood heroes if you're polite, the mob if you're looking at the U.S. big cities in much of the 20th century. Behaviors change through fear.
2 - Enforce statutory laws via government punishment: fines or community service, imprisonment for repeat offenders, etc. Behaviors change through removing people from the society, or scaring them into fearing punishment.
3 - Don't enforce any laws. After all, shoplifting is a victimless crime. People need to eat and they need medicine. It's not against the law to be poor.
4 - Change societal norms through shaming and education. After all, people don't realize the impact they're having, if you finger wag and lecture to them, they will understand the bigger societal reason to be nice.
In cities like NYC, SF, Philly and Chicago I seem to be seeing all of these, with a de-emphasis on traditional #2, the government punishing people. We like to blame police for not showing up, but district attorneys are specifically avoiding to prosecute [1], so police aren't going to waste their times and risk themselves.
We have judges attempting diversion programs like making defendants write essays or attend some event where they can meet victims to gain empathy.
Then we have a huge number (according to voting patterns) of Millennial-age folks who are deeply against police, against incarceration ("the carceral system" as they refer to it) at any cost, both as they're viewed as historically racist.
What will happen now? Well as usual the middle class and poor will suffer - the rich will always have their deliveries, private security, and seclusion from the street thuggery we're pretending is inevitable and perhaps only started during the pandemic (an argument being made by our politicians).
> ("The Office will not prosecute the following charges...")
It's absurd that a sitting DA can just choose not to prosecute whole sections of the law. I get that prosecutorial discretion is a thing, but that has to be on a case-by-case basis, and not declared outright that a whole class of crimes is unilaterally decided by the DA to no longer be a crime.
"3 - Don't enforce any laws. After all, shoplifting is a victimless crime. People need to eat and they need medicine. It's not against the law to be poor."
> Society starts failing when the answer to every problem is call mommy and daddy (the police) and stops enforcing basic societal norms by itself.
I cannot emphasize this enough. There is no amount of police presence that will make society work if enough members choose to violate the law and each other, and that "enough" is a smaller percentage than most people think.
Wallgreens is a national retailer, so excess shrinkage at one or a series of locations is offset by below average shrinkage in other locations. Just because a national retailer can absorb something like this does not mean a local retailer with many fewer locations can.
It's still a massive problem, just not for national retailers.
Even though Walgreens is a national retailer, non-thieving locations should not be made to subsidize the thieving locations.
A Walgreens in small town Illinois with extremely low shrinkage ought not see any negative effects such as price increases because other, more lax on crime cities, perpetuate an atmosphere of lawlessness and tolerance of same.
> Even though Walgreens is a national retailer, non-thieving locations should not be made to subsidize the thieving locations.
This is all part and parcel of society, of corporations, of any multi-site organisation. Each node has its own advantages and disadvantages. High "shrinkage" sites often have high sales and a corporation that sticks to "small town Illinois" is never going to be able to offer the economies of scale of Walgreens.
I can get better loan rates due to my great credit, while others who have squandered their credit do not.
Similarly, criminal-coddling cities should be burdened with the higher prices that the outcomes of their voting and governance are known to deliver to them.
Not unlike how SF voters continually elect politicians who tolerate human feces and needles in their streets and get just that. It would not be fair for healthy communities to have human feces and needles spread on their cities out of some misguided sense of fairness or social justice.
Read the article fully. The reason for crying was the over expense on private security while the security being handicapped to actually protect property. This isn't some rebuke about crying over stolen goods.
The context of where I assume you are making that conclusion from reads differently to me: they are saying they believe their security posture is excessive.
> But a year later, Kehoe said Thursday that the company added too much extra security in stores.
> “Probably we put in too much, and we might step back a little bit from that,” he said of security staffing. The company has found private security guards to be “largely ineffective” in deterring theft, so instead it’s putting in more police and law enforcement officers.
Yes, though that's an interesting phrase - how can the company "put in" more police / LE officers? Aren't they assigned patrols or dispatched for specific incidents?
Which is just crazy to me. You can pay for police! In uniform! I’m in Peru at the moment and for how much more corrupt people in the US act like LATAM is, I’ve never seen a company here pay police to stand somewhere. But every Apple Store in SF I’ve been to has an officer or two in front when they’re open.
Consider how opinion might be colored by the LATAM country next door as opposed to one >3000 miles away on a separate continent with a separate culture and society.
I’ve lived in Mexico a few years and have also never seen it. I’m not saying Mexico is less corrupt than the the US. It’s certainly more. But it doesn’t seem to be “strictly” more, like a superset of corruption.
Local businesses even in San Pedro & the nice parts of DF routinely pay uniformed police officers to stand in certain places while on/off duty, that you don’t seen them loitering outside the door during business hours generally means it’s working.
In resume, somebody was teached again the hard lesson that people dislike buying with security breathing on their napes.
Is a spiral of death. Being watched destroys the pleasant experience of browsing things. People buy just what they had in mind and exit, spending much less time in the shop looking for things that they could want to buy. Big red flag. Soon, the big store is half-empty most of the time and being the only customer in a place full of vendors is psychologically disturbing for many people. Less objects are stolen but you sell less, and soon realize that are paying more to security than the loses by shoplifting.
I had seen this before when, lets call it "Computer World", decided to increase their results fighting against shoplifting. Warnings in the walls, everything in plastic cases, cameras and security sucking all the fun. They closed in three months.
Kinda related, but in Sydney, our grocery store "Woolworths" has been tightening the screws on the self-checkout.
It started without even a weight scale. Which was really convenient to use: Take everything out of trolley -> scan -> put back in trolley -> pay & go.
Then the weight scale had to be used.
Then it got more strict, and you had to tell it when using your own bags.
Then they had cameras near the barcode reader so you had to show the "item" when you scan the barcode otherwise it'd be like "I don't think that's a shampoo bottle, lets get a human to check". which was frustrating.
Now it's even worse, they have overhead cameras analyzing you, and if you click "finished" but leave a bag in your trolley(say, just a crazy thought, from one of the 200 other shops in the shopping centre), then they say "maybe you forgot something" and a human has to come check up on you. Also if you have bags in your hands, or on the floor.
I feel like they've been slowly training people... but also, it's now too cumbersome to use so I go to a person(and then complain when there's not enough people sitting at registers).
Both of the local Walgreens I frequented previously, have just stopped… stocking stuff seemingly arbitrarily? Like lots of it. If you want milk, you’ll get whatever they have in stock or nothing at all. I don’t think they were being robbed of milk. But a broken window and you’re lucky if you can find milk is what they’ve decided to do. Same goes for a bunch of other products not being stolen en masse in any timeframe.
32 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 88.4 ms ] threadAn you have invented a dollar store, welcome to food desert without nutritional food and most necessary items.
I live in a big city and my point is that no is waiting around to chase down the one person working so that they can unlock the cabinet/fridge for them. Often there's not even anyone to be found to do so. I can get soap across the street at the corner store in two seconds. I can get ice cream at the grocery store where it's not locked up.
At the Walgreens near where I live they sometimes have a security guard at the door, sometimes not. They only allow one of the two doors to open.
If the guard isn’t there you’ll see teenagers walk in, dump a bunch of their stuff in a backpack, grab as much as they can carry, and walk out. They come back five minutes later and do it again.
This is with a lot of staff on the floor, who recognize them when they come back in.
The staff have likely been told not to try to stop them, because it’s a liability for Walgreens. The security does seem to help but even that doesn’t completely stop people from trying. I have seen the security follow people they recognize into the store and then end up chasing them out but the perpetrators still get away. Even more security might help to block the door in that case, but that’s the only useful mitigation I’ve seen in these cases.
I live a few blocks away from a Walgreens that is now closing at the end of the month. I've personally witnessed a shoplifter actively shoplifting nearly every time I was in the store over the past year to year and a half. This was a half dozen encounters at least, of varying degrees of audacity from teenagers stealing some makeup to outright crews doing a mini flash mob style raid.
In every case staff (and security) were tailing them, and in one instance outright confronting them nearly to the point of physically blocking them. The shoplifters do not care - they know they cannot be touched by store employees, and they also know the police literally will not show up to the call. These are folks filling up entire baskets full of high value items for obvious resale while everyone simply lets them do it.
Perhaps this is an outlier, but based on talking to employees, seeing it with my own two eyes, it's fairly clear to me Walgreens Corporate is simply walking it back and taking an L in these locations vs. bothering to step into a hyper-partisan political topic.
This is a wild shift in societal norms and values from when I was working retail jobs in the mid to late 90's. We were enabled (and willing) to outright physically detain shoplifters to the point of physical restraint if they fought back. Police and prosecutors would have our backs strongly. This rapidly changed towards the end of the 90's into the early 00's.
Society starts failing when the answer to every problem is call mommy and daddy (the police) and stops enforcing basic societal norms by itself. We are witnessing the transition from a high trust society to a low trust society in many areas of this country.
>Police and prosecutors would have our backs strongly. Prosecutors still have your backs. The idea of NOT prosecuting a shoplifter is pretty much a non-consideration anywhere, and even in the small part of california that people claimed the DA did prosecute saw them voted out. It's police that just seem to ignore crime in some jurisdictions. In my local supermarket growing up, the store manager and local police RELISHED going after shoplifters. It was stupid easy, a few cameras and a bored officer is all it takes.
This was also in a dirt poor community where small time crime was a regular thing for most people, think "White trash" area.
This anecdote should clearly not be generalized to the entire country, but average retail shrinkage is supposedly around 2% which includes pretty much any reason you can think of, including someone returning a box of bricks instead of the product, a minimum wage employee dropping a bottle of soda, a customer putting the frozen peas on a random shelf instead of back in the freezer, etc. Shoplifting as something that harms a store's income is an extremely local thing IMO.
I have worked with a handful of amazing people like him. Taking pride in such things is great and is what I am mourning in these (risky) posts.
> he never once talked about shoplifting as a driver of that shrinkage. It was ALWAYS waste, or backroom theft, or poor stock handling and planning.
Agreed. Employee theft was always by far the largest form of shrinkage while I was working retail. It likely very much still is or I'd be absolutely surprised.
What is not discussed is the elephant in the room. You start letting retail theft creep up like this - not just in numbers but in blatant in your face crime - you will start seeing backroom theft skyrocket. People eventually become demoralized and while it's complete anecdote I'm personally seeing it now. Eventually theft is going to become normalized if we continue down this path. Why work a $20/hr retail job when someone can walk in, take $1500 worth of product, and walk out with zero consequences. It adds up.
I also cannot agree that shrinkage is not a major problem for most retail stores. A major chain can likely hide it via averaging it out, but for a mom and pop/small chain in a rough area (the type of places I worked for) shrinkage was a major factor of profitability. You have to sell a lot of candy bars to make up for a single one being stolen when you are operating at 10-20% margin.
I also completely understand this is very widely distributed through the country at the moment, and I live in one of the worst off places for this sort of thing. My perception is certainly due to that fact.
Complex societies seem to have a few basic options:
1 - Enforce social laws 'locally' without official government sanction; neighborhood heroes if you're polite, the mob if you're looking at the U.S. big cities in much of the 20th century. Behaviors change through fear.
2 - Enforce statutory laws via government punishment: fines or community service, imprisonment for repeat offenders, etc. Behaviors change through removing people from the society, or scaring them into fearing punishment.
3 - Don't enforce any laws. After all, shoplifting is a victimless crime. People need to eat and they need medicine. It's not against the law to be poor.
4 - Change societal norms through shaming and education. After all, people don't realize the impact they're having, if you finger wag and lecture to them, they will understand the bigger societal reason to be nice.
In cities like NYC, SF, Philly and Chicago I seem to be seeing all of these, with a de-emphasis on traditional #2, the government punishing people. We like to blame police for not showing up, but district attorneys are specifically avoiding to prosecute [1], so police aren't going to waste their times and risk themselves.
We have judges attempting diversion programs like making defendants write essays or attend some event where they can meet victims to gain empathy.
Then we have a huge number (according to voting patterns) of Millennial-age folks who are deeply against police, against incarceration ("the carceral system" as they refer to it) at any cost, both as they're viewed as historically racist.
What will happen now? Well as usual the middle class and poor will suffer - the rich will always have their deliveries, private security, and seclusion from the street thuggery we're pretending is inevitable and perhaps only started during the pandemic (an argument being made by our politicians).
1 - See page four of https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Day-O... ("The Office will not prosecute the following charges...")
It's absurd that a sitting DA can just choose not to prosecute whole sections of the law. I get that prosecutorial discretion is a thing, but that has to be on a case-by-case basis, and not declared outright that a whole class of crimes is unilaterally decided by the DA to no longer be a crime.
Shoplifting is a victimless crime? Wtf?
I cannot emphasize this enough. There is no amount of police presence that will make society work if enough members choose to violate the law and each other, and that "enough" is a smaller percentage than most people think.
It's still a massive problem, just not for national retailers.
A Walgreens in small town Illinois with extremely low shrinkage ought not see any negative effects such as price increases because other, more lax on crime cities, perpetuate an atmosphere of lawlessness and tolerance of same.
This is all part and parcel of society, of corporations, of any multi-site organisation. Each node has its own advantages and disadvantages. High "shrinkage" sites often have high sales and a corporation that sticks to "small town Illinois" is never going to be able to offer the economies of scale of Walgreens.
I can get better loan rates due to my great credit, while others who have squandered their credit do not.
Similarly, criminal-coddling cities should be burdened with the higher prices that the outcomes of their voting and governance are known to deliver to them.
Not unlike how SF voters continually elect politicians who tolerate human feces and needles in their streets and get just that. It would not be fair for healthy communities to have human feces and needles spread on their cities out of some misguided sense of fairness or social justice.
> But a year later, Kehoe said Thursday that the company added too much extra security in stores.
> “Probably we put in too much, and we might step back a little bit from that,” he said of security staffing. The company has found private security guards to be “largely ineffective” in deterring theft, so instead it’s putting in more police and law enforcement officers.
Is a spiral of death. Being watched destroys the pleasant experience of browsing things. People buy just what they had in mind and exit, spending much less time in the shop looking for things that they could want to buy. Big red flag. Soon, the big store is half-empty most of the time and being the only customer in a place full of vendors is psychologically disturbing for many people. Less objects are stolen but you sell less, and soon realize that are paying more to security than the loses by shoplifting.
I had seen this before when, lets call it "Computer World", decided to increase their results fighting against shoplifting. Warnings in the walls, everything in plastic cases, cameras and security sucking all the fun. They closed in three months.
Then the weight scale had to be used.
Then it got more strict, and you had to tell it when using your own bags.
Then they had cameras near the barcode reader so you had to show the "item" when you scan the barcode otherwise it'd be like "I don't think that's a shampoo bottle, lets get a human to check". which was frustrating.
Now it's even worse, they have overhead cameras analyzing you, and if you click "finished" but leave a bag in your trolley(say, just a crazy thought, from one of the 200 other shops in the shopping centre), then they say "maybe you forgot something" and a human has to come check up on you. Also if you have bags in your hands, or on the floor.
I feel like they've been slowly training people... but also, it's now too cumbersome to use so I go to a person(and then complain when there's not enough people sitting at registers).