Tolerating shoplifting is burning the furniture to keep warm, eating the seeds for the next crop. Stores close, jobs flee, food and medicine deserts grow. Whatever desperation drives people to shoplift, amplifies. I'm watching it happen in real time in my nearest big city.
It's a huge slow motion train wreck crushing the people who need help most. To help them we need to be less tolerant of such petty crime, more in proportion to the damage that it does.
I don't know if you classify misappropriation of government funds, grift, and politically motivated administrative decisions as white collar crime, but that sort of stuff is a large part of the reason for why this sort of thing is culturally acceptable. The Kids for Cash scandal, I think, serves as a good example for why so many people feel disenfranchised - and it's an example of someone with authority in the system getting caught, imagine how many don't.
I don't think 15 year old kids in Chicago are stealing clothes and shoes because of an insider corruption scheme impacting Pennsylvania almost two decades ago.
Absolutely, but the majority of people who are doing that are doing it to buy food and other necessities (or, a step or two removed, to buy drugs to try to sell but for the same end goal - a better life for them and theirs).
Yes there are exceptions of course but the people stealing things from Target and CVS are not selling those things to pay for their Mercedes. They're selling them to pay for basic necessities. That doesn't mean it's not a crime, and it shouldn't be punished, but it is a distinction worth noting.
Overwhelmingly shoplifters are white kids with substance abuse problems. They are feeding drug/alcohol problems, not feeding their family.
The vast majority of the poor in the US are.. obese. Not fat, but clinically obese. For whatever failings we have, feeding the poor and the masses is not one of them. Typically when kids do "go hungry" they are Middleschoolers or younger with... abusive parents. (Which is why free lunch programs work, it bypasses shitty parents).
> Absolutely, but the majority of people who are doing that are doing it to buy food and other necessities (or, a step or two removed, to buy drugs to try to sell but for the same end goal - a better life for them and their
I don't think anyone is shoplifting for food, at least in Seattle where food banks are stocked and ask few questions. They do shop lift for drugs, which is why LEGO, baby formula, and laundry detergent sections are locked down at many discount stores. It is shoplifting LEGOs to sell via a fence (this is very organized now) to get money to buy fent (often the shoplifting ring will give you drugs straight for the LEGO set you lifted).
If you want me to spell it out for you, 15 year old kids in Chicago are stealing clothes and shoes because the effects of slavery have had as-of-yet unaddressed generational effects on people. Schemes like Kids for Cash serve to remind people that things aren't being addressed. Nihilism ensues.
First, you've made the assumption here that all the shoplifters are black. The data does not support that. Most shoplifters are white kids with drug problems.
Second, you've made the assumption here that all Black people in the US are descendents of slaves. That's also incorrect and ignores hundreds of years of migration from a rich variety of countries.
Third, no, shoplifters aren't shoplifting because of "generational nihilism". They are feeding drug/alcohol habits.
I actually made no statements about the race of the shoplifters. Indeed, I don't think the effects of slavery are isolated to groups of people with a certain skin color. I'm not going to address the first two points you made because they're irrelevant in light of the above.
To point three, drug/alcohol habits are often hereditary and communal. Not sure why generational nihilism and feeding drug/alcohol habits are mutually exclusive.
> Most shoplifters are white kids with drug problems.
You keep claiming this without qualification. It is probably very regional, but most shoplifters in my city (Seattle) are mostly white unhoused neighbors who are usually in their 20s-30s and have drug abuse problems. They aren't white suburban kids (although I'm sure it happens in the suburbs, just not in our urban area).
Obviously the shoplifters are going to be a subpopulation of the area they live in - if you live in a predominantly black neighborhood, they will trend to be more black, if you live in an older neighborhood, they will trend to be older, etc etc.
But basically the whole benefit of shoplifting is that it solves both your money problem and the "accounting for where money has gone" problem that occurs with substance abuse. If you're running a successful business and then snorting all your cash flow, that's going to show up in your books (or to your parents if it's your allowance money, etc). To sustain a substance issue, you need not only money but money reasonably free of attention.
You don’t think the two are linked? You can’t imagine seeing such a thing happening and coming to the conclusion that, not only does America not give a shit about you, it absolutely hates you and will do whatever it can to make a buck at your expense and that attitude having an impact on the outlook your kids have?
It comes up in every crime discussion -- a poster runs in to point out that actually, wage theft is worse than someone beating and robbing your elderly grandmother.
They also have to torture the numbers to make the case that it's comparable. The "wage theft" numbers they cite include like, some defense subcontractor suing Lockheed Martin for unpaid hours.
It's important that it doesn't happen, but it's just a different order of magnitude of damage for the people sensitive to it.
I’ve never seen anyone compare wage theft to violent crime like you’re implying.
It’s usually in the context that wage theft is a much larger problem than people realize - to the point that depending on which source you choose it’s either on par or larger than other forms of theft.
I don’t see any references to physically harming people in your examples. I also don’t believe anyone is implying violent crime when comparing to other types of theft.
I don't get where you're getting "on par" from. Literally the only year that other forms of theft have exceeded or even come close to wage theft was the year Bernie Madoff got convicted. That's just an accounting artifact.
Without even going that far, why should blue collar workers respect the law when the white collar workers are corrupting the legal system for their benefit? Why should the poor tolerate a class war robbing them of their livelihoods and not retaliate?
To me this sounds like a “no u” argument. Whataboutism doesn’t address the op’s claim that shoplifting reduces access to stores for those who really need it.
> To help them we need to be less tolerant of such petty crime
??? 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.
I didn't mention the morality of it. The statement was 'no one HAS to steal' so I was taking it as a statement that no-one will starve without stealing which must surely be a comment on the social safety net.
My three assumptions here are that some people are starving, stealing to eat is the canonical excusable crime, and that 'just get a job' is not a solution. If you disagree with any of those, then that's your opinion but we have nothing further to discuss as we start from a different premise.
You're absolutely correct, we disagree on premises about the world. Have a wonderful day, I'm sorry for what amounts to a nonsensical response on my part.
It's not black or white. Stealing food from Walmart so your kids have the extra they need to grow is very honorable in my mind. It may feel shameful but it's honorable to me.
>"It's not entirely clear how punishing it harder"
It seems like nowadays 'punishing at all' is a serious issue. If the police say they won't show up for theft under a certain dollar amount they've basically made it legal to steal up to that amount.
>"until you actually help the truly desperate"
Food banks and welfare programs exist. I feel like sympathetic people are ignoring the fact that some people realize they can do illegal things because it gives them an advantage, not solely because there is no other option.
Food banks and welfare programs don't cover the things that are actually unaffordable. We have food banks and SNAP because food is cheap and abundant. And guess what, poor people can afford things that are cheap and abundant.
We can talk about honor and the nobility of suffering or whatever your catholic school taught you but the reality is that humans need a certain level of comfort before they stop doing things that are considered desperate acts to get there. You steal the stuff you can't afford that gives you comfort and puts you ahead enough that you still have money to make rent. Things like laptops, phones, tvs, video games have a high comfort/risk ratio and significantly raise your tolerance to the shittiness of the rest of your life.
Don't assume my stance comes from a Catholic upbringing, or from any religion at all. There's no need to frame this in terms of "honor and the nobility of suffering". I'm not saying people should suffer, I'm saying people shouldn't steal, particularly when alternatives exist.
If the question is "when is theft permissible" most people aren't going to agree that stealing "laptops, phones, tvs, video games" is okay because it will make the thief feel better about how shitty their life is.
I'm not arguing it's permissible, I'm saying you're gonna get nowhere trying to fight the river of rational actors who are following the natural optimization problem of value/risk. People who are desperate are going to steal and they're going to steal certain classes of goods.
You either deal with this or will forever be demonizing the very people you want to help because they're not behaving in the way you've decided they should to be worthy of sympathy.
>"or will forever be demonizing the very people you want to help"
I'm not demonizing anyone and this choice of words shows a gross misunderstanding of how most people feel about theft.
>"because they're not behaving in the way you've decided they should to be worthy of sympathy."
What's so wrong about this? I can definitely lose sympathy for someone who makes the choice to break the law and harm others when they could have chosen a non-violent alternative that would have probably helped the more. When that happens they should face consequences, be judged, and hopefully be rehabilitated.
The Aladdin fallacy. Everyone who steals is driven to it by desperate circumstances. But if you read the article, dire straits means the liquor aisle or the electronics section.
Desperate circumstances are exactly what drives people to steal from the liquor aisle. And idk about you, but I can’t think of a better way to shoplift overdue rent than stealing from the electronics section.
People who are desperate steal things that are expensive and provide them some reprieve from their situation. You don't see too many heroine users among the upper crust.
It's wild how people who people who've never experienced being poor don't get economics of it. You don't steal food, that's stupid because the risk/reward is terrible, when your phone breaks you steal the iPhone because that takes $1000 off your budget.
I tried to bake that idea into the phrasing but it clearly didn't land.
It's not desperation! It's organized crime reselling on Amazon and Ebay!
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.
Happy, well adjusted people don't form organized shoplifting gangs. You do that when you fall down the rabbit hole of not having other options.
If we do our job of educating and providing very basic social services and opportunities for young people it turns out that crime rates get lower and we get to harness the collective human potential of a generation instead of paying to lock them up.
Unfortunately we have to rely on the better nature and responsible long term planning abilities of humans to get this done. One human might be able to stick to a plan that becomes impossible for 5.
> Happy, well adjusted people don't form organized shoplifting gangs
Happy and well adjusted people form shoplifting gangs with the risk/reward calculus says that they can make a lot of money with 0 risk!
"Don't shoplift" is not some innate ethical virtue that humans adopt when they are happy and healthy; by trying to lean on virtues without maintaining a system for enforcing them you are simply spending down unquantifiable social capital in order to avoid making hard decisions.
I think you're wrong. Most people aren't kept from stealing because they're afraid they'll get in trouble. They are kept from stealing by an innate sense of social fairness. If you meet a man on the road in the middle of a remote forest in which you cannot possibly be observed do you murder him and take his things or not? If not, why not?
Like I said, you are parasitically running down the "innate sense of social fairness" that society has spent 10,000 years building. You want to believe it's innate, because it absolves you of the work of actually building a system to enforce virtue.
That's laziness, it doesn't make it true.
People do not want to rely on their "innate" sense of social fairness while watching the people around them be rewarded for violating those norms. People hold those feelings because they see the people around them do the same. When that's not true, they feel like suckers, and if you push them, you will find out how not-innate that sense is.
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Edit: And yes, for most of human history, "traveling in the woods in unfamiliar territory" was asking for a brutal death. Read some Jared Diamond or something on his work in New Guinea. We have actively socialized ourselves, through hard work over centuries, to make this relatively safe.
I think the only one projecting here is you. You're terrified of the masses of people just waiting to do horrible things because those are things you would do. The rest of us don't need the threat of violence against us to be decent people because that's just what most people do.
That sense of social fairness is easily hacked to justify stealing whatever a thief wants to steal. A hypothetical random man in the forest, sure. But how do we know they aren't a highway man, that would have threatened you first, but you managed to get there first? What if they do threaten you? Would we be comfortable stealing/robbing this person? And what if it was a corporation that's done and is doing bad stuff? Like, say, Google trying to charge money for YouTube*. Thieves performing feats of mental acrobatics to make it okay to steal when it's an eeeevil corporation says it's an innate sense of wanting things for free that does it.
> Whatever desperation drives people to shoplift, amplifies.
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 burning the furniture to keep warm, cracking down more harshly on furniture burning probably doesn't make the people less desperate for heat to live.
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?
I live in SF, and when I see a man grab a rack of jackets at target and walk out, it’s obvious the act of a desperate and drug addled individual.
When I see an efficient group of people in a Lexus breaking into cars or luxury stores, or the groups reselling fenced merchandise on 24th and Mission, it’s obviously organized crime.
The one fuels the other. There’s little reason for a desperate man to steal 10 jackets (he only needs one or two), unless there is a fence willing to buy them. There’s little reason for organized crime to break into cars or shops when others are willing to do that work for them, they can focus on selling the goods on Facebook Marketplace or eBay.
The truth is weirder than that. In sections of society it is frowned upon to have paid employment. It is seen as being a loser. A decent percentage of shoplifting is done by those with drug addictions, but a bigger percentage is done by those who are not desperate or in need, but simply because it is seen as the respectable way to earn money.
Source: I am a criminal and have spent a serious portion of my adult life in custody
I went to Caltech, perhaps the university with the most extensive honor system. It was wonderful. I never had to watch my back, or lock my dorm room door. The rest of the students liked it, too, and we watched out for each other. I don't know of any student who stole, but surely it did happen. Their fellow students would turn them in and ostracize them, so they usually just disappeared.
It's the way I want to live.
I've tried to use that in my life ever since. Sometimes, I get taken advantage of. But usually, I've found that people reciprocate, and it's nice. The D Language Foundation is run that way. We like it.
(In contrast, a friend of mine attended a different university. His second day, his dorm room was looted clean.)
Not only fine tech university folks like us can keep order. I lived in the Amsterdam Red Light district for a couple of years. It was said the criminals kept law and order, not the police. True or not, I never had any issue there, contrary to the mess of Utrecht city center where I lived before.
The infamous police bureau Wibautstraat was just one street further and I would be the last to argue they were incompetent.
There are still plenty of societies in the world where you can feel safe all of the time. On the Isle of Man where my family have lived you certainly never need to lock your house or your car. I've not lived there, but I heard it can be pretty similar in Japan or even Canada?
I agree. And, we need to be more aware and action orientated towards our judicial systems to enforce the law and making sure people get treatment/help. I think this should probably start with our police and judicial systems
Just a few weeks ago, NPR did a segment on how reducing traffic enforcement (because it disproportionately impacts minorities and the poor) has significantly increased the number of people hit and killed by cars… mostly minorities and the poor.
I am sympathetic to a person stealing food or clothing but not iPhones and consumer products, but theft appears unsustainable for retailers. What is the answer to this problem? Options are:
a. More prosecutions and stronger enforcement of existing laws;
b. Greater security within the store environment; or
c. Closing the stores in areas with high crime.
The last option would not be productive for the community. Option B has its limitations such as profiling, potential hostile encounters, and civil liability for America retailers. I do not know what it was like for shoplifters a decade ago but one person has told me it was more stringent. Shoplifters were prosecuted and punished, therefore it is possible that the only solution is greater enforcement of the law, and aggressive prosecutions.
Don't take this as me defending the shoplifters, but I don't think the smash-and-grab iphone thieves are doing it because they want dozens of phones. They are fencing them and use the money, which can buy food (and of course anything else).
This matches my brief experience. When I worked at a Lowe's store, which was a big target for serial shoplifters, the security staff said the process usually went like this:
1. Steal a small but expensive item, usually by hiding it in another item's box (return the big one later for a refund).
2. Return the stolen item at a different Lowe's, or even Home Depot. Without a receipt, you'll get a gift card with the item's value.
3. Sell the gift card at a discount, either online or to somebody in the parking lot.
I don't remember any problems with people stealing the basic things every good toolset should have, like hammers or drills. It was a lot of drill bits and attachments.
You are missing option d), raise the standard of living so that no one lives in poverty, and no one feels that stealing is the best way to get what they want.
You're right after all it's not like there are people all over the world risking their lives for the shot to come to the US. The US is a late stage capitalist hell hole that no one really wants to live in and is worse than every where else in the world (by which we mean a few handpicked countries in Western Europe that have much smaller population and borders).
Asking for some form of proof isn't accusing the US of being a hell hole, and I can't help but feel that a people that actually felt confident in their standard of living supremacy wouldn't be so touchy about it. Belligerence isn't an argument, and "People wants to be there" is only proof of good PR.
Speaking as a foreigner, it seems to me that this whole "USA #1" mentality is keeping a lot of people from reflecting on the reality of their situation and from being willing to try and make things better, as is evidenced by the person I was responding to - to paraphrase a bit their take seems to be "we're the best so we can't possibly fix the problem". That argument doesn't really make sense if you're actually not.
The problem with the USA is that those "highest standards of living" are not well-distributed, and there is a lack of a safety net at the lower end. 13% of the population lives below the poverty line. 1 in 400 people has to live on less than $2.15 a day.
I completely agree that there will still be thieves in a post-scarcity utopia, but those will basically just be bored housewives looking for a thrill. We should definitely work on reducing the number of people who resort to stealing in order to survive, though.
The requirements of “nobody lives in poverty” or the requirement of “no one feels that stealing is the best way to get what they want”
Because ubi would 100% eradicate poverty as we currently define it: making under a certain income
level. Would it improve living situations or get rid of stealing as a “best way to get what you want”? Idk - but it seems clear it’d work better than what we’re
currently doing (systematically impoverishing millions because otherwise nobody would get to own a superyacht)
I did not consider poverty elimination as an option, but thinking about it now, I don't think eliminating poverty is feasible, nor a short term solution to a serious quality of life issue. It is also questionable, given other comments, that this is a poverty issue. I recognize some may steal to feed themselves, or to sell to gain money to purchase life sustaining goods, but I do not believe that is something we can know for sure.
Duuhh it was so obvious the whole time, why don't we just fix poverty. It's so simple.
I mean it's not like there are dozens of confounding factors that make it a complicated problem like mental health issues, disabilities, immigration, substance abuse, or a dozen other things.
No it's probably all just the evil capitalist class, if we just got rid of them then everyone would be equal and joy and peace would exist forever just like in the Soviet Union known as a bastion of joy and freedom and peace, and they had practically no crime to boot. Was it because of a totalitarian police state that banished people to die in the frozens wastes of Siberia for life? No it was because the capitalists were gone that's clearly the solution.
I think enforcing the laws will do it. Prosecution of shoplifting seem to be down, and police and resources have been diverted to other crimes. It’s created a self-fulfilling cycle of unpunished stealing.
Even with option B, the cost for that security could rise to the point where it doesn't make sense to keep the store open, and it turns into option C. A and B would really need to work together.
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 am sympathetic to a person stealing food or clothing but not iPhones and consumer products
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.
We know that most shoplifting is committed by a small group[0], so we don't need to profile anybody, we can just ban people when they are convicted of their second theft (so as to avoid youngsters being stupid).
My local grocery store chain (Giant) recently closed off 1 of the two main openings to every store, and the self-checkout is now very annoying about "put the item in the bagging area". All of their solutions seem to be very anti-consumer, to the point where I now use instacart instead of going myself. I've also started ordering from a different grocery store.
I wish they'd just hire an off-duty police officer some of the time.
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.
> I wish they'd just hire an off-duty police officer some of the time.
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.
Truthfully, the proliferation of crimes like this is a pre-condition of systems collapse because it slowly unravels a lawful society. Laws that are not enforced are useless, and behaviour like this would eventually permeate into mainstream culture. After all, why should I pay if others can steal without consequences? Not to mention the negative socioeconomic impacts others have already pointed out of forcing store closures or driving up costs which eventually just feed the loop.
Whether or not one is sympathetic towards the people practicing this, the key issue that is becoming apparent is increasing apathy towards basic civilizational social contracts. This will be bad for everyone in the long term.
It shifts the Overton window on what behavior is acceptable, and like the GP said it creates a feedback loop where stores close, prices increase, more people are forced to steal, etc etc. It's pretty widely accepted that lawlessness, even at the "petty" end of the spectrum, is a precursor to larger deterioration of society and whatever civilization/empire you're talking about specifically.
> It's pretty widely accepted that lawlessness, even at the "petty" end of the spectrum, is a precursor to larger deterioration of society and whatever civilization/empire you're talking about specifically.
"Laws that are not enforced are useless" - Worse than useless because it's a license for the justice system to discriminate. "We don't normally enforce this law, but we're enforcing it against YOU right now."
Also worse than useless because those who normally follow the law begin to build immense frustration and loss of desire to make their own good choices.
It is called "prosecutorial discretion" used by prosecutors to favor the powerful, wealthy, connected folks. Right now, this discretion is extended to favor ordinary folks belonging to right categories.
Just imagine how much more abundance we would have if we didn't need to build all these security measures to deter bad actors. We are all paying more because of these thieves.
Imagine thinking "having relationships and growing like nearly every human being has in the history of the species" is in any way comparable to "stealing a bunch of shit from Target."
Learn what deadweight loss is. These costs are born by everyone, what percent of the cost is born by which parties is determined by the competitiveness of markets. Normal, law abiding, people are absolutely bearing the cost of bad actors.
We bear the cost in the form of needing to pay for police, surveillance cameras, security guards, security software, the justice system, lawyers, and jail cells. The money lost from each stolen good is spread across all other goods in the form of price increases, etc.
The shareholders who contribute nothing of value and yet still require more and more wealth be extracted from retailers? Yeah, we’re definitely all paying more because of those thieves.
Learn what deadweight loss is. These costs are born by everyone, what percent of the cost is born by which parties is determined by the competitiveness of markets. Normal, law abiding, people are absolutely bearing the cost of bad actors.
We bear the cost in the form of needing to pay for police, surveillance cameras, security guards, security software, the justice system, lawyers, jail cells. The money lost from each stolen good is spread across all other goods in the form of price increases, etcetera.
> shareholders who contribute nothing of value
They are shareholders because someone presumably at some point contributed something to society which resulted in them earning money to invest.
> someone presumably at some point contributed something to society
Even if that is true, which it’s not: in a shockingly high number of cases it is actually harming society that got people money. Even if it is true in a specific case - this premise implies that someone at one point contributing something to society entitles them to drain money from everybody else forever.
We all understand how we bear the cost of theft, but i don’t believe that theft is caused by bad people - it’s an inherent byproduct of a system that REQUIRES poverty to function.
Worst justification ever. Is this satire? History is full of legal things that were theft. Take your pick: the british crown taking land from whomeever. Slavery, chattel and indentured. Redlining. The potato famine.
Stealing from those who can afford it, in order to meet your basic needs (housing, food, etc) is not wrong. While taking the fruits of other’s labour because you have money, when you know the result is others not being able to afford their basic needs, is wrong.
> imagine how much more abundance we would have if we didn't need to build all these security measures to deter bad actors
This article has plenty of information about the fact that companies aren't building in security measures because they don't want to pay.
Or to put it another way: think about how much better shopping experiences we'd all have if stores weren't constantly understaffed. But they are, and so shopping sucks and shoplifters proliferate.
> After all, why should I pay if others can steal without consequences?
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.
> if there are no immediate consequences to the self
Fixing this is the answer, isn't it? Make sure there are consequences. Watch any video of people riding bikes into a CVS and filling trash bags with goods. The employees are scared to do anything. Not only do they not try to stop them, many times they're actively preventing customers from trying to stop them. A minority of the time one of the other customers, who has probably seen this bullshit way too many times, tries to do something.
How about a law saying "if you are an employee of a store charged with loss prevention, security, or anything like that, you have qualified immunity when trying to stop an active theft?" The idea that I can run into a store and start stealing things, then turn around and sue the security guard AND the corporate store for punching me in the face while I'm doing it is ludicrous.
We already have laws that if someone is killed in the commission of a crime you're committing, it's the same as if you killed them. It's not unheard of to say that if you're committing a crime, the laws of liability change.
> How about a law saying "if you are an employee of a store charged with loss prevention, security, or anything like that, you have qualified immunity when trying to stop an active theft?"
Qualified immunity from what, though? Pointing and yelling "thief"? Blocking their way? Laying hands on them to detain them? Assault and battery? Deadly force? You can't just allow people to do anything to stop someone from stealing a $5 tube of toothpaste. Where do you draw the line?
Also, what if the employee himself/herself is the one that gets injured? Who has qualified immunity from being responsible? The store?
> > We already have laws that if someone is killed in the commission of a crime you're committing, it's the same as if you killed them. It's not unheard of to say that if you're committing a crime, the laws of liability change.
At least to your last point, if you're stealing from a store and someone gets hurt trying to stop you, you should be responsible whether you hurt them or not, whether it was intentional or not. They slip on something and break their shoulder while they're running after you? No different than you assaulting them and breaking their shoulder directly. Again this isn't the case (at least not to this level) but I think it would be a good change.
I agree with your other point that it's not cut-and-dry, and honestly probably will vary based on state and municipality. There are certainly municipalities where you can do a lot, up to what would otherwise be assault or battery, to prevent theft. And there are some where you can't. But I think in general being a little more permissive with what is allowed, especially in these large corporate stores in large urban areas where this smash & grab type of theft seems to be more prevalent (or maybe just reported on more?), might be a good thing.
I think you might have it backwards. Petty theft doesn’t cause systems collapse - it’s the result of systems collapse. No matter how normalized, if there’s even a rare chance of consequences most people who can afford to pay will pay. That these crimes might be increasing (stats that prove that and aren’t junk are “hard to come by”) is evidence not of the theives not holding up their end of the social contract - but of employers, businesses, and governments not holding their end up.
> Petty theft doesn’t cause systems collapse - it’s the result of systems collapse.
That this is not the obvious conclusion is alarming. We've been talking about the costs of poor social safety nets and high income inequality for decades.
I know of a few European countries that have very strong safety nets, and this behaviour is significantly on the rise there also (first hand experience). There has been a slow-motion withdrawal of enforcement for 'small' crimes which I think leads to larger ones ala the 'broken window'. I think part of this is because it is so arduous a process to convict & incarcerate someone.
Broken windows policing is a garbage + debunked theory about crime, btw. It “worked” in NYC where it was famously deployed, because we were in the middle of massive decrease in violent crime. Not because it worked.
There is the broken window fallacy, and the broken window fallacy fallacy:
> A 2015 meta-analysis of broken windows policing implementations found that disorder policing strategies, such as "hot spots policing" or problem-oriented policing, result in "consistent crime reduction effects across a variety of violent, property, drug, and disorder outcome measures".[36] As a caveat, the authors noted that "aggressive order maintenance strategies that target individual disorderly behaviors do not generate significant crime reductions," pointing specifically to zero tolerance policing models that target singular behaviors such as public intoxication and remove disorderly individuals from the street via arrest. The authors recommend that police develop "community co-production" policing strategies instead of merely committing to increasing misdemeanor arrests.[36]
if you read the abstract of the 2015 study you’re quoting from:
> The strongest program effect sizes were generated by community and problem-solving interventions designed to change social and physical disorder conditions at particular places.
That doesn’t sound like broken windows policing. That sounds like fixing actual broken windows.
With ML we might have efficient ways of detecting enforceable scenarios, but I wonder if the tradeoff of cameras everywhere and a turnstile when entering a grocery market will be worth it.
Soon we might see conglomerations of businesses pooling their data together for global customer credibility scores.
> I think you might have it backwards. Petty theft doesn’t cause systems collapse - it’s the result of systems collapse.
It is probably a positive feedback loop: some system collapse causes some petty theft, which causes more system collapse, which causes more petty theft...
> hat these crimes might be increasing (stats that prove that and aren’t junk are “hard to come by”) is evidence not of the theives not holding up their end of the social contract - but of employers, businesses, and governments not holding their end up.
Why not both? Much of the shoplifting in my area is for drug money (at least the blatant kind you get to see up front). Now, one could claim employers are wrong for not letting someone addicted to fent work, but maybe not. Definitely how they got to that point is some fault of society, however.
It's by far not the most people who drive this. Non-enforcement of rules gives the worst individuals free reign. Enforcement works on the margins, and in this case the margins is basically all that matters, at least UNTIL the collapse.
Sure, but that is a consequence of allowing police forces to devolve into extortionate gangs, with no responsibility for responding to crimes and plenty of latitude to commit their own, with impunity.
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.
The actions of others are unrelated. I cannot steal just because someone else has become successful even if through stealing. If I steal the billionaire is not wrong, just better at it than I am.
But why? If the person with the overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of power is unwilling to uphold and support the social contract, why is it incumbent upon the disenfranchised to regard the contract as valid or even existent?
I think these processes are also driven by the fact that more and more people are living at or below the poverty level (due to an evert getting bigger gap between the rich and the poor) and reduction in social-economical mobility. The 'American dream' is no longer a reality in the USA. When large parts of socity live at the bare minimum and have no hope for improving their situation except through crime, it is to be expected that crime rates will increase.
There was an education thread the other day. No one much said it explicitly, we all danced around it... but it was mentioned that some states aren't bothering to teach math anymore, because some "groups" always failed. It was supposed to be some social justice thing.
I'm no racist. None of the children who were failing were incapable of understanding algebra. But there is a toxic culture that interferes with them wanting to learn it and behaving in ways that allow them to learn it.
It is asinine to say that they have no hope of improving their situation, when the same people are sabotaging themselves from childhood on up.
Sabotage piles up. When those retail stores inevitably flee those regions, there will be even fewer legitimate jobs to go around. There will be so-called "food deserts". And then that too will be blamed on late-stage capitalism and so forth.
Watching everyone blame a complex system failure on their pet theory reminds me of the parable of the blind men and the elephant.
I'll say that after the previous decade or so of watching oligarchs treat the law/decency as a non-entity and seeing zero repercussions, I've lost most of my belief in the law myself. While some might take that as a free license to do whatever they can get away with, personally it's made me evaluate my own morals and try to live as closely to them as I can, and I feel good about myself for living my values.
But I often see the attitude here that I should be a mercenary and work for the highest bidder no matter the social cost of the company that pays the best. I can't help but wonder - what if the best employment available to me was as a member of a retail theft gang?
Is greed good? I don't think so, but it seems to be a core value these days.
Any group or culture will possess a number of progressive and regressive tendencies (with specific reference to education). For every enlightenment there is a Spanish inquisition.
If a particular group holds too many regressive tendencies they're going to slide backwards, and unfortunately we are not culturally permitted to point out that their cultural beliefs might be at fault. A non-US example to calm your pitchforks: The 'Travelling Community' in Ireland/UK (a culturally distinct group, though not genetically distinct) believe that formal education is not a worthwhile use of a teenagers time.
I don't think anyone noticed themselves, nor has anyone listened when I've mentioned it previously, so I'll repeat:
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.
> 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.
Cognitive dissonance. I think this is a symptom of a slow western civilzation collapse
> Truthfully, the proliferation of crimes like this is a pre-condition of systems collapse because it slowly unravels a lawful society
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 saw a generic bottle of mayo go for $8.99. I say steal more. The commodification of food is an evil in and of itself; our society is based on profit over people. Let this shit collapse. This is a symptom of economic systems failing people. The problem doesn't lie solely on individuals.
Retailers use the equation (inventory in db - what's on shelf) = shrink, which conflates many different types of problems in one. Shrink can happen with errors in dbs and cycle counts, but the large part is due to actual theft. However, theft can take many different forms:
* Items "falling off the truck", i.e. you expect 100 units to be delivered to store, only 90 were delivered. Workers rarely check counts while receiving in store backrooms, so retailers think these were stolen from the shelves;
* Employees stealing stuff directly, either from the backroom or from the shelves;
* Plain old shoplifting, e.g. somebody swiping a few items from the shelf into their pocket;
* Organized Retail Crime (ORC): People coming into the store and brazenly stealing entire shelves or racks of merchandise.
The first four has been around since Retail was invented, but their impact is relatively small on a store basis. It is the last item that is the killer and what is referred to as the rise in "shoplifting" recently. This is not shoplifting in the traditional sense at all. As an example, consider Cotopaxi closing their flagship store in SF: https://sgbonline.com/cotopaxi-closes-store-in-san-fransisco...
Retailers are very reluctant to deal directly with the problem, i.e. stop the people walking out. The reason is that the usual profile of people engaged in OCR as well as its relation to various progressive causes makes this a taboo subject in the US. This also makes it hard to discuss the problem. Just the other day I heard a segment on NPR saying retail theft has not increased and "statistics are hard to come by".
Edit: For those who (rightly) point out the fact that retailers are doing cost benefit analysis and deciding that the bad press is not worth it: consider walking into a bank in California and stealing (without using a weapon, just intimidation) less than $950 (lower than the misdemeanor theft limit for retail) and see if the bank would do a similar analysis.
I would also naively expect that trying to intervene directly is dangerous. Organized hints at multiple people, you do not want to start escalating things in such a situation.
It’s simply more expensive to deal with the public relations and legal consequences of organized retail crime than to deal with it itself. These are national or even multinational corporations. They will let the stores in dysfunctional cities bleed out and write them off for the quarter, and remember this the next time they choose where to invest.
> Retailers are very reluctant to deal directly with the problem, i.e. stop the people walking out.
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?
From what the employee said, they're reluctant to take any action at all, like hiring more staff or caging certain merchandise like beer.
> Corporate ignored employees’ requests to put booze in locked cases because the liquor aisle is an area of the store that attracts some especially “sketchy” characters. It also blew them off when they warned of camera blind spots that shoplifters were aware of. “The company didn’t really seem that interested in solving the problem, they seemed more interested in, I don’t know, complaining,” he says. The cops weren’t much help, either. They’d show up hours after being called and ask whether the perpetrators were still there (they obviously weren’t) and which way they’d gone (what does it matter if it was six hours ago?).
...
> “All these companies that are screaming about theft, they’re kind of complicit in it because they keep reducing staff,” says Steven Rowland, the host of The Retail Warzone podcast and a former retail store manager. “From an hourly standpoint, a lot of these folks feel like they’re not paid enough to care anyway. And then you have store managers who are bleeding out, basically, because they have a lack of payroll, they don’t have enough staff just to get their basic functions done.”
You're right that store workers cannot be expected to interfere. What I meant was that they are reluctant to take more draconian measures, e.g. armed guards at the store and calling police immediately.
I knew someone who did 7.5 years in prison because he was the getaway driver for his female friend who stole a $5 hat from Walmart on the way out of the door and the shelf-stacker tried to be a hero and chase down the car, had to jump out of the way, hit their head on the kerb and was in a coma for months.
Walmart paid the medical bills which came in at over $2m.
Source: they were my cellmate in jail
Edit: but I live in the hood, and twice recently I've seen shoplifters beaten to shit by retail workers in Family Dollar and Walgreens for being caught stealing...
I saw a purse snatcher get walloped by bystanders in Shanghai. The police came by and just laughed, ya, you don't want to be a purse snatcher in China.
After having worked in retail for 20+ yrs, both in the field and in IT, what I saw as the largest cause of shrink was always just simple accounting errors.
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.
But that would only explain the ~20 billion dollar increase in shrink if stores had very high turnover due to low hourly pay (and a recent push for employees attempting to demand more), a strict immigration policy (or the afteraffects of low immigration during a recent pandemic) and poor working conditions (for floor employees), resulting in poorly trained employees that may not realize their mistake!
Rather than the usual he said/she said approach, do you have knowledge to back up your claim that "this isn't the reason"? In my job function I talked with many retailers. Also the crime increase post 2020 cannot be easily ignored.
As I mentioned to a sister comment above, what I meant is that retailers are reluctant to take any action. This is due to a convergence of several factors, including bad optics, lack of response from the police (which in turn is related to other factors), and, of course, the additional costs.
You have a very misinformed black and white view of low wage workers. Many are honorable and take issue with theft despite their wage and would prefer to intervene.
Obviously though as you state many also have a more detached view understanding that it may be unwise to intervene due to risk + their low wage, even if they dislike theft.
I think the largest part of the problem are actually the 2nd and 3rd order effects of retail theft. The shrinkage itself is only a small part of the cost.
Stores might attempt to address theft with preventative measures like locking things up, but this hurts the shopping experience for legitimate shoppers and encourages them to shop elsewhere, reducing sales at that store.
And what of the morale of the employees who witness all this? What sorts of employees remain in an environment where they see shop lifting all day?
Aside from the inconvenience of asking for the toothpaste cabinet to be unlocked, who wants to shop in a place where low-lifes are wandering around shoplifting in plain sight?
Staff shortages lead to messier, less organized stores, with less help and longer lines.
Overall this leads to a general degradation of the store, reduced sales, higher turnover, lower employee moral, and eventually closing the store outright in many cases.
And it's not fair to focus entirely on what the stores can do - this should be a job for the police and justice system. That's what we pay them for. And we don't allow (and wouldn't want) stores meting out their own justice either.
Its worth mentioning that this is somewhat a manufactured moral panic.
The Rite-aid referenced in the article cited shoplifting as the reason for closing but provided no numbers & the numbers of reported shoplifting incidents have been pretty much steady. Its worth mentioning that about a year after this happened the company filed Chapter 11.
There is no good data on this, and the data that does exist shows that shoplifting is down from 2019. Its only up it you compare to during the pandemic.
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.
I mean cities in California have legalized all shoplifting under $900, which is more than most people's grocery bill. But you're right it's just a moral panic by those darned conservatives trying to push their racism and bigotry by demanding that their society have "laws" and rely on outdated ideas like "criminals" instead of realizing the truth that crime is not a societal problem but rather a daring statement by marginalized groups striking back against their vaguely defined "oppressors".
No-one legalized it. Prop 47 was meant to reduce shoplifting under 900(950 actually) from a felony to a misdemeanor. This bring is it rough inline with other states such as Texas (at a cap of $2,500) and North Carolina ($1,000).
Also please don't put words in my mouth, its distasteful.
>No-one legalized it. Prop 47 was meant to reduce shoplifting under 900(950 actually) from a felony to a misdemeanor. This bring is it rough inline with other states such as Texas (at a cap of $2,500) and North Carolina ($1,000).
TX and NC don't have DAs that refuse to prosecute misdemeanor shoplifting charges. CA does. That's the important difference, not so much the dollar amount.
All the crime numbers are trash. In my city the police literally won't enter a case in to the system to even record that something has happened unless you go in person to the precinct or call them repeatedly until you get an officer willing to submit the report, and there's an online system that just auto-rejects anything submitted. And this is for theft like storage unit break-ins, bikes, mail, pick pockets.
Yeah the PD numbers seem pretty crap universally¹.
But I was referring to the the self reported shrinkage numbers produced by National Retail Federation shows that shrinkage caused by external theft. Numbers are only slightly up year but are also way way under the 2019 numbers.
1: My wife works in the DV grants field for a while. PD numbers have always been pretty abysmal.
And that's if you try. Eventually it becomes common knowledge reporting the crime is just a waste of time and most people don't even bother when it happens. This isn't something that will really show in statistics though so it is hard to track.
AFAIK, this is simply not true. If you talk to any retailer, shrink is the number one problem they mention by far, I was at NRF this January and saw this personally in my interviews with several grocery, pharmacy, and apparel retailers.
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.
Shrink is a significant problem. I'm not saying that its not. Its especially an issue when you're already being squeezed by inflation while trying to keep prices low. And year on year numbers are up. But most individuals take on this is vibe based.
According to NRF's numbers both shrinkage & external theft are at not historically high, and are still down from pre-pandemic numbers.
There will be cases like Cotopaxi where a store goes under, but
1. The plural of anecdote is not data.
2. These types violent smash and grabs & resulting closures are not new, they are however going viral.
Would it be possible to go back to basics and have "smaller shops" instead of multi level shopping industrial complexes that has fuck tone of space and millions of dollars worth of product?
In other countries including mine, traditionally there have always been small shops at every corner, each seeking something different and the owner sits there and has help or usually not. The result, the owner or the help get to know their clientele and its a matter of social contract that no one steals from the small shopkeeper. If someone does, the other shopkeepers come to help because its a scratch my back and I will scratch yours.
Incredibly naive solutions offered by the workers: Hire more colleagues and watch all aisles at all times and hire full-time security guards as well. They really don't seem to understand that this costs more money than it prevents thefts.
I've followed this with San Francisco, where taking $1,000 worth of items from a store is now de facto allowed. (I won't call it theft anymore because of this.) Target, a retail chain, moved to shorter opening hours there, and only there, to slow the bleeding in 2021 and closes ever more stores.
In any case, the market takes care of this: Any population that tolerates this kind of behaviour (whether that's a city jurisdiction, or on the council/state level) will, sooner or later, find its stores closed.
Delivery trucks - less attractive targets because of missing information about their wares and whereabouts - will be the next victims.
>I've followed this with San Francisco, where taking $1,000 worth of items from a store is now de facto allowed. (I won't call it theft anymore because of this.)
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.
I think the main purpose of store security guards is to protect staff, not goods. And they're more a theatrical deterrent than anything else; at least, the store guards around here are unarmed, over 50, and don't look fit. They seem to spend most of their time doomscrolling on their phone.
The fact is, the self-service supermarket retail model is a compromise; a self-service store can sell more goods with less staff, at the cost of "shrinkage". That is, shoplifting is the cost of doing business, and business is still more profitable than the old-fashioned model of keeping goods behind a manned counter.
So Vox is not GDPR compliant? It's the worse joke of a banner I've seen. It says that to opt out of tracking you need to disable cookies at the browser level.
Your account has been using HN primarily (exclusively, even?) for political battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of who/what you're battling for/against, so I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
210 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadIt's a huge slow motion train wreck crushing the people who need help most. To help them we need to be less tolerant of such petty crime, more in proportion to the damage that it does.
White collar crime needs to be prosecuted. But that won’t help here.
I don’t think any marginalized community sees a single dime out of any white collar crime prosecution.
A lot of the crime isn’t just necessities. It’s basically stealing to sell on the side.
Yes there are exceptions of course but the people stealing things from Target and CVS are not selling those things to pay for their Mercedes. They're selling them to pay for basic necessities. That doesn't mean it's not a crime, and it shouldn't be punished, but it is a distinction worth noting.
The vast majority of the poor in the US are.. obese. Not fat, but clinically obese. For whatever failings we have, feeding the poor and the masses is not one of them. Typically when kids do "go hungry" they are Middleschoolers or younger with... abusive parents. (Which is why free lunch programs work, it bypasses shitty parents).
I don't think anyone is shoplifting for food, at least in Seattle where food banks are stocked and ask few questions. They do shop lift for drugs, which is why LEGO, baby formula, and laundry detergent sections are locked down at many discount stores. It is shoplifting LEGOs to sell via a fence (this is very organized now) to get money to buy fent (often the shoplifting ring will give you drugs straight for the LEGO set you lifted).
You expect 15 year olds to be transgressive. But when it's endemic among certain 50 year olds - that's when you have a real problem.
First, you've made the assumption here that all the shoplifters are black. The data does not support that. Most shoplifters are white kids with drug problems.
Second, you've made the assumption here that all Black people in the US are descendents of slaves. That's also incorrect and ignores hundreds of years of migration from a rich variety of countries.
Third, no, shoplifters aren't shoplifting because of "generational nihilism". They are feeding drug/alcohol habits.
To point three, drug/alcohol habits are often hereditary and communal. Not sure why generational nihilism and feeding drug/alcohol habits are mutually exclusive.
You keep claiming this without qualification. It is probably very regional, but most shoplifters in my city (Seattle) are mostly white unhoused neighbors who are usually in their 20s-30s and have drug abuse problems. They aren't white suburban kids (although I'm sure it happens in the suburbs, just not in our urban area).
Obviously the shoplifters are going to be a subpopulation of the area they live in - if you live in a predominantly black neighborhood, they will trend to be more black, if you live in an older neighborhood, they will trend to be older, etc etc.
But basically the whole benefit of shoplifting is that it solves both your money problem and the "accounting for where money has gone" problem that occurs with substance abuse. If you're running a successful business and then snorting all your cash flow, that's going to show up in your books (or to your parents if it's your allowance money, etc). To sustain a substance issue, you need not only money but money reasonably free of attention.
Between the subprime mortgage crisis and hooking 50 million people on OxyContin, this shit really takes a bite out of people's savings.
It's important that it doesn't happen, but it's just a different order of magnitude of damage for the people sensitive to it.
It’s usually in the context that wage theft is a much larger problem than people realize - to the point that depending on which source you choose it’s either on par or larger than other forms of theft.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37703395
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37751850
You're right that they're not saying "wage theft is worse than murder", just "wage theft is worse than all other forms of theft"
??? 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.
My three assumptions here are that some people are starving, stealing to eat is the canonical excusable crime, and that 'just get a job' is not a solution. If you disagree with any of those, then that's your opinion but we have nothing further to discuss as we start from a different premise.
You're absolutely correct, we disagree on premises about the world. Have a wonderful day, I'm sorry for what amounts to a nonsensical response on my part.
Did a double take on this one. There are plenty of scenarios where stealing is honorable.
It seems like nowadays 'punishing at all' is a serious issue. If the police say they won't show up for theft under a certain dollar amount they've basically made it legal to steal up to that amount.
>"until you actually help the truly desperate"
Food banks and welfare programs exist. I feel like sympathetic people are ignoring the fact that some people realize they can do illegal things because it gives them an advantage, not solely because there is no other option.
We can talk about honor and the nobility of suffering or whatever your catholic school taught you but the reality is that humans need a certain level of comfort before they stop doing things that are considered desperate acts to get there. You steal the stuff you can't afford that gives you comfort and puts you ahead enough that you still have money to make rent. Things like laptops, phones, tvs, video games have a high comfort/risk ratio and significantly raise your tolerance to the shittiness of the rest of your life.
If the question is "when is theft permissible" most people aren't going to agree that stealing "laptops, phones, tvs, video games" is okay because it will make the thief feel better about how shitty their life is.
You either deal with this or will forever be demonizing the very people you want to help because they're not behaving in the way you've decided they should to be worthy of sympathy.
I'm not demonizing anyone and this choice of words shows a gross misunderstanding of how most people feel about theft.
>"because they're not behaving in the way you've decided they should to be worthy of sympathy."
What's so wrong about this? I can definitely lose sympathy for someone who makes the choice to break the law and harm others when they could have chosen a non-violent alternative that would have probably helped the more. When that happens they should face consequences, be judged, and hopefully be rehabilitated.
And overdue rent is what happens when you make bad decisions like spending your money on drugs and alcohol
Have any of you ever even been in dire straits? Because those of us who have are not as tolerant and that’s not meaningless
It's wild how people who people who've never experienced being poor don't get economics of it. You don't steal food, that's stupid because the risk/reward is terrible, when your phone breaks you steal the iPhone because that takes $1000 off your budget.
I tried to bake that idea into the phrasing but it clearly didn't land.
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.
If we do our job of educating and providing very basic social services and opportunities for young people it turns out that crime rates get lower and we get to harness the collective human potential of a generation instead of paying to lock them up.
Unfortunately we have to rely on the better nature and responsible long term planning abilities of humans to get this done. One human might be able to stick to a plan that becomes impossible for 5.
Happy and well adjusted people form shoplifting gangs with the risk/reward calculus says that they can make a lot of money with 0 risk!
"Don't shoplift" is not some innate ethical virtue that humans adopt when they are happy and healthy; by trying to lean on virtues without maintaining a system for enforcing them you are simply spending down unquantifiable social capital in order to avoid making hard decisions.
That's laziness, it doesn't make it true.
People do not want to rely on their "innate" sense of social fairness while watching the people around them be rewarded for violating those norms. People hold those feelings because they see the people around them do the same. When that's not true, they feel like suckers, and if you push them, you will find out how not-innate that sense is.
---
Edit: And yes, for most of human history, "traveling in the woods in unfamiliar territory" was asking for a brutal death. Read some Jared Diamond or something on his work in New Guinea. We have actively socialized ourselves, through hard work over centuries, to make this relatively safe.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128765
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.
I live in SF, and when I see a man grab a rack of jackets at target and walk out, it’s obvious the act of a desperate and drug addled individual.
When I see an efficient group of people in a Lexus breaking into cars or luxury stores, or the groups reselling fenced merchandise on 24th and Mission, it’s obviously organized crime.
The one fuels the other. There’s little reason for a desperate man to steal 10 jackets (he only needs one or two), unless there is a fence willing to buy them. There’s little reason for organized crime to break into cars or shops when others are willing to do that work for them, they can focus on selling the goods on Facebook Marketplace or eBay.
Source: I am a criminal and have spent a serious portion of my adult life in custody
I went to Caltech, perhaps the university with the most extensive honor system. It was wonderful. I never had to watch my back, or lock my dorm room door. The rest of the students liked it, too, and we watched out for each other. I don't know of any student who stole, but surely it did happen. Their fellow students would turn them in and ostracize them, so they usually just disappeared.
It's the way I want to live.
I've tried to use that in my life ever since. Sometimes, I get taken advantage of. But usually, I've found that people reciprocate, and it's nice. The D Language Foundation is run that way. We like it.
(In contrast, a friend of mine attended a different university. His second day, his dorm room was looted clean.)
The infamous police bureau Wibautstraat was just one street further and I would be the last to argue they were incompetent.
a. More prosecutions and stronger enforcement of existing laws;
b. Greater security within the store environment; or
c. Closing the stores in areas with high crime.
The last option would not be productive for the community. Option B has its limitations such as profiling, potential hostile encounters, and civil liability for America retailers. I do not know what it was like for shoplifters a decade ago but one person has told me it was more stringent. Shoplifters were prosecuted and punished, therefore it is possible that the only solution is greater enforcement of the law, and aggressive prosecutions.
1. Steal a small but expensive item, usually by hiding it in another item's box (return the big one later for a refund).
2. Return the stolen item at a different Lowe's, or even Home Depot. Without a receipt, you'll get a gift card with the item's value.
3. Sell the gift card at a discount, either online or to somebody in the parking lot.
I don't remember any problems with people stealing the basic things every good toolset should have, like hammers or drills. It was a lot of drill bits and attachments.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4104590/
FTFY
FTFY
Speaking as a foreigner, it seems to me that this whole "USA #1" mentality is keeping a lot of people from reflecting on the reality of their situation and from being willing to try and make things better, as is evidenced by the person I was responding to - to paraphrase a bit their take seems to be "we're the best so we can't possibly fix the problem". That argument doesn't really make sense if you're actually not.
I completely agree that there will still be thieves in a post-scarcity utopia, but those will basically just be bored housewives looking for a thrill. We should definitely work on reducing the number of people who resort to stealing in order to survive, though.
Because ubi would 100% eradicate poverty as we currently define it: making under a certain income level. Would it improve living situations or get rid of stealing as a “best way to get what you want”? Idk - but it seems clear it’d work better than what we’re currently doing (systematically impoverishing millions because otherwise nobody would get to own a superyacht)
I mean it's not like there are dozens of confounding factors that make it a complicated problem like mental health issues, disabilities, immigration, substance abuse, or a dozen other things.
No it's probably all just the evil capitalist class, if we just got rid of them then everyone would be equal and joy and peace would exist forever just like in the Soviet Union known as a bastion of joy and freedom and peace, and they had practically no crime to boot. Was it because of a totalitarian police state that banished people to die in the frozens wastes of Siberia for life? No it was because the capitalists were gone that's clearly the solution.
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...
I wish they'd just hire an off-duty police officer some of the time.
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.
Whether or not one is sympathetic towards the people practicing this, the key issue that is becoming apparent is increasing apathy towards basic civilizational social contracts. This will be bad for everyone in the long term.
Rudi Giuliani would agree. I wouldn't.
I suspect you disagree with me on that. What sort of evidence would you accept that would convince you of my position?
But teenagers do fuck, so we must deal with the reality of the human condition.
We bear the cost in the form of needing to pay for police, surveillance cameras, security guards, security software, the justice system, lawyers, and jail cells. The money lost from each stolen good is spread across all other goods in the form of price increases, etc.
We bear the cost in the form of needing to pay for police, surveillance cameras, security guards, security software, the justice system, lawyers, jail cells. The money lost from each stolen good is spread across all other goods in the form of price increases, etcetera.
> shareholders who contribute nothing of value
They are shareholders because someone presumably at some point contributed something to society which resulted in them earning money to invest.
Even if that is true, which it’s not: in a shockingly high number of cases it is actually harming society that got people money. Even if it is true in a specific case - this premise implies that someone at one point contributing something to society entitles them to drain money from everybody else forever.
We all understand how we bear the cost of theft, but i don’t believe that theft is caused by bad people - it’s an inherent byproduct of a system that REQUIRES poverty to function.
It is absolutely true for the vast majority of capital owners.
> entitles them to drain money from everybody else forever
They are not "draining money" by owning capital that produces goods that are then sold for money.
Stealing from those who can afford it, in order to meet your basic needs (housing, food, etc) is not wrong. While taking the fruits of other’s labour because you have money, when you know the result is others not being able to afford their basic needs, is wrong.
This article has plenty of information about the fact that companies aren't building in security measures because they don't want to pay.
Or to put it another way: think about how much better shopping experiences we'd all have if stores weren't constantly understaffed. But they are, and so shopping sucks and shoplifters proliferate.
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.
Fixing this is the answer, isn't it? Make sure there are consequences. Watch any video of people riding bikes into a CVS and filling trash bags with goods. The employees are scared to do anything. Not only do they not try to stop them, many times they're actively preventing customers from trying to stop them. A minority of the time one of the other customers, who has probably seen this bullshit way too many times, tries to do something.
How about a law saying "if you are an employee of a store charged with loss prevention, security, or anything like that, you have qualified immunity when trying to stop an active theft?" The idea that I can run into a store and start stealing things, then turn around and sue the security guard AND the corporate store for punching me in the face while I'm doing it is ludicrous.
We already have laws that if someone is killed in the commission of a crime you're committing, it's the same as if you killed them. It's not unheard of to say that if you're committing a crime, the laws of liability change.
Qualified immunity from what, though? Pointing and yelling "thief"? Blocking their way? Laying hands on them to detain them? Assault and battery? Deadly force? You can't just allow people to do anything to stop someone from stealing a $5 tube of toothpaste. Where do you draw the line?
Also, what if the employee himself/herself is the one that gets injured? Who has qualified immunity from being responsible? The store?
At least to your last point, if you're stealing from a store and someone gets hurt trying to stop you, you should be responsible whether you hurt them or not, whether it was intentional or not. They slip on something and break their shoulder while they're running after you? No different than you assaulting them and breaking their shoulder directly. Again this isn't the case (at least not to this level) but I think it would be a good change.
I agree with your other point that it's not cut-and-dry, and honestly probably will vary based on state and municipality. There are certainly municipalities where you can do a lot, up to what would otherwise be assault or battery, to prevent theft. And there are some where you can't. But I think in general being a little more permissive with what is allowed, especially in these large corporate stores in large urban areas where this smash & grab type of theft seems to be more prevalent (or maybe just reported on more?), might be a good thing.
That this is not the obvious conclusion is alarming. We've been talking about the costs of poor social safety nets and high income inequality for decades.
A popular one: 225 previous convictions: https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41055134.html
> A 2015 meta-analysis of broken windows policing implementations found that disorder policing strategies, such as "hot spots policing" or problem-oriented policing, result in "consistent crime reduction effects across a variety of violent, property, drug, and disorder outcome measures".[36] As a caveat, the authors noted that "aggressive order maintenance strategies that target individual disorderly behaviors do not generate significant crime reductions," pointing specifically to zero tolerance policing models that target singular behaviors such as public intoxication and remove disorderly individuals from the street via arrest. The authors recommend that police develop "community co-production" policing strategies instead of merely committing to increasing misdemeanor arrests.[36]
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
> The strongest program effect sizes were generated by community and problem-solving interventions designed to change social and physical disorder conditions at particular places.
That doesn’t sound like broken windows policing. That sounds like fixing actual broken windows.
Soon we might see conglomerations of businesses pooling their data together for global customer credibility scores.
It is probably a positive feedback loop: some system collapse causes some petty theft, which causes more system collapse, which causes more petty theft...
> hat these crimes might be increasing (stats that prove that and aren’t junk are “hard to come by”) is evidence not of the theives not holding up their end of the social contract - but of employers, businesses, and governments not holding their end up.
Why not both? Much of the shoplifting in my area is for drug money (at least the blatant kind you get to see up front). Now, one could claim employers are wrong for not letting someone addicted to fent work, but maybe not. Definitely how they got to that point is some fault of society, however.
That is basically irrelevant; example - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...
It's by far not the most people who drive this. Non-enforcement of rules gives the worst individuals free reign. Enforcement works on the margins, and in this case the margins is basically all that matters, at least UNTIL the collapse.
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.
Not true in the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200463/us-poverty-rate-s...
At 11.5% only two years since 1990 have been lower, 2019 and 2000.
I'm no racist. None of the children who were failing were incapable of understanding algebra. But there is a toxic culture that interferes with them wanting to learn it and behaving in ways that allow them to learn it.
It is asinine to say that they have no hope of improving their situation, when the same people are sabotaging themselves from childhood on up.
Sabotage piles up. When those retail stores inevitably flee those regions, there will be even fewer legitimate jobs to go around. There will be so-called "food deserts". And then that too will be blamed on late-stage capitalism and so forth.
I'll say that after the previous decade or so of watching oligarchs treat the law/decency as a non-entity and seeing zero repercussions, I've lost most of my belief in the law myself. While some might take that as a free license to do whatever they can get away with, personally it's made me evaluate my own morals and try to live as closely to them as I can, and I feel good about myself for living my values.
But I often see the attitude here that I should be a mercenary and work for the highest bidder no matter the social cost of the company that pays the best. I can't help but wonder - what if the best employment available to me was as a member of a retail theft gang?
Is greed good? I don't think so, but it seems to be a core value these days.
If a particular group holds too many regressive tendencies they're going to slide backwards, and unfortunately we are not culturally permitted to point out that their cultural beliefs might be at fault. A non-US example to calm your pitchforks: The 'Travelling Community' in Ireland/UK (a culturally distinct group, though not genetically distinct) believe that formal education is not a worthwhile use of a teenagers time.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmwo...
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.
Cognitive dissonance. I think this is a symptom of a slow western civilzation collapse
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.
* Items "falling off the truck", i.e. you expect 100 units to be delivered to store, only 90 were delivered. Workers rarely check counts while receiving in store backrooms, so retailers think these were stolen from the shelves;
* Employees stealing stuff directly, either from the backroom or from the shelves;
* Employees working in conjunction with non-employees to steal, e.g. sweethearting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweethearting);
* Plain old shoplifting, e.g. somebody swiping a few items from the shelf into their pocket;
* Organized Retail Crime (ORC): People coming into the store and brazenly stealing entire shelves or racks of merchandise.
The first four has been around since Retail was invented, but their impact is relatively small on a store basis. It is the last item that is the killer and what is referred to as the rise in "shoplifting" recently. This is not shoplifting in the traditional sense at all. As an example, consider Cotopaxi closing their flagship store in SF: https://sgbonline.com/cotopaxi-closes-store-in-san-fransisco...
Retailers are very reluctant to deal directly with the problem, i.e. stop the people walking out. The reason is that the usual profile of people engaged in OCR as well as its relation to various progressive causes makes this a taboo subject in the US. This also makes it hard to discuss the problem. Just the other day I heard a segment on NPR saying retail theft has not increased and "statistics are hard to come by".
Edit: For those who (rightly) point out the fact that retailers are doing cost benefit analysis and deciding that the bad press is not worth it: consider walking into a bank in California and stealing (without using a weapon, just intimidation) less than $950 (lower than the misdemeanor theft limit for retail) and see if the bank would do a similar analysis.
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?
> Corporate ignored employees’ requests to put booze in locked cases because the liquor aisle is an area of the store that attracts some especially “sketchy” characters. It also blew them off when they warned of camera blind spots that shoplifters were aware of. “The company didn’t really seem that interested in solving the problem, they seemed more interested in, I don’t know, complaining,” he says. The cops weren’t much help, either. They’d show up hours after being called and ask whether the perpetrators were still there (they obviously weren’t) and which way they’d gone (what does it matter if it was six hours ago?).
...
> “All these companies that are screaming about theft, they’re kind of complicit in it because they keep reducing staff,” says Steven Rowland, the host of The Retail Warzone podcast and a former retail store manager. “From an hourly standpoint, a lot of these folks feel like they’re not paid enough to care anyway. And then you have store managers who are bleeding out, basically, because they have a lack of payroll, they don’t have enough staff just to get their basic functions done.”
Walmart paid the medical bills which came in at over $2m.
Source: they were my cellmate in jail
Edit: but I live in the hood, and twice recently I've seen shoplifters beaten to shit by retail workers in Family Dollar and Walgreens for being caught stealing...
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.
...which actually adds up.
As I mentioned to a sister comment above, what I meant is that retailers are reluctant to take any action. This is due to a convergence of several factors, including bad optics, lack of response from the police (which in turn is related to other factors), and, of course, the additional costs.
Obviously though as you state many also have a more detached view understanding that it may be unwise to intervene due to risk + their low wage, even if they dislike theft.
Stores might attempt to address theft with preventative measures like locking things up, but this hurts the shopping experience for legitimate shoppers and encourages them to shop elsewhere, reducing sales at that store.
And what of the morale of the employees who witness all this? What sorts of employees remain in an environment where they see shop lifting all day?
Aside from the inconvenience of asking for the toothpaste cabinet to be unlocked, who wants to shop in a place where low-lifes are wandering around shoplifting in plain sight?
Staff shortages lead to messier, less organized stores, with less help and longer lines.
Overall this leads to a general degradation of the store, reduced sales, higher turnover, lower employee moral, and eventually closing the store outright in many cases.
And it's not fair to focus entirely on what the stores can do - this should be a job for the police and justice system. That's what we pay them for. And we don't allow (and wouldn't want) stores meting out their own justice either.
Edit: moral->morale
Do you mean morale or moral? The sentence reads a little differently if you actually mean the latter.
The Rite-aid referenced in the article cited shoplifting as the reason for closing but provided no numbers & the numbers of reported shoplifting incidents have been pretty much steady. Its worth mentioning that about a year after this happened the company filed Chapter 11.
There is no good data on this, and the data that does exist shows that shoplifting is down from 2019. Its only up it you compare to during the pandemic.
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 please don't put words in my mouth, its distasteful.
TX and NC don't have DAs that refuse to prosecute misdemeanor shoplifting charges. CA does. That's the important difference, not so much the dollar amount.
But I was referring to the the self reported shrinkage numbers produced by National Retail Federation shows that shrinkage caused by external theft. Numbers are only slightly up year but are also way way under the 2019 numbers.
1: My wife works in the DV grants field for a while. PD numbers have always been pretty abysmal.
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.
According to NRF's numbers both shrinkage & external theft are at not historically high, and are still down from pre-pandemic numbers.
There will be cases like Cotopaxi where a store goes under, but
1. The plural of anecdote is not data. 2. These types violent smash and grabs & resulting closures are not new, they are however going viral.
In other countries including mine, traditionally there have always been small shops at every corner, each seeking something different and the owner sits there and has help or usually not. The result, the owner or the help get to know their clientele and its a matter of social contract that no one steals from the small shopkeeper. If someone does, the other shopkeepers come to help because its a scratch my back and I will scratch yours.
I've followed this with San Francisco, where taking $1,000 worth of items from a store is now de facto allowed. (I won't call it theft anymore because of this.) Target, a retail chain, moved to shorter opening hours there, and only there, to slow the bleeding in 2021 and closes ever more stores.
You can see people riding bikes into stores, stuffing a plastic bag full of items and leaving, in full sight of what appears to be a security guard: https://twitter.com/LyanneMelendez/status/140457407915631821...
In any case, the market takes care of this: Any population that tolerates this kind of behaviour (whether that's a city jurisdiction, or on the council/state level) will, sooner or later, find its stores closed. Delivery trucks - less attractive targets because of missing information about their wares and whereabouts - will be the next victims.
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.
The fact is, the self-service supermarket retail model is a compromise; a self-service store can sell more goods with less staff, at the cost of "shrinkage". That is, shoplifting is the cost of doing business, and business is still more profitable than the old-fashioned model of keeping goods behind a manned counter.
It's amazing how "blame the victim" is either ok or not ok, depending on the victim.
She "tries" not to?
> even if that was going to cost them a little more.
Hiring more staff is not a "little" more. Staff is very expensive.
> a man walked in with a gun ... the robber actually showed more concern for our well-being than my manager or the police did.
Threatening people with a gun does not show concern for well-being. (I've been threatened with a gun twice.)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.