In the last few days, I've done some spotty amateur research on this, because something about this rising tide of shoplifting doesn't ring quite true. So here's the best picture I can put together.Phoebe wrote:Apparently there has been a spike in shoplifting across the nation and stores are having trouble dealing with it and have adopted controversial policies.
There are almost no hard statistics for "shoplifting". Retail operations don't track shoplifting per se. All they measure reliably is retail shrinkage, which essentially is any loss of merchandise. A third of that is estimated to be shoplifting/external theft, a third is employee/internal theft, and the rest is chalked up to damage, waste, mismanagement, fraud and unknown causes.
What we know about shrinkage is that it saw a dramatic rise starting in like 2015 or 2016, generally attributed to more organized theft rings, especially online, and with that came a move to higher ticket items, so maybe not so much a dramatic change in the number of incidents of theft, but definitely an increase in the dollar loss per incident. But since that first couple years, shrinkage actually dropped some and then leveled off. It is not as low as it was ten years ago, but it also has not changed significantly in the last two or three years. As far as I can tell.
And yet we have headlines proclaiming a rising epidemic of shoplifting, with articles definitively describing a 73% increase in shoplifting year over year. Or 54%. Or 26%? Not to mention numerous businesses shutting branches in certain trouble areas and citing shoplifting losses in those areas as the reason.
Turns out that the massive % increases come from surveys of small business owners asking them if they think shoplifting is up or down. Are they more or less worried. Have their losses increased. But all pretty subjective really. No actual stats. And despite most crime showing steady downward trends for decades in this country, every survey that asks about crime shows most people think it is worse now than a few years ago. People worry about crime, so ask small business owners about crime and you'll hear their worry. But also, I found articles where reporters pressed companies that claimed they closed some stores due to shoplifting and found evidence that the closures had been in the works for a long time. Companies would rather blame crime than admit they are downsizing and liquidating assets to increase shareholder returns.
Plus, these stories are favorites of Fox News as they show that liberal bastions of lawlessness like Portland have devolved into cesspools of danger.
I welcome new information and perspectives, but my initial impression is that the crimewave tales are overblown bullshit.
