The Left says retail crime is going down. The truth? Theft has become so pervasive — and ordinary — that retailers have simply stopped reporting it.
The well-documented surge in shoplifting in the U.S. has caused many retail locations across the country to close. From CVS to Nordstrom, major retailers are pulling out of crime-ridden areas. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.) adhered to the Left’s narrative when she termed such closures “life-threatening acts of racial and economic discrimination” and accused corporations of “divesting from Black and brown communities.”
When a Walgreens shut its doors south of Boston in Roxbury, Mass., Pressley unleashed her anger at the evil corporation. “They disrupt the entire community and they take with them baby formula, diapers, asthma inhalers, life-saving medications and, of course, jobs. . . . These closures are not arbitrary and they are not innocent.”
Pressley is right — these closures are not arbitrary. According to a local legal organization, “Roxbury’s overall crime rate at 4,796 per 100,000 residents, is 93 percent higher than the national average. Citizens of the neighborhood have a 1 in 21 chance of becoming a victim of a crime.”
A spokesperson for Walgreens offered a euphemism to explain the Roxbury store’s closure: “As a result of the current operating environment and our financial performance, we have had to make difficult decisions across our business, including . . . store closures like Roxbury.” (The “current operating environment” was one of overwhelming crime.)
At a press conference last week, California governor Gavin Newsom shared a (self-defeating) story about theft at a local Target. As Newsom was checking out, he and the clerk assisting him saw another man walk out without paying: “I said, ‘Well why didn’t you stop him?’ She goes, ‘Oh the governor lowered the threshold, there’s no accountability. . . . ’ Swear to god, true story!” Newsom went on to reject the clerk’s claims and tout California’s “toughest” shoplifting laws.
(I will leave it to the reader to surmise if the store clerk or the governor has a better understanding of retail crime in the Golden State.)
In 2022, the National Retail Federation (NRF) reported that retail shrink (overall loss of inventory) had become a $100 billion problem. At the time, organized retail crime was cited as “a critical component of that shrink” and “a growing challenge both for retailers and the industry at large.” According to NRF’s 2022 National Retail Security Survey, “Retailers reported a 26.5 percent increase in organized retail crime, on average. Even more alarming, the vast majority (81.2 percent) said the violence and aggression associated with organized retail crime increased in the past year.”
An NRF spokesperson stated, “The factors contributing to retail shrink have multiplied in recent years, and organized retail crime is a burgeoning threat within the retail industry. . . . Highly sophisticated criminal rings jeopardize employee and customer safety and disrupt store operations. Retailers are bolstering security efforts to counteract these increasingly dangerous and aggressive criminal activities.”
In 2023, NRF reported a continued increase in retail shrink caused by crime. The 2023 survey reported $112.1 billion in losses in fiscal year 2022 — up nearly $20 billion from fiscal year 2021. The 2023 report did not mince words: “Retail crime, violence and theft continue to impact the retail industry at unprecedented levels. . . . While retail shrink encompasses many types of loss, it is primarily driven by theft, including organized retail crime.”
Despite the clearly evidenced rise in violence and organized retail crime, the Left will tell you that retail crime is going down.
An article published by the New York Times last November, “Is Shoplifting Really Surging?” asserts that claims of a shoplifting wave in the U.S. are exaggerated. “Retail theft has not spiked nationwide in the past several years. If anything, it appears less common in most of the country than it was before the pandemic.” The piece primarily cites “the most up-to-date source” on shoplifting to back its argument, a 2023 report by the Council on Criminal Justice.
The Council on Criminal Justice data show that — apart from New York City — reports of shoplifting fell 7 percent. Per the report, San Francisco had among the largest decreases in shoplifting from the first half of 2022 to the first half of 2023. (As San Francisco has been hemorrhaging retailers over the last few years, this laudable designation pointed to something nefarious in the data.)
The fatal flaw in such studies on shoplifting is that they rely on the number of reports which were made, not on the actual number of incidents which occurred. These studies confirm that reports of shoplifting are decreasing nationally, but they cannot conclude that shoplifting itself is decreasing nationally (although they often do).
According to the California District Attorneys Association (CDAA), which has worked closely with consumers and retail executives to track the rise in shoplifting in California, an estimated 80 percent of retail theft goes unreported these days. Why is this?
Greg Totten, CEO of the CDAA, told National Review:
“There are very good and compelling reasons for retailers to take that approach — they’ve got major risk management issues for their employees and their customers. Anytime they try to stop somebody that’s committing theft, they risk potential assault, or worse, if the person is armed. Many retailers have just made a conscious decision: “Look, our shrink rates are going to go up. We’re going to have more issues, but we’re just going to have to take these losses.”
According to the CDAA, theft has become so pervasive that standard loss-prevention techniques are no longer effective. Measures like reducing store hours, minimizing points of exit, and locking products behind plastic screens — such that a store clerk must be hailed every time a customer seeks to purchase a secured item — has not deterred shoplifting.
In August of last year, Target CEO Brian Cornell told analysts that Target stores had a 120 percent increase in theft incidents “involving violence or threats of violence” in the first five months of 2023.
For obvious reasons, stores don’t want to tell their customers — or their potential employees — that violence on their property is on the rise. As Totten surmised, “They’re protecting brand. They don’t want to tell the parents of the young people that work in their stores that it’s risky for them to do so. They don’t want to tell their customers that there is risk associated with them shopping there. So, a lot of theft is underreported.”
A key pressure point in the policies regarding retail crime arises from the number of shoplifting incidents reported. Retailers must properly report the shoplifting that occurs on their premises so that better legislation can be enacted. With a national rise in retail crime, the consequences fall most heavily on the consumers, who are exposed to risk and store closures.
O. H. Skinner, executive director of the Alliance for Consumers, has noted the heavy costs suffered by the consumers in the face of rising, underreported retail crime. In a letter sent out yesterday to executives of the top 25 retailers in the U.S., Alliance for Consumers called on retailers to take action. “When you fail to report theft, robbery, and other crimes, it plays into the hands of the officials who have set our cities ablaze; it empowers those officials to downplay the crime we see all around us as they blithely point to statistics that blatantly underreport what is happening. . . . We need you to pick the side of consumers, and not play into the hands of the people who set this problem in motion. We are calling on you to hold the line, report the crime, and help us fight for consumers.”
The faithful reporting of crime by retailers would confirm for all — even Governor Newsom and the New York Times — that retail crime is truly on the rise. Only then might the surge be stopped.