And one of them has actual evidence to support that claim. The other one…doesn’t.
Also, the “organized retail theft” that e.g. Target was whinging about (honestly or not) is not smash and grab raids that would scare the soccer moms shopping nearby. Which is the image that “looting” brings to mind.
It’s predominantly criminal entrepreneurs paying shoplifters (and employees) to steal by subterfuge goods that can be resold en masse over eBay, Amazon, etc. Plus countless individual one-man efforts using the same steal for resale model.
White collar criminals are often described as “looting” the treasury of their company. Nobody thinks that means they’re running through the accounting department shooting wildly and grabbing bales of checks and cash while laughing maniacally.
But somehow when folks hear “looting” in context of retail, the image is smash-and-grab and also riots. Which is exactly why the lying propagandists use the term “looting”. Evidently the OP has fallen for that garbage. As have a lot of other citizens.
The theft across all their stores affects their overall profit. If that goes down, then they start looking at ways to cut costs. One way to do that is to close stores which are underperforming. It might not be that theft at those specific stores caused them to be closed. Rather, the theft across all the Target stores is cutting into profits to the point that Target needs to go into cost cutting mode. I would assume that they are cutting costs in other aspects of their business as well, such as laying off corporate employees, having fewer workers in store, looking for cheaper suppliers, etc. Certainly many things affect Target’s profit. Shoplifting, theft, and looting is just one aspect, but it can have a significant effect.
Even if “looting” is not in someone’s area, pretty much everyone is seeing the effects of the increase in shoplifting. Whole sections of frequently stolen products are now locked up, hand baskets are removed since shoplifters were filling them up with stuff and walking out, people may have seen shoplifters brazenly stealing, etc. Shoplifting has been around forever, but what we’re seeing in the past few years is shoplifting at a whole new level. People who were somewhat insulated from crime are now seeing it right in their own neighborhoods with the changes that stores are making. This is going to make them feel less safe, and will likely affect how they vote.
I live in the Bay Area and read local news regularly. This pretty much sums it up: Every article I’ve read on this just quotes what Target said. Not a single one questioned it.
Having seen the results of Target’s ill-fated attempt to move into the Canadian market*, I would just assume that any decision of Target’s management is probably the wrong one, and is based on some idiot’s stupid idea.
*A month after the local Target opened, I went in the store and it looked like something out of a war ravaged documentary; A huge wall of hooks with three, (Three!) pairs of socks. Empty shelving everywhere. Housewares section with nothing whatsoever in it. Employees shambling about like zombies after the apocalypse. It was stunning. It was like someone forgot that a store needed to be stocked.
It was a truly remarkable failure, so yes, I wouldn’t trust any statements from Target about why its stores are failing.
Short of a formal filing for bankruptcy, maybe.
I’m not seeing this at all. There are sections of the store that are locked up, but those sections have always been so. I still see hand baskets available. Where do you live that you’re seeing this behavior?
I’m not going to give my city, but it’s one of the top 10 cities in the US. I live in a suburb of one of the wealthier zip codes in the city. Entire sections of the Walgreens now have plastic doors that you have to ask someone to unlock. The local grocery store removed the hand baskets a month or two ago. Home Depot has locked up the high-value items. And I personally saw someone trying to steal a cart filled with Tide and kitchen appliances from Target. One of the employees grabbed the cart and pushed it over. The thief grabbed an appliance from the cart and walked away while flipping off the employee. And you don’t have to take my word for it. Just do a google search for “flash mob robberies cityName” and you’ll find incidents from many cities.
Not how it works here. Do your own work. Provide your own cites.
I thought the hand baskets were removed simply because even those who paid for the merchandise were walking out with them. (It annoys me though, because frequently I only need a hand basket to carry what I plan to buy.)
This was my understanding as well. Here in Philly, several local news stations reported on people intentionally or otherwise taking baskets after the plastic bag ban went into effect.
Walgreens has always locked up shaving stuff, deodorant, other sections. HD has always locked up high-value items, sometimes, putting them into a separate section in front of the store. Hand baskets are probably not compatible with people having to, and forgetting to, bring their own bags, so they bring the baskets to the car and just dump them on the ground or in shopping carts.
One thing I find frustrating is the concerted effort by the media to portray this as a problem exclusive to blue states and cities, and to blame it on law enforcement and prosecutorial policies.
Most mid-sized Southern cities have crime rates that are appreciably higher than those of large Democratic cities. I live in a mid-sized Southern city and in general the per capita crime rate is about twice that of New York City. It varies by crime, for some property crimes the rate in my city is only 50% higher than NYC, while the per capita murder rate is 3.5 times higher.
A lot has been written about the problems at the urban locations of stores like Target, but stores like Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Family Dollar, which are concentrated in the South, have a huge problem with violent crime, which have been exacerbated by lax gun laws and poor worker protections.
I actually asked an employee at the grocery store what happened to the hand baskets when I couldn’t find any. He said they removed them because people were filling them with stuff and walking out the door. The store went from having stacks of them one day to having none the next. It wasn’t that they slowly evaporated from people walking away with them.
The doors on the sections at Walgreens are new this year. These are top to bottom doors, not just a single shelf or a lock on a display hanger. Big items like lawnmowers are now locked up at HD because people were putting 2 on a rolling cart and walking out the front door. Smaller stuff like hand tools were locked up a year or two ago.
That’s interesting, or actually it’s not. External “shrink” is down from 2021 to 2022, and is a smaller part of sales than it was in 2019. Here’s a cite.
I’m sure you’re collecting plenty of anecdotes that affirm your confirmation bias, but the stats say otherwise. I’m sure the 24-hour news cycle is also making this seem much bigger in your mind, and voters minds in general.
My uneducated guess is that shoplifting has increased because eBay and other sites make it so much easier to “fence” stolen goods than in years past. A young cousin of mine makes pretty good money buying low-priced items at retail and reselling them on eBay, so it’s easy to see the motive for people to steal them and do the same.
But, in any event, I think it’s ludicrous to equate that sort of crime with the actual, rage-related looting that Fox News loves to showcase so they can scare white suburban voters into voting for Republicans.
What exactly did he say? The news stories I saw agree with this but included the detail that people paid for the goods first. The stores were responding to the theft of the baskets, not their contents.
Since we are trading anecdotes, we replaced our head of Asset Protection because he was driven by anecdotes, headlines and TikTok instead of data.
We have lots of data. Oodles and oodles.
Theft by shoplifters did go up. Everywhere, not just in urban locations. It’s actually come down in the last 18 months but not down to pre-pandemic levels.
To the extent that organized retail theft has increased it seems to be driven by the ability to sell stuff online sometimes to small retailers. Baby formula, Tide, shampoo. It’s going up in places where no one would accuse DAs of being soft on crime.
Theft by “customers” has gone up a lot as well. We cut back on staffing, using more self checkouts. The business cases were very rosy scenario. Customers are sneaking small valuable items out in their bags. We have made thieves out of “innocent” people. We invest in more technology, but it’s not ready for prime time and having three people watching eight self checkout stations eats up half the labor savings.
Vendor fraud is going up too. Diverting cases of soda or chips that should have been delivered to a supermarket or drugstore chain to the bodega for cash has raised its ugly head again (a very 1980s problem). As store staff is cut back, the vendors are delivering on the honor system, no one is counting the loads thoroughly.
Overworked staff on crazy variable schedules are also more easily corruptible.
In places where the minimum wage hasn’t gone up while inflation on necessities has gone up, employees “sweethearting” friends and family is on the increase as well. They feel entitled.
I’d heard of shrinkage due to theft by store employees but it never occurred to me that the vendors might be responsible for some of it.
Interesting, here in the Bay Area Target is considered a huge step up from Walmart. Much better organized, much nicer employees. My wife refuses to shop at Walmart, but loves Target.