people are people throughout the supply chain; same personal economic issues.
The rewards are bigger moving from nicking singles to cases to pallets to truckloads.
Pretty much throughout the USA things are as you and your wife see.
Conversely, Target’s move into Canada a few years ago was a legendary corporate f***-up.
They built the stores, outfitted the stores with the usual fixtures, hired the employees, trained everybody, and had Grand Openings to great fanfare. But somehow they had forgotten to put a supply chain in place for merchandise.
Stores were understocked from the git-go, looking more like the late stages of a
- Closing soon! Everything must go!!
50% off this week, 75% next week!!1!
All sales final!
And as the weeks progressed, the problem got worse, not better. As little as they sold, they could not even replenish that. Pretty quickly Target threw in the towel and closed all those shiny new fully-fixtured but merchandise-free stores.
This will make an amazing case study at MBA school someday.
I don’t think it was theft, but back in the day I was assistant manager at a computer store, and one of the things I did was receive incoming stock and check it against the order. One of our common vendors was Belkin. They were, and I guess are, the go-to purveyor of absolutely generic computer components. USB cables, adapters, those little things that don’t cost much and you never think about until you need one.
Anyway, every single time, without question, the delivery would be wrong. Too much of one thing, too little of another. Every time. And I would catalog it, and contact them, and then we’d make adjustments on both sides. It was just accepted that they would constantly screw up but they’d make it right.
So, not theft, just incompetence. But if I wasn’t vigilant and didn’t check every time, we’d have been shortchanged constantly.
I was at Target the other day to return something and got in line behind a guy with a bag of cans. He walked up and told the cashier that he had a number of cans and she gave him money and then instructed him to drop them off over at another counter.
I expressed surprise that they take cans. I asked how it works and she said they are supposed to count them, but because they are understaffed, they just trust the customer. The guy I watched could have just walked out and right back in again and sold the same cans over and over again.
Just a story to show that Corporations will often cut off their noses despite their faces. Or something like that.
Here’s an interesting story about organised shoplifting gangs: a Florida pastor encouraged his flock of recovering drug addicts to steal from big box stores like Home Depot.
Probably not what the OP had in mind when he brought up “looting”. It’s certainly not the line the Reactionary Wacko Traitor propagandists want folks to believe.
Especially given that the pastor in question is a white guy. Before I clicked on that link, I would have bet money that this mainstream news story about a church leader fencing stolen goods that he encouraged recovering addicts to pilfer from stores involved a Black pastor. Because that is exactly the kind of framing about stories of theft, addiction and exploitation that so much of the media audience expects to see.
And I would have lost my bet. Just goes to show that cynicism about the media is not always justified.
Correct. The chain I work for got rid of handbaskets at the beginning of the pandemic for safety reasons. In late 2021, we brought them back and brought in 300 brand new baskets. They were all gone within six months due to people deciding to keep them after making their purchase. On one occasion I found a stack of our baskets in a convenience store down the street from my house and the store manager swung by there a few days later to demand them back.
A few years ago one of our Little Debbie merchandisers got busted for shorting the company almost $80,000 worth of merchandise and then reselling it on the side and pocketing the cash.
You ignore the role that the media plays in setting public perception. When Teddy Roosevelt was NYC Police Commissioner, Joseph Pulitzer single-handedly created the perception of a crime wave by dramatically increasing his paper’s coverage of crime.
And since the media today hardly ever reports on the things you mentioned, they functionally do not exist for most people.
I actually pictured a white man, who had been fired from at least one church where he had been the Youth Pastor, for being a bit too friendly with the kids.
Maybe that’s happened too, and just hasn’t come out yet.
Yeah. I concur.
We stopped going there after we went and had six things on the list, all something they had before. We found none of six (they were out of two, and the wild bird seed choices were so sad, we didnt get any) but spent $50 anyway. We havent been back, and that was two years ago.
Yep, as i pointed out earlier… The Violent crime rate in Southern states tends higher.
Now, what worries me more? Murder, rape, armed robbery-OR
Some dudes grabbing a buncha shit off the shelves and making a break for it.
The first impacts my personal safety. The second might mean I pay an extra 1% for stuff.
Well, if I do the shopping, i too often find an item that didnt scan but I bagged it anyway. For me, high pitched sounds are hard to hear, and I can not always register the lack of a beep. Mind you, these tend to be cheap marked down items with poor codes. But now my wife does most of the shopping. Sigh.
We used to think so too, but now in SoCal, Walmart is better. Much.
Florida Man!! 
Yeah, with the pandemic and post-pandemic boost in online reselling of goods, you have to wonder if theft (by both shoplifters and employees/merchandisers) is just significantly more highly incentivized nowadays.
Small-time fences trying to flog random amounts of random stuff that “fell off the back of a truck” used to be the de facto representatives of local (and very marginally successful) petty crime in the crime fiction of yore. Now that pretty much anybody can find a buyer in the online world for a sub-retail-price exemplar of pretty much any kind of goods, opportunistically filching random amounts of random stuff looks like a much better business model than it used to.
The Little Debbie embezzler was pre-pandemic, actually.
Fair point, I was just musing on whether there’s more of it happening nowadays.
Imagine if it had been two separate stories? The Little Debbie crime wave?
Just thought I’d share a quick anecdote.
I just got back from my local Home Depot, where for the last couple of years the ONLY cashiered register was the one by the lumber area, where people check out large carts of large/heavy items (plywood, lumber, bricks, etc).
Today only three self checkouts were open, and they were all staffed by cashiers. I asked what was going on and I was told that the theft losses had gone through the roof, to the point where they had an all-hands meeting to get yelled at. No more self-checkout.
Home Depot used to only have cashiers, no self-checkout, and then they would still check your receipt against what was in your cart on the way out. They went from there all the way to lots of self-checkouts and no receipt checker, so I am unsurprised about the increased level of theft relative to what it was before.
They probably did some cost-benefit analysis that said that if thefts rise to X level, it’s worth it to reduce our staff by Y. Unfortunately, I guess it rose to X+Z, so the cost-benefit analysis was wrong.
There’s a Dollar General on Highway 5 here in Arkansas that’s a frequent target for robbery. There’s not a whole lot of traffic in the evening and once you rob it it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump away to heading towards Texarkana or Memphis on 30 or you could head north on 430. They’re magnets for robberies.
Self-checkout leads to stealing?!? Really, whoda thunk it.