Apparently it's been a big problem and Lowes and Home Depot for a while and the people stealing know that the employees are not allowed to confront them. We have some grocery stores that can't keep items on the shelves especially meat because it gets stolen immediately. On a positive note, I started a community garden in a low income area and for the first year or so, people would pull up plants and children would purposely break things. The community center had been in a state of disrepair for a long time. We fixed up some of the things like the basketball goal and the kids broke them right away. We fixed them again and kept coming and spent time there especially while the kids were there playing. We talked to them and made relationships with them. It sounds hokey but it was like as soon as they felt confident that we were staying and the place would be maintained, they stopped breaking things and now they seem to really enjoy and use the space.
Thank you for sharing that story. I have a conflicted reaction, I am glad the kids stopped breaking things and rewarded all of the grace you showed them. I guess it just makes me sad that their attitude is closer to cynicism than nihilism or some relatively pure form of immaturity.
I decided to keep the line about police priorities in part because it troubles me to think that police have to disincentivize what almost feels like a breakdown of basic civilization. It also makes me question whether society can just carry on as normal. That is an extreme way of putting it, I hope folks understand what I am trying to say.
If the problem is really driven by middle and high school aged kids and not organized retail theft this seems like it should be a relatively easy problem to solve. The cvs has security cameras and employees are taking pictures of the thieves already. File a police report, take their pictures to the schools and identify them and then charge them with misdemeanor theft. Word will get around very very quickly that theft will be prosecuted, the kids will knock it off and ideally the local prosecutor will agree to a diversion program or suspended sentence of some kind. But even if not a teenage misdemeanor isn’t exactly the kind of thing that closes tons of doors or ruins lives. The idea that any misconduct that isn’t a violent felony isn’t worth police time or attention is toxic and is leading to all kinds of negative consequences throughout society. Particularly if the culprits really are school kids then this seems like a moment when you can either impose some minor consequences and hopefully get them to change their behavior or let it slide and run the risk of them escalating to much worse antisocial behavior.
I generally agree with everything you say. I was trying to avoid opening that can of worms with this piece to try to maximize the audience that would engage with it.
So, I live in Seattle and am a lifelong retail worker, store level to corporate. I've also owned my own store and only recently closed it. I can tell you, factually, after 30 years of this and lots of corporate LP meetings -
1. Internal theft far, far outmatches external. Yes, still. Security theater doesn't just exist to scare customers...it exists to scare employees. And wage theft, on the part of corporations, accounts for a dramatically larger amount of money.
2. The best, most efficient way to improve external shrink (corporate speak for theft) is increased customer service and a visible presence of engaged employees on the floor. This has been proven over and over again at every company where I have worked. All it takes is smiling and looking like you care.
3. Employees cost money that the companies do not wish to pay, and we have not caught up to pre-pandemic levels of staffing, by a LONG shot. We killed a million people in this country, many of them service workers. A couple were my friends. But people needed groceries, and Starbucks, and clothing, so we worked, and died, to provide it for them. While they sent emails at home.
4. The last point brings me to internal theft; prevention for internal shrink is actually the same as it is externally, basically - better staffing levels/less turnover/competitive wages. People rarely steal from jobs where they feel supported on the floor, are not overworked/underpaid, and have good relationships with management.
I know many people who work for these large chains, as well as some smaller ones. After these companies and state and local governments failed to protect workers during covid, failed to provide living wages, and failed to hire up to healthy staffing levels, these workers began to understand, myself as well, how LITTLE our lives meant to everyone else in this country. So in response to what, I think, is the main thrust of your inquiry - yes, the social contract is broken. But it is not the people stealing, nor the people working, who broke it. I can't tell you how many times I would try to fight for healthier staffing levels only to be rebuffed by the controller (the typical title for retail budgeting roles), only to have a different higher up increase the budget for LP.
As far as children stealing, that has been happening since both stores and children were invented. That amount of shrink is always a pittance compared to other budget wastefulness in a P&L. Truly, shrink was always, like, .8% of controllable losses. Biggest controllable financial loss in retail? Employee turnover. Biggest fixed cost in any brick and mortar, and the reason for price hikes and staffing cuts? Rent. Astronomical rent that increases year over year, even with the super long, company lawyer drafted leases.
Do our kids feel the fracturing of our social contract? Of course they do. They see the same images many of us see on the daily; dead kids overseas, ripped apart by American weapons, or college kids getting their heads bashed in by cops on campus. Seattle is one of many cities in America that is deeply unfriendly to families and children. My kids aren't allowed to play on the playground after school, they kick all the kids out. Malls have curfews and rules about unaccompanied kids. We are afraid to let them play outside by themselves, not because of some invented stranger danger, but because of traffic; WA state kills a lot of people with cars, and I live right off Aurora, one of the deadliest roads for pedestrian deaths in this city.
Kids aren't stupid. They see that our systems will not work for them, or even assist them in reaching adulthood. The man running for president is a convicted felon. Our government is packed with proud criminals. What do we THINK our kids would take away from this? From my own savvy 16 year old, whose bodily autonomy is being denied by her government in a movement that is actually being funded by some of these very same corporations, I have heard that there is no point to anything, she never wants to get married, or have kids, because the world will be a charred hellhole very soon. She knows that if she is able to go to college, which I cannot pay for, she will be saddled with loans for the rest of her life and will still only have an 8% chance of living a better life than her mother. She will probably struggle, just as I do, and seems to be embracing a nihilistic philosophy that I see more and more in her generation; that the only way to win a rigged game is to refuse to play.
I appreciate your observations and the fact that you empathize with us workers, as most people do not. In fact, most people treat us as objects while they bark demands - no eye contact, no hello, just, "Are there any more of these?!" and "Where is the manager?!" and "Why is this line so long?" But the employee ennui and broken product presentation you observed have far deeper causes than simply, "Kids steal things."
I wish I could help your daughter feel more optimistic about the future. Thank you for sharing that perspective, and for being so gentle in your feedback.
I am relieved to see another progressive person in the area deeply bothered by this. Most of the people waxing poetical on this topic are conservative and blaming "defund the police" or higher limits on petty vs. grand larceny. I grew up in an area where punk kids stole stuff all the time to show they were tough but it never impressed me. To me a lot of this is punk kids.
Well-written, thanks for sharing. I’m sorry to hear about that change in your neighborhood, and I understand how you feel.
You say the police must have more important problems to deal with, but, that doesn’t seem quite right to me. Theft is fairly serious, if that’s not part of what police exist to deter then I’m not sure what their purpose is.
Questions that come to mind: Is this part of the local conversation? How do your neighbors feel about theft in the neighborhood, and how do they feel about the police? What do the police themselves think?
Fair point, I left that line in the piece even though the council member I talked to might have mentioned that a cop has been posted at a CVS in a different part of town. Obviously, I agree this is a serious issue that merits some kind of response. I made a largely tactical decision not to wade into potential solutions, partially because I do not know what would be appropriate. And I am not a criminologist by any stretch, I know close to nothing about that field. It does strike me that that if evidence-based approaches for reducing crime exists, they are conspicuously absent from the public discourse about the issue.
There has been a lot of media coverage questioning the claimed impact of theft on retailer profits. While I have little doubt that some retailers have "cried too much," as the Walgreens CEO admitted, there are adverse impacts on quality of life when theft is widespread. The measures that retailers take to ensure continued profitability in the face of theft diminish the shopping experience for honest customers and degrade the workplace for store employees.
My local Target now has armed guards on duty in addtion to its own unarmed loss prevention staff. The firm that provides the guards makes a big deal of parking its vehicles, which are painted to look like police cars, as conspicuously as possible outside the store entrances. Since very few shopliftining incidents lead to gun fights or car chases, this appears to be theater to intimidate would-be thieves. If so, it must be expensive theater that we're all paying for.
I’m not sure what the answer is. When I was young, I remember there were kids in my neighborhood who saw shoplifting as a right of passage. Then there were the PSAs that intoned “Shoplifting is stealing” showing a character behind bars. Maybe that was a deterrent in the short term but who knows for certain.
In Barcelona, our pharmacies are much different from the American style CVS and Walgreen’s shops. They only sell prescription medicines and items related to personal health and wellbeing. Usually when you enter the shop, you have to speak with the pharmacist behind the counter, whether it’s a prescription or, OTC, or other medical item. The pharmacies are small, they don’t have 15 to 20 aisles of candy, cosmetics, stationery supplies, etc. I would imagine that if someone enters a store and is face-to-face with an authority figure to whom they must interact, there’s less likelihood that they’d steal. Plus there’s less to tempt a potential thief. Anything that they might want to take is sold at a department or grocery store with better security and sometimes RFI tags attached (not to mention stealing is more frowned upon). It’s frustrating going back to the US and having to call for an attendant just to buy basic supplies such as toothpaste and lip balm.
3rd rail time - is there a racial element to this?
I used to live in downtown DC and, having grown up in NYC (5th floor of a walkup - yeah Bay-Bee!), it is in my DNA to cross streets regardless of the traffic light or the Walk/Don't Walk Sign. There was a McDonalds about 5 blocks away and I would often head down there on Sunday mornings and bring things back for everybody. That time of a Sunday morning in Downtown, the only other people out and about were Church Ladies dressed in there Sunday fineries. I never really thought about it, but I would cross against the light without even thinking twice and they would patiently wait at each corner with zero traffic waiting for the light to change.
Eventually I realized I was wearing my White Privilege - I had just assumed that I would never be hassled by the po po for jaywalking at an empty corner - and if they did hassle me it would most likely be no big deal. But these POC Church Ladies - long experienced with a completely different relation with the po po than I - couldn't afford to make a mistake of any kind that would invite po po attention - even something minimal as crossing against the light on an empty street. I admit I was deeply ashamed of myself when I figured that out and from then on I waited at every light just as they did
So this is a long way around to get to my rather unusual question - but is it possible that expecting a store not to have this shoplifting problem is, or is going to be, a matter of White Privilege? Or taking the racial element out, Middle Class Privilege? Don't get me wrong. I'm not condoning this behavior, I'm just trying to address it from a different POV in hopes that, as with anything, it might help in understanding. We do have a huge underclass that rarely gets any attention. We congratulate ourselves on the lowest unemployment rate in decades, but ignore the fact that unemployment rate completely ignores millions of people who have left the workforce because they have given up on looking for jobs that just may not be there. We can't ignore the massive tent cities throughout the West and we shouldn't ignore the rise and spread of this shoplifting phenomenon. Something just isn't right. Trump isn't the answer by a long shot - he is a symbol for this mess.
I realize I may be a bit contradictory here - but I am very concerned about what is going on that doesn't really break through into our consciousness. I apologize for my lack of brevity.
Kids’ stupid decisions shouldn’t ruin their lives. They should ruin their week, and probably hurt their parents a bit too. Friday and Saturday nights in jail and a $1,000 fine sounds good to me. Repeat offenses lead to escalating punishment, up to say a year in jail.
Then, like all juvenile offenses, it’s expunged when they turn 18.
The problem, obviously, is actually doing it enough to make it a credible threat. It’s very obvious how and relatively simple to defend our civilization, but people lack the stomach for it (myself included, a lot of the time) and that doesn’t mean it’s easy or cheap, especially with all the social capital we, as a civilization, have set on fire over the past 80 years.
This, in turn, is the purpose of leadership. It’s very easy for elected representatives to form the belief that they cannot lead, as leadership always involves telling your constituents ‘no’ and that their instincts are bad and wrong. Unfortunately, with most of the fundamental problems well-solved and scarcity largely eliminated, this gets harder.
Today, we can mostly rely on technology and pure self-interest to solve these problems and keep the world running more or less smoothly. In the past, what solutions were on the menu were to a significant degree political. Our ability to reach such solutions has therefore atrophied. As Matt Yglesias likes to say about obesity, we are experiencing some downside from otherwise very positive developments.
It’s obvious to me that we must return to building social capital rather than spending it. I think the circumstances are potentially right for such a change. What with inflation, rising interest rates, and escalating foreign threats, the time for austerity, in more than just public budgets, is upon us, and I have enough faith in my fellow man to believe that many of them see it too.
Apparently it's been a big problem and Lowes and Home Depot for a while and the people stealing know that the employees are not allowed to confront them. We have some grocery stores that can't keep items on the shelves especially meat because it gets stolen immediately. On a positive note, I started a community garden in a low income area and for the first year or so, people would pull up plants and children would purposely break things. The community center had been in a state of disrepair for a long time. We fixed up some of the things like the basketball goal and the kids broke them right away. We fixed them again and kept coming and spent time there especially while the kids were there playing. We talked to them and made relationships with them. It sounds hokey but it was like as soon as they felt confident that we were staying and the place would be maintained, they stopped breaking things and now they seem to really enjoy and use the space.
Thank you for sharing that story. I have a conflicted reaction, I am glad the kids stopped breaking things and rewarded all of the grace you showed them. I guess it just makes me sad that their attitude is closer to cynicism than nihilism or some relatively pure form of immaturity.
I decided to keep the line about police priorities in part because it troubles me to think that police have to disincentivize what almost feels like a breakdown of basic civilization. It also makes me question whether society can just carry on as normal. That is an extreme way of putting it, I hope folks understand what I am trying to say.
If the problem is really driven by middle and high school aged kids and not organized retail theft this seems like it should be a relatively easy problem to solve. The cvs has security cameras and employees are taking pictures of the thieves already. File a police report, take their pictures to the schools and identify them and then charge them with misdemeanor theft. Word will get around very very quickly that theft will be prosecuted, the kids will knock it off and ideally the local prosecutor will agree to a diversion program or suspended sentence of some kind. But even if not a teenage misdemeanor isn’t exactly the kind of thing that closes tons of doors or ruins lives. The idea that any misconduct that isn’t a violent felony isn’t worth police time or attention is toxic and is leading to all kinds of negative consequences throughout society. Particularly if the culprits really are school kids then this seems like a moment when you can either impose some minor consequences and hopefully get them to change their behavior or let it slide and run the risk of them escalating to much worse antisocial behavior.
I generally agree with everything you say. I was trying to avoid opening that can of worms with this piece to try to maximize the audience that would engage with it.
So, I live in Seattle and am a lifelong retail worker, store level to corporate. I've also owned my own store and only recently closed it. I can tell you, factually, after 30 years of this and lots of corporate LP meetings -
1. Internal theft far, far outmatches external. Yes, still. Security theater doesn't just exist to scare customers...it exists to scare employees. And wage theft, on the part of corporations, accounts for a dramatically larger amount of money.
2. The best, most efficient way to improve external shrink (corporate speak for theft) is increased customer service and a visible presence of engaged employees on the floor. This has been proven over and over again at every company where I have worked. All it takes is smiling and looking like you care.
3. Employees cost money that the companies do not wish to pay, and we have not caught up to pre-pandemic levels of staffing, by a LONG shot. We killed a million people in this country, many of them service workers. A couple were my friends. But people needed groceries, and Starbucks, and clothing, so we worked, and died, to provide it for them. While they sent emails at home.
4. The last point brings me to internal theft; prevention for internal shrink is actually the same as it is externally, basically - better staffing levels/less turnover/competitive wages. People rarely steal from jobs where they feel supported on the floor, are not overworked/underpaid, and have good relationships with management.
I know many people who work for these large chains, as well as some smaller ones. After these companies and state and local governments failed to protect workers during covid, failed to provide living wages, and failed to hire up to healthy staffing levels, these workers began to understand, myself as well, how LITTLE our lives meant to everyone else in this country. So in response to what, I think, is the main thrust of your inquiry - yes, the social contract is broken. But it is not the people stealing, nor the people working, who broke it. I can't tell you how many times I would try to fight for healthier staffing levels only to be rebuffed by the controller (the typical title for retail budgeting roles), only to have a different higher up increase the budget for LP.
As far as children stealing, that has been happening since both stores and children were invented. That amount of shrink is always a pittance compared to other budget wastefulness in a P&L. Truly, shrink was always, like, .8% of controllable losses. Biggest controllable financial loss in retail? Employee turnover. Biggest fixed cost in any brick and mortar, and the reason for price hikes and staffing cuts? Rent. Astronomical rent that increases year over year, even with the super long, company lawyer drafted leases.
Do our kids feel the fracturing of our social contract? Of course they do. They see the same images many of us see on the daily; dead kids overseas, ripped apart by American weapons, or college kids getting their heads bashed in by cops on campus. Seattle is one of many cities in America that is deeply unfriendly to families and children. My kids aren't allowed to play on the playground after school, they kick all the kids out. Malls have curfews and rules about unaccompanied kids. We are afraid to let them play outside by themselves, not because of some invented stranger danger, but because of traffic; WA state kills a lot of people with cars, and I live right off Aurora, one of the deadliest roads for pedestrian deaths in this city.
Kids aren't stupid. They see that our systems will not work for them, or even assist them in reaching adulthood. The man running for president is a convicted felon. Our government is packed with proud criminals. What do we THINK our kids would take away from this? From my own savvy 16 year old, whose bodily autonomy is being denied by her government in a movement that is actually being funded by some of these very same corporations, I have heard that there is no point to anything, she never wants to get married, or have kids, because the world will be a charred hellhole very soon. She knows that if she is able to go to college, which I cannot pay for, she will be saddled with loans for the rest of her life and will still only have an 8% chance of living a better life than her mother. She will probably struggle, just as I do, and seems to be embracing a nihilistic philosophy that I see more and more in her generation; that the only way to win a rigged game is to refuse to play.
I appreciate your observations and the fact that you empathize with us workers, as most people do not. In fact, most people treat us as objects while they bark demands - no eye contact, no hello, just, "Are there any more of these?!" and "Where is the manager?!" and "Why is this line so long?" But the employee ennui and broken product presentation you observed have far deeper causes than simply, "Kids steal things."
I wish I could help your daughter feel more optimistic about the future. Thank you for sharing that perspective, and for being so gentle in your feedback.
I am relieved to see another progressive person in the area deeply bothered by this. Most of the people waxing poetical on this topic are conservative and blaming "defund the police" or higher limits on petty vs. grand larceny. I grew up in an area where punk kids stole stuff all the time to show they were tough but it never impressed me. To me a lot of this is punk kids.
I would call myself a center-right liberal, not a progressive. But we are definitely on the same page.
Well-written, thanks for sharing. I’m sorry to hear about that change in your neighborhood, and I understand how you feel.
You say the police must have more important problems to deal with, but, that doesn’t seem quite right to me. Theft is fairly serious, if that’s not part of what police exist to deter then I’m not sure what their purpose is.
Questions that come to mind: Is this part of the local conversation? How do your neighbors feel about theft in the neighborhood, and how do they feel about the police? What do the police themselves think?
Fair point, I left that line in the piece even though the council member I talked to might have mentioned that a cop has been posted at a CVS in a different part of town. Obviously, I agree this is a serious issue that merits some kind of response. I made a largely tactical decision not to wade into potential solutions, partially because I do not know what would be appropriate. And I am not a criminologist by any stretch, I know close to nothing about that field. It does strike me that that if evidence-based approaches for reducing crime exists, they are conspicuously absent from the public discourse about the issue.
As for your questions, I am not sure of the answer. I hope this blog post helps spark a conversation among people I know in my city.
There has been a lot of media coverage questioning the claimed impact of theft on retailer profits. While I have little doubt that some retailers have "cried too much," as the Walgreens CEO admitted, there are adverse impacts on quality of life when theft is widespread. The measures that retailers take to ensure continued profitability in the face of theft diminish the shopping experience for honest customers and degrade the workplace for store employees.
My local Target now has armed guards on duty in addtion to its own unarmed loss prevention staff. The firm that provides the guards makes a big deal of parking its vehicles, which are painted to look like police cars, as conspicuously as possible outside the store entrances. Since very few shopliftining incidents lead to gun fights or car chases, this appears to be theater to intimidate would-be thieves. If so, it must be expensive theater that we're all paying for.
I’m not sure what the answer is. When I was young, I remember there were kids in my neighborhood who saw shoplifting as a right of passage. Then there were the PSAs that intoned “Shoplifting is stealing” showing a character behind bars. Maybe that was a deterrent in the short term but who knows for certain.
In Barcelona, our pharmacies are much different from the American style CVS and Walgreen’s shops. They only sell prescription medicines and items related to personal health and wellbeing. Usually when you enter the shop, you have to speak with the pharmacist behind the counter, whether it’s a prescription or, OTC, or other medical item. The pharmacies are small, they don’t have 15 to 20 aisles of candy, cosmetics, stationery supplies, etc. I would imagine that if someone enters a store and is face-to-face with an authority figure to whom they must interact, there’s less likelihood that they’d steal. Plus there’s less to tempt a potential thief. Anything that they might want to take is sold at a department or grocery store with better security and sometimes RFI tags attached (not to mention stealing is more frowned upon). It’s frustrating going back to the US and having to call for an attendant just to buy basic supplies such as toothpaste and lip balm.
3rd rail time - is there a racial element to this?
I used to live in downtown DC and, having grown up in NYC (5th floor of a walkup - yeah Bay-Bee!), it is in my DNA to cross streets regardless of the traffic light or the Walk/Don't Walk Sign. There was a McDonalds about 5 blocks away and I would often head down there on Sunday mornings and bring things back for everybody. That time of a Sunday morning in Downtown, the only other people out and about were Church Ladies dressed in there Sunday fineries. I never really thought about it, but I would cross against the light without even thinking twice and they would patiently wait at each corner with zero traffic waiting for the light to change.
Eventually I realized I was wearing my White Privilege - I had just assumed that I would never be hassled by the po po for jaywalking at an empty corner - and if they did hassle me it would most likely be no big deal. But these POC Church Ladies - long experienced with a completely different relation with the po po than I - couldn't afford to make a mistake of any kind that would invite po po attention - even something minimal as crossing against the light on an empty street. I admit I was deeply ashamed of myself when I figured that out and from then on I waited at every light just as they did
So this is a long way around to get to my rather unusual question - but is it possible that expecting a store not to have this shoplifting problem is, or is going to be, a matter of White Privilege? Or taking the racial element out, Middle Class Privilege? Don't get me wrong. I'm not condoning this behavior, I'm just trying to address it from a different POV in hopes that, as with anything, it might help in understanding. We do have a huge underclass that rarely gets any attention. We congratulate ourselves on the lowest unemployment rate in decades, but ignore the fact that unemployment rate completely ignores millions of people who have left the workforce because they have given up on looking for jobs that just may not be there. We can't ignore the massive tent cities throughout the West and we shouldn't ignore the rise and spread of this shoplifting phenomenon. Something just isn't right. Trump isn't the answer by a long shot - he is a symbol for this mess.
I realize I may be a bit contradictory here - but I am very concerned about what is going on that doesn't really break through into our consciousness. I apologize for my lack of brevity.
Kids’ stupid decisions shouldn’t ruin their lives. They should ruin their week, and probably hurt their parents a bit too. Friday and Saturday nights in jail and a $1,000 fine sounds good to me. Repeat offenses lead to escalating punishment, up to say a year in jail.
Then, like all juvenile offenses, it’s expunged when they turn 18.
The problem, obviously, is actually doing it enough to make it a credible threat. It’s very obvious how and relatively simple to defend our civilization, but people lack the stomach for it (myself included, a lot of the time) and that doesn’t mean it’s easy or cheap, especially with all the social capital we, as a civilization, have set on fire over the past 80 years.
This, in turn, is the purpose of leadership. It’s very easy for elected representatives to form the belief that they cannot lead, as leadership always involves telling your constituents ‘no’ and that their instincts are bad and wrong. Unfortunately, with most of the fundamental problems well-solved and scarcity largely eliminated, this gets harder.
Today, we can mostly rely on technology and pure self-interest to solve these problems and keep the world running more or less smoothly. In the past, what solutions were on the menu were to a significant degree political. Our ability to reach such solutions has therefore atrophied. As Matt Yglesias likes to say about obesity, we are experiencing some downside from otherwise very positive developments.
It’s obvious to me that we must return to building social capital rather than spending it. I think the circumstances are potentially right for such a change. What with inflation, rising interest rates, and escalating foreign threats, the time for austerity, in more than just public budgets, is upon us, and I have enough faith in my fellow man to believe that many of them see it too.
This post popped up in my feed about five times and now I've read it.
It was actually interesting, thank you for writing about it!