The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'a thief stealing from a retail store.'
After the civil unrest here in Minneapolis in 2020, brazen shoplifting became much more common. These days, I don't see it all the time, but once a month or so I watch someone run out of a store with an armload of merchandise. Sometimes they're chased by security officers who take pictures. I've never seen a shoplifter arrested.
Philosophically, I see the uptick in retail theft as a natural consequence of manufactured inequality. In a more pragmatic sense, I see it as an unsustainable practice. Stores close when too much of their inventory disappears, leaving would be thieves with nothing left to steal. The loss of any store negatively impacts the neighborhood it served.
This may sound like a minor issue, but the scope of what's going on suggests a major trend. Consider a recent MSNBC article titled, "Target expects organized retail crime-fueled losses to jump by $500 million this year." Here's some of what the article says:
Target said Wednesday that organized retail crime will fuel $500 million more in stolen and lost merchandise this year compared with a year ago. Target’s inventory loss, called shrink, totaled about $763 million last fiscal year, based on calculations from the company’s financial filings. With the anticipated increase, shrink this year would surpass $1 billion. ... Organized retail crime has become a hot-button issue in the industry, and some companies have blamed the growth of online marketplaces that allow thieves to anonymously sell electronics, makeup and other items they stole from stores. ... Shrink cost retailers $94.5 billion in 2021, up from $90.8 billion in 2020, according to the National Retail Federation. Its data is anonymized and shared by retailers, so it cannot be fact-checked. External retail crime accounts for only 37% of those losses, or about $35 billion, the NRF data shows.
If Target alone is losing a billion a year to organized retail crime, and the nationwide total of annual losses is around $35 billion, that's quite a racket. It's almost unbelievable. I wonder if there's a centralized shoplifting mafia or if there are thousands of autonomous groups. My sense is that the latter seems more likely.
Retail stores including my local target are closing left and right. While exorbitant rents are largely to blame, theft is increasingly a factor. Where I live, every other commercial space is already vacant. So we've got abandoned storefronts and gangs of thieves operating everywhere. That feels distinctly dystopian.
Too often, conversations on this subject turn into demands for law and order. My opinion is that law and order is broken in the US. The matter does have social implications worth considering. If thieves are able to capture 10% of the value of their stolen merchandise, they're earning in the ballpark of $3.5 billion a year. But once all the stores close, they'll be earning nothing.
Will all of these thieves then secure legitimate employment? Hopefully some will, but others will simply find different crimes to do. They'll be part of the permanent criminal class that's grown sharply all over the country since 2020. All of these criminals are of course responsible for their own actions. But I'm not convinced they would undertake these actions if they had better options.
Read my novels:
See my NFTs:
