Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan

lmao so the parent post just made up their story? on the internet no less!?

The "Most Americans do not live in bit cities" comment caught my eye. I wasn't sure if it was true or not, so I ran some numbers. Using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...

Assuming 331M people in the USA, 164M (50%) live in a metropolitan area of at least 1.6M people. 189M people (57%) live in an area with at least 1M people. 230M (70%) live in an area with at least 500K people.

My conclusion is that most Americans do live in big cities. However, even if all big cities have restrictive shelving practices, there are still 3 out of 10 Americans (outside of the 500K cities) that do no experience these practices.

I'm in an area with 4M people and have seen the shelving practices. So I can concluded that at least 34% of Americans (who are in larger areas) have also experienced these restrictions.

I'd assume there was a miscommunication with the person that was working at the CVS store. She may have been talking about another store that her parents have the operating rights to or such.

Right, so this is a hugely political issue right now. Don't be surprised to get wildly differing answers. Republicans are pointing at public disorder and screaming about crime, and Democrats are accusing them of being fragile suburbanites who can't handle normal urban life. I'm a left-leaning independent, and I tend to agree with Democrats on a lot of their talking points, but I will say that everywhere I go I see more public disorder than I did a few years ago. There are more locked shelves everywhere, and I think people's perceptions of crime and disorder are also affected by the fact that there are way more encampments of people living in tents and RVs (which leads to more litter on the streets etc.). I live southeast of Seattle, in a straight-up middle-class area, and our local Target now has OTC pain relief behind locked glass doors. I stopped dead and stared. I'd never seen that except in a big city.

As for the issue of unhoused people, which I don't think is related to the actual crime rate but is very much related to perceptions of crime, we also have some tent encampments down in my area. In Seattle (I visit the International District weekly) a year ago there were huge tent cities under freeway overpasses, actual structures hacked together on sidewalks, people living in deplorable conditions. There have always been unhoused people in Seattle but it was an order of magnitude worse than normal. In the last several months Washington state and Seattle have made a huge effort to clear the tent cities and get people into transitional housing, and from what I can tell it's working: the sidewalk shacks are gone, the tents are gone, the areas are fenced off, and by all accounts they've gotten almost all the people living there into shelter of some kind. I'm paying attention to whether I hear less squawking about crime now that there's less visible disorder.

Expert in stolen goods here.

I was talking to a NYC colleague the other day about how there are trends in favor of not punishing people for certain criminal activity in the city. We were talking about driving with a suspended license, but I asked about shoplifting. She said, "Oh, no. That's on the opposite trend. Not only are they prosecuting it to the maximum, but they just changed the law to make it easier to hold people on bail for shoplifting." She made it clear that shoplifting was never a low priority for prosecution, but now it's a higher one.

I understand that the claim in this article is that aggregators/sellers/fences whatever should be surveilled and prosecuted (more), but just wanted to add this tale from the courthouse and emphasize that the street-level shoplifter will be the target of most policy interventions here, which is the least effective and least humane strategy.