'Maybe we cried too much' over shoplifting, Walgreens executive says

I don't know what to tell you then. My father was the assistant manager of our local supermarket for 10 years, after being a sub-department manager for 20. In the many years he has bragged about making that store's shrinkage the smallest in the state, including being befriended by the CEO of the international company that had a partnership with the stores in the state and eventually bought them all, he never once talked about shoplifting as a driver of that shrinkage. It was ALWAYS waste, or backroom theft, or poor stock handling and planning.

This was also in a dirt poor community where small time crime was a regular thing for most people, think "White trash" area.

This anecdote should clearly not be generalized to the entire country, but average retail shrinkage is supposedly around 2% which includes pretty much any reason you can think of, including someone returning a box of bricks instead of the product, a minimum wage employee dropping a bottle of soda, a customer putting the frozen peas on a random shelf instead of back in the freezer, etc. Shoplifting as something that harms a store's income is an extremely local thing IMO.

> In the many years he has bragged about making that store's shrinkage the smallest in the state

I have worked with a handful of amazing people like him. Taking pride in such things is great and is what I am mourning in these (risky) posts.

> he never once talked about shoplifting as a driver of that shrinkage. It was ALWAYS waste, or backroom theft, or poor stock handling and planning.

Agreed. Employee theft was always by far the largest form of shrinkage while I was working retail. It likely very much still is or I'd be absolutely surprised.

What is not discussed is the elephant in the room. You start letting retail theft creep up like this - not just in numbers but in blatant in your face crime - you will start seeing backroom theft skyrocket. People eventually become demoralized and while it's complete anecdote I'm personally seeing it now. Eventually theft is going to become normalized if we continue down this path. Why work a $20/hr retail job when someone can walk in, take $1500 worth of product, and walk out with zero consequences. It adds up.

I also cannot agree that shrinkage is not a major problem for most retail stores. A major chain can likely hide it via averaging it out, but for a mom and pop/small chain in a rough area (the type of places I worked for) shrinkage was a major factor of profitability. You have to sell a lot of candy bars to make up for a single one being stolen when you are operating at 10-20% margin.

I also completely understand this is very widely distributed through the country at the moment, and I live in one of the worst off places for this sort of thing. My perception is certainly due to that fact.

In resume, somebody was teached again the hard lesson that people dislike buying with security breathing on their napes.

Is a spiral of death. Being watched destroys the pleasant experience of browsing things. People buy just what they had in mind and exit, spending much less time in the shop looking for things that they could want to buy. Big red flag. Soon, the big store is half-empty most of the time and being the only customer in a place full of vendors is psychologically disturbing for many people. Less objects are stolen but you sell less, and soon realize that are paying more to security than the loses by shoplifting.

I had seen this before when, lets call it "Computer World", decided to increase their results fighting against shoplifting. Warnings in the walls, everything in plastic cases, cameras and security sucking all the fun. They closed in three months.

Local businesses even in San Pedro & the nice parts of DF routinely pay uniformed police officers to stand in certain places while on/off duty, that you don’t seen them loitering outside the door during business hours generally means it’s working.

No.

I can get better loan rates due to my great credit, while others who have squandered their credit do not.

Similarly, criminal-coddling cities should be burdened with the higher prices that the outcomes of their voting and governance are known to deliver to them.

Not unlike how SF voters continually elect politicians who tolerate human feces and needles in their streets and get just that. It would not be fair for healthy communities to have human feces and needles spread on their cities out of some misguided sense of fairness or social justice.