Laura: We
talked about how shoplifting works on the ground. After the break, we’re
talking about its effect on stores. Is theft rising as much as big retailers
say?
Alex: The
Atlantic’s Amanda Mull has written about
the so-called explosion in shoplifting and some of the possible reasons behind
it. “The deeper you search for real, objective evidence of an accelerating
retail crime wave,” she says, “the more difficult it is to be sure that you
know anything at all.” Amanda, welcome to the show.
Amanda Mull: Thank
you so much for having me.
Alex: So we
know over the last few years these stores are closing. We know they’re blaming
theft. You’ve looked into it. You’ve looked at the data. Has theft increased so
much that it’s warranting these store closures in your opinion?
Amanda: Well
based on every set of data that I have seen, no. Largely, theft seems usually flat, and it
becomes more difficult to get down to a store by store granular level because
retailers don’t release that kind of information to the general public. When
these retailers have done announcements specifically attributing particular
closures to theft, a lot of times local journalists have gone into as much
detail as possible, and in basically every case that I have ever seen, there’s been no indication that the stores that are being
closed have real verifiable theft levels higher than the stores around them in
the same chain. Oftentimes they will have lower
theft levels than some of the other stores in nearby locations.
Alex: Over
the last few years, we’ve also seen a rise in viral shoplifting content, right?
It seems that despite more attention being paid to these sorts of viral videos
of theft, it’s not borne out in the actual data that you have found in terms of
a surge in retail theft.
Amanda: Right.
What’s interesting to me is that often the videos that go viral—to demonstrate
the perilous rise in retail theft—often depict things that aren’t really
categorized as that in crime statistics. What you’re seeing are like armed
robberies, which are an entirely different set of crimes that wouldn’t be
reflected in theft statistics because that’s not what they are, according to any kind of data.
There’s also no indication
that things that would be categorized that way in crime statistics are up a
great deal, but we live in an information environment where it’s very easy to
get short video clips of scary things to people.
Laura: I mean,
the impact of that is really hard to overstate, I think, because having these
videos out there creates a perception that it’s happening all the time—it’s
just like lawlessness and it’s completely out of control. What I found really interesting
in your piece is that you break down the categories of retail loss that’s all
lumped into this term called shrink. And actually most of it is not
shoplifting. Can you walk us through some of the various ways that stores lose
their inventory that’s not shoplifting?
Amanda: This is
one of the most interesting parts of this whole phenomenon to me, because I
worked in a big box store for a number of years in the 2000s, and we used the
term shrink internally to talk about lost product. It very much is not a
synonym for shoplifting, but in a lot of media reports and conversations around
it, the two get conflated.
One of the reasons I
wanted to write about it is because it seemed people who had never worked at a
big box store were having this conversation absent anybody who had ever had the
experience of being in a big box store like that.
So, shrink is just your
total inventory loss expressed as a percentage of sales. So, shrink can come
from a lot of things. Theft is one of those things and usually shrink reports
internally within a company are going to break suspected theft down into, shoplifting
and then into employee theft, which is an issue that a lot of retailers deal
with because you have to hire a ton of people, you’re not paying very much.
You’ve got a lot of churn in your employee stable. So you do just miss on some
people and people steal stuff.
And then you’ve also got
inventory errors where a truck came into your warehouse, the guy working the
drop off signed everything as received without checking it very carefully, and
you missed a bunch of stuff that wasn’t there that you signed off as being
there. So that stuff is in inventory on your computer. It was never in
inventory in your store, physically. You’ve got all kinds of other paperwork
errors that can go into this, in the logistics end. You’ve also got
checkout errors, and this becomes even more common when you have self-checkout.
Alex: And
you’ve written another piece that says retailers don’t exactly mention
self-checkout when they’re talking about theft, even though they have to know
it’s associated with loss, right?
Amanda: Yes,
self-checkout does create more theft, because any time that you are just
leaving people to their own devices, you’re going to have more theft. But then
also, you’ve got people who are trying to pay for things, who are trying to
make sure that everything ends up on their receipt, who just swipe something
over the scanner, it doesn’t scan, they don’t realize it doesn’t scan, they
shove it in their bag, or whatever. The self-checkout thing is a whole
disaster.
Laura: When I
use one of those, I’m like, actually doing the checkout is a real job
that people are trained to do, and I am not trained to scan the things
in my bag.
Alex: Well,
you’re totally right. Scanning things is a job.
Amanda: Right,
and self-checkout areas are very crowded, they’re very small, so you’re
shifting a bunch of stuff around on this machine that is beeping at you and
flashing at you and telling you you’re doing the wrong thing and you don’t want
to look like you’re shoplifting and you don’t want to look like you’re being
shifty.
Laura: Oh, I
have a whole physical routine that in my mind emphasizes that I am not
shoplifting because I immediately feel when I’m at one of these that I look
shady because I’m confused, and I’m moving all these little pieces around.
Amanda: Yeah,
absolutely, and in a lot of these big box stores or these national chain
stores, you have an increased rate of checkout errors because so many of the
transactions they’re doing are done through self-checkout, where errors are
just a lot more common.
So all of this goes into a
store’s or a chain’s shrink level. You do inventory a couple times a year at a
single big box store location so you basically find out what you have in your
inventory in your computer that you cannot put your hands on in the store
itself. A lot of times, you’re just guessing as to how that stuff went missing.
Some of it you have some evidence for, from other parts of the store’s
operations that might tell you what proportion roughly comes from where, but a
lot of that is just analysis. It is not data.
Alex: That
seems super important to emphasize because we’re talking about shrink loss, and
we can attribute some of that to theft or crime, but that percentage is, like
you said, it’s just a plain guess. Because we’re not talking about incidents
where someone was caught and arrested for it, we’re just talking about stuff
not being there.
Laura: Some of
this stuff you were saying in the article never arrived at the store because
someone processes something is like, you’re meant to get this shipment and by X
date, we’re going to say that’s in the system, but maybe that truck didn’t get
to the store or maybe they only unloaded half of it and then the rest of it
went to another store or something.
Amanda: Right,
there’s a lot of ways that it can happen that like some last package of stuff
does not get put on a pallet that should be on a pallet and it gets put on the
truck and shipped to the store, and our understanding of what should be on the
pallet is just not aligned with what’s actually there. There’s a lot of ways to
make a simple error and make things appear in a store inventory that aren’t
necessarily there and then make things disappear that should be there.
Especially when you’re dealing with drugstore stuff, a lot of that stuff is
easy to lose and stuff that’s easy to count incorrectly. The stores where most
theft happens are stores where there’s a lot of tiny fiddly stuff because
that’s the easiest stuff to steal. And there’s just also a lot of ways for
stuff to go missing in other, less nefarious ways.
Laura: The
kind of panic about shoplifting has been somewhat widespread across a variety
of different stores, but the stores that have reacted to it, in my view most
visibly, are drugstores with these locked up plastic cabinets. Do you have any
theories like why drug stores specifically have reacted this way?
Amanda: Well, I
think that part of it is that they sell a lot of stuff that is fairly easy to
steal. It’s small, it has some value to it. You know, people might be inclined
to steal large quantities of stuff for its resale value to low-income people or
to sell it on internet platforms, which is what the retailers charge that a lot
of people are doing with this stuff. Cold medications, beauty products, things
like that are going to be relatively easy to flip. They’re not perishable, so
they’re easy to ship, they are sellable to a wide range of people. So, I think
that there is a real reason there, but also I think that America’s drugstore
chains are highly centralized and they’re pretty much nationwide. They have an
enormous number of locations, whereas grocery stores are nationwide, but the
companies that run them are becoming more centralized. But still, to a certain
extent you have regional players here and there, so it’s harder for these
regional players to sort of work in quite as seamless class solidarity as it is
for the people who run drugstores.
And also drugstores,
you’re going to see them in a sort of wider variety of neighborhoods than you
might necessarily see, like a Walmart or a Target. They’re all over the place.
I think that there’s an inclination because of that for drugstores to get into
the urban politics of cities in a way that Target might not.
Laura: Yeah,
that makes a lot of sense because Target has announced that it’s also closing
some stores due to retail theft. But if you think about a Target, it’s more of
a destination that you would drive to or go to that’s usually in an area with
lots of other big box stores, and CVS is something you’re just going to swing
by in your neighborhood.
Alex: I was wondering, what’s in it for the retailers?
What’s in it for them to hype up theft?
Amanda: I think
it helps make them sympathetic parties in a lot of ways, to the general public.
A lot of what we see coming out of this is retail executives lobbying and
arguing for, reversing bail reform for reducing the monetary threshold for
theft to become a felony instead of a misdemeanor, you see a real desire to get
the state involved in mediating these things that are just shoplifting.
Although it’s really
interesting: There’s no correlation between where a state does the theft cutoff
between a misdemeanor and a felony and how much retail theft you have in those
states. The cutoff in California is much lower
than the cutoff in Texas and South Carolina, and you wouldn’t know that by
hearing lobbyists who are arguing for stiffer penalties in California
specifically.
I mean, this is my
opinion, but I think that basically, these stores want taxpayers to help them
run the stores because what you see in a lot of them, you see staffing levels
really low because the companies don’t want to pay very much. So they have a difficult
time hiring in the first place, and then they just don’t want to staff people
in the stores as much as they should to run a safe, useful store.
Laura: It’s
like, instead of having several employees and then maybe some security guards,
you have a couple of employees, a bunch of self-checkout machines, and then a
local police officer that’s paid for by the public getting called in all the
time.
Amanda: Yes,
you have more public sector investment, we’ll say, instead of more private
sector investment in making sure the private sector stores function properly.
You know, it’s sort of
galling because stores talk out of both sides of their mouth on this. When you
look at forums where retail employees talk about their jobs where they complain
to each other, you don’t see retail employees talking much about theft, you see
them talking about how there’s not enough people working at the store for them
to do their jobs properly. When you look at the research for deterring theft,
what you find almost uniformly is that the way to deter theft is for people to
feel like they’re going to get caught. The way that people feel like they’re
going to get caught is there’s a lot of employees in the store.
Laura: Right,
it seems like there’s also two different models of using your employees to
intervene in theft. One is having enough employees. So there are people in the
checkouts, there are people restocking the aisles. There are just people
around, and so that’s just a deterrent. And then the second model is like, oh,
there’s two employees in this huge store and if someone steals, they should be
expected to step in and stop that person, which is really dangerous, unlikely
to be effective, and like you say in your article, why would the employee risk
that?
Amanda: I think
that the people who advocate that second model are again, the people who have
never worked in a store because once you work in retail, you find out very
quickly in your onboarding training that you are under no circumstances
supposed to interact with someone who is shoplifting, in a confrontational way.
You can go ask them if
they need help. You can go ask them if they’re finding everything okay. You
can, and you should, according to training, contact them to make sure that they
understand that someone is watching. And hopefully they will abandon the product
then and oftentimes they do.
I’ve been in this
situation before as a store employee. And you’re not supposed to do anything
because it creates an insurance and liability nightmare for the store. If you
get hurt, if the person stealing gets hurt, if a bystander gets hurt, then it
is on the store for that happening. I have been in this situation—I have
watched someone at a store I was working at fill a cart full of stuff and just
make a run for it.
Alex: Right.
I think it’s really interesting that you have that experience, and I think very
little of the coverage of this actually takes a perspective of the people who
actually work in the stores.
Amanda: Right.
You get a lot of the perspective of retail analysts and loss prevention
industry people who have every motivation to paint this as a huge problem
because the bigger a problem that this is perceived to be, the more money there
is for services of their types of firms.
And then you have the
national and state-level lobbying groups, for the industry, and you have
executives at the stores, and there’s just not a lot of firm information on
what actually happens in a store. There’s just a lot of people at their
desks.
Laura: Well,
it also seems like this perfect topic of conversations for people who run big
chain stores because you can hire all these loss prevention experts, but if
you’re not willing to do the thing that actually works, which is hiring
employees in the store, then you’re just going to be talking about this
forever, which could also be really useful for explaining a whole other range
of failures and decisions, right?
Amanda: Right.
And they have been talking about this forever. if you go back and look
at news reports over the years, you get a retail theft panic, a shoplifting
panic every like 10, 15 years. This is something that just comes back around
again and again without ever being really resolved as a topic or as a concern.
But like you said, when you need to lay blame somewhere, shoplifting is a
perfect bogeyman because it is bad third-party actors who are making things
worse for everybody, who are maybe going to get your favorite drugstore or your
local Target closed or something like that.
There’s no one person to
pin that on. It is just an unseen other who is ripping apart the fabric of our
country and there’s no real requirement to define any of this concretely, to
provide any sort of real data on it—it is just a bogeyman, perhaps as literally
as can be.
Alex: Amanda,
thank you so much for talking to us today.
Amanda: Thank
you so much for having me.
Alex: Read
Amanda Mull’s reporting on retail theft, including her latest, “Self-Checkout
is a Failed Experiment,” at the atlantic.com.
Alex: The
Politics of Everything is co-produced by Talkhouse.
Laura: Emily
Cooke is our executive producer.
Alex:
Lorraine Cademartori produced this episode.
Laura: Myron
Kaplan is our audio editor.
Alex: If you
enjoyed The Politics of Everything and you want to support us, one thing
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Laura: Thanks
for listening.