Taking retail theft seriously. By Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias

17 Oct 2023

∙ Paid

www.slowboring.com

11 - 14 minutes

I’ve lived in the District of Columbia for a bit over 20 years now, and in all that time I’ve regularly visited the CVS on the 1400 block of P Street. For the first 19 of those years, I never personally witnessed any large-scale shoplifting occurring there. But this year, I did see two guys grab a bunch of stuff off shelves, sweep it into bags, and walk out the door. Kate witnessed something similar, also this year. And friends in the neighborhood have also seen it — again, as a recent trend.

Those are anecdotes, not evidence of a clear national trend.

But when major national retail chains say shoplifting is a growing problem and cite it as a reason for some store closures, I’m inclined to agree with them. Among other things, companies just don’t have strong incentives to lie about this kind of thing.

That said, it is not easy to convincingly demonstrate that there has been a big national increase in shoplifting — see these skeptical stories from CNN and the Marshall Project — in part because in a country where the overall state of crime data is bad, the shoplifting data is really bad. Jeff Asher tried to run the numbers to see if crime is really worse at the locations of the recently closed Target stores. It doesn’t seem to be, but you can’t really tell because property crime underreporting is massive and also because a raw count of thefts doesn’t tell you how much was stolen.

What does seem verifiably true and is perhaps more important is that stores have been ratcheting-up their deployment of anti-shoplifting tactics, including keeping items behind locked doors on shelves, investing in more surveillance technology, and having systems with multiple doors so you could potentially trap thieves without asking staff to physically confront them.

This strikes me as in some ways the more relevant issue. If you imagine a town where over a five year span, everyone invests a lot of money in getting iron bars for their windows and installing new security systems and the level of burglaries stays flat, that’s probably a bad sign. I hear some people say the “real issue” with shoplifting is that retailers are trying to get away with running understaffed stores, and that might be true, to an extent. But it’s also one way of saying that the true cost of retail theft to society is not the losses to the retailers, but the increased cost basis of running a store. If it takes more people per square foot of retail space to safely operate, that means lower labor productivity, higher prices, fewer stores, and shorter hours.

That’s also one reason you can’t necessarily draw a straight line between the level of theft and which stores get closed. If your whole business faces a negative shock, what gets closed is the marginal store — which might be marginal for unrelated reasons — not necessarily the store that’s most impacted by the shock. Either way, I think the real question to ask is whether there are any reasonable policy measures available to deal with the problem. Because if there are, we should probably try to implement them and if there aren’t then we just need to muddle through. Those are the options, regardless of our read on the long-term trend.

The thorniest aspect of this problem is that most people who write about policy issues want to be able to identify clear policy origins of problems. For example, it’s common in moderate and conservative California circles to hear that the problem of shoplifting in the Golden State was caused by a ballot initiative that raised the threshold at which retail theft counted as a felony. There may be some sense in which that’s true, but the basic reality is that even with the new, higher threshold in place, California sets the bar unusually low, not unusually high.

If California, New York, and Illinois were to align their laws with the practice in Texas and South Carolina, that would be seen as a soft on crime measure. Besides which, almost all of these states set the threshold in nominal terms, which means that thanks to inflation, penalties have been getting tougher.

That doesn’t mean that the policy change was irrelevant. But to the extent that it’s relevant, I think its impact has been less direct.

What I think is clearly new is the extent of brazen acts of thefts induced by the fact that many people have realized that chain store staff are instructed not to physically confront shoplifters. If you try to steal from a small business, the odds are decent that you’ll run into an owner-operator and he will try to stop you with physical force. But not only are employees unlikely to put themselves on the line for the Walgreens Boots Alliance, official corporate guidance is that they shouldn’t do that.

That policy is not even slightly new and just reflects generalized features of American liability law. Yet when I was a teenager, the norms around this were much different. You can see in the classic Jane’s Addiction “Been Caught Stealing” video, which clearly depicts people trying to conceal their shoplifting behavior.

The blatant rampage watched over by ineffectual staff is a new cultural trope.

One can imagine the intersection of a few trends combining to induce a one-off increase in the boldness of young thieves:

    Youth bored by Covid lockdowns

    News that shoplifting laws were being relaxed

    And a generalized climate of anti-policing sentiment in which the idea of calling the cops was socially stigmatized in liberal states. 

Then thanks to social media, videos of people getting away with it — both celebratory videos filmed by perpetrators and also condemnatory videos filmed by opponents of criminals justice reform — started spreading everywhere. Suddenly the word is out that you can ransack stores and nobody’s really going to do anything about it. This was more or less always the case, but once it becomes more widely known, it creates a big problem. Which is one reason that certain locations get hit over and over again.

In Washington, DC, there has clearly been a lot of shoplifting at the CVS location in the Columbia Heights neighborhood. The empty shelves at this location went viral on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, specific reporting by DCist confirms that a lot of stuff gets stolen from here, and when I walked over there on October 7, the place was absolutely giving Soviet vibes.

For context, right before stopping at that CVS, I visited one about 10 blocks south, and it was totally fine. I walked in, grabbed a bottle of water, and stood in line behind a bunch of other paying customers before buying my water.

One obvious difference, I think, is that while the shelves were largely empty at the Columbia Heights CVS, there were plenty of consumer packaged goods for sale directly across the street, courtesy of some irregular street vendors.

These kind of pop-up shops are also on H Street and some other corridors in the city.

And here we do have a real policy change. Because earlier this year, the DC Council moved to decriminalize street vending:

    On Tuesday, the family sat with other street vendors and watched the D.C. Council unanimously pass the “Street Vendor Advancement Amendment Act of 2023.” The legislation calls for decriminalizing vending without a license, establishing sidewalk vending zones and forgiving unpaid licensing-related civil citations.

    The legislation marks a significant victory for some of the city’s hardest workers, and it was fitting that Rodriguez and her children were there to witness the council approve it. The family’s experience shows why the legislation is needed. Street vendors contribute to the city’s economy, and for too long they have been forced to work in fear of being harassed by authorities, taken to jail or fined money they don’t have to spare.

The part of this that relates to creating vending zones I support. There have always been a handful of Central American immigrants doing irregular food sales around that location in Columbia Heights, and turning it into an officially approved outdoor marketplace for pupuserias and fresh fruit stands and other stuff is great. The city should be more open to commerce! One thing I’ve long deplored about DC is that even though we’re blessed with a lot of parks, they are mostly run by the very fussy National Park Service, which doesn’t like vendors or activities. Making it cheaper and easier for people to get licenses and ply their trade is good.

But something I think a lot of reformers have lost sight of is that legal business areas still have rules, and the rules still require enforcement.

So if you want to create a legal marijuana industry where people are earning legitimate livings and contributing to your state’s tax base, you still need to enforce the laws against people who are selling without a license, not paying taxes, and not following age restrictions. In some ways, it becomes even more important to enforce the rules if you’re trying to transition to a legal, regulated industry. Likewise, creating spaces for small-scale vending operations is great, but that should mean making it easy for people with legitimate businesses to get licenses, not tolerating people who are breaking the rules.

The resale of stolen goods is not the whole story, but it’s a logical place to start a crackdown. And of course it’s happening online, too — Facebook marketplace is full of people reselling secondhand razors and laundry detergent.

The good news is we may be seeing some progress here. New federal legislation about e-fencing passed this summer, and we’re starting to see people like this Florida pastor get arrested and charged for fencing stolen goods. San Francisco police did a high-profile bust of street fences late last week. This is a solvable issue if people care to enforce the rules.

San Francisco has a lot of issues with disorderly drug addicts and mental health cases, plus seemingly high levels of petty property crime. But the city actually has very little violence or shootings by American standards. Under the circumstances, I think investing a lot of resources into busting people who are reselling stolen goods makes a lot of sense.

I could imagine an initiative to station undercover police officers in retail stores posing as customers or employees who then do confront shoplifters might be a very effective strategy. The best approach to reducing crime is to increase the odds perpetrators will be caught and punished, even if the punishment isn’t very severe. Social learning has taught people there is more impunity in this space than was previously believed. A well-designed program to teach the opposite lesson — anyone you see in a store might be a cop who’s going to arrest you — could be pretty potent.

On the other hand, the murder rate here in DC is up 35 percent from last year, and we are on pace for more killings than we’ve seen in 20 years.

We already suffer from too few of our police officers being stationed where they are most needed, which I think means that expending a lot of resources on shoplifting busts probably does not make sense. The guy openly fencing stuff across the street from a ransacked CVS is really low-hanging fruit, but in general, I’m not sure how much sense it makes to focus on shoplifting right now.

Which is different from saying we should be endorsing the anti-anti-shoplifting view that maintains this is somehow all about desperate people needing to feed their starving families. The good news about the Biden labor market is not lies and propaganda, and if you’re someone who needs money, then America’s exciting retail sector is eager to pay you money in exchange for working in their stores rather than stealing from them.

And by the same token, it’s worth emphasizing that to the extent stores can only operate if they lock everything up, that’s going to mean higher expenses and fewer sales and, ultimately, fewer stores and job opportunities. Some cities may need to prioritize other things in the short term. But cities should, in fact, move to take this seriously if the personnel is available.