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U.S. retailers admit they lied about shoplifting, retail crime again
(boingboing.net)
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this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Yes, I'm well aware corporations never miss an opportunity to fuck people over.
Then what was the point of your previous comment? Theft has a real and measurable impact on your community.
They literally closed those stores without actual theft issues. You think they're gonna reopen them now that they've admitted they were lying? Of course not. Sounds like imaginary theft has a ReAl aNd MeSUrAbLe impact on my community too. Fuck 'em.
I never commented about Target closing or reopening stores. My comment was relating to insurance not just being free money that covers bad stuff happening. There's also such a thing as being uninsurable.
I'm all for bashing corporate greed but claiming theft isn't a big deal because they have insurance is a bad take.
Let's take a step back from this pointless argument. Shrink rates have been between 1-2% for arguably forever. Retailers currently are aghast that their shrink losses went from $90 billion to $120 billion! Yikes! That sounds like a big increase!
Yet, that shrink percentage has not significantly increased. It's been around 1.5% for a few years now. Doesn't that make you wonder though? If the percentage of shrink loss isn't increasing, how are the losses increasing 33%? And even more perplexing is, how are these companies posting record profits? Quarter after quarter their profits are increasing as much as 6% even with these record breaking shrinkage losses.
It's almost as if they have taken advantage of the publics attention of COVID era inflation, and price gouged the retail market. It's like they priced their products 33% higher than they were, in order to make record profits, and those higher prices can easily be conflated into record shrinkage losses.
Weird. I'm sure that can't be what's happening though. My always friendly Walmart has always been set on giving me the cheapest prices possible. They couldn't be trying to change the narrative to make it seem like customers are thieves. They love their customers, and would never patronize them for something as greedily evil as a drop in their revenue bucket.
Why are so stores spending so much money and labor redoing stores to add locked shelving display units for basic goods?
The cost of the shelving and maintenance increases, and the required labor increases because every customer will need an employee to unlock the displays every time they need an item like video games in the 90s.
Stores don't want to lock up toothpaste and bottle neck their sales but they're doing it en masse, why is that?
If you walk into basically any CVS in America, you'll notice the number of employees working the floor is inversely proportional to the amount of merchandise locked behind plastic cases. It's far more cost efficient for the corporation to just pay fewer employees and lock up as much of the high-margin merch as possible.
Without a doubt, they lose sales because of this tactic, but they also have less overhead and almost nonexistent theft. I don't think this trend came as a result of high levels of shoplifting, it was just the inevitable outcome of corporate cost-cutting practices. The companies won't hesitate to blame these decisions on rising levels of theft and organized crime, though, as if the act of shoplifting isn't as old as commerce itself. It's not a new problem, it's just a new convenient solution that saves the retail giants a ton of money.
Your amount of profit is not necessarily tied to your pricing. With 0 change in pricing, you can make more money by simply selling more things.