We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.
He said that a couple of months ago in the wake of a full summer of panic over an alleged wave of violent shoplifting all over the country. The LA Times’ Michael Hilzik takes a look at this issue in light of the fact that the National Retail Federation’s report that “organized shoplifting” was sweeping the nation is now revealed to have been a total lie:
The statistic, published in April by the National Retail Federation, was that “organized retail crime” — including the videotaped flash mob smash-and-grab events aired in frequent rotation on the cable and evening news shows — came to more than $45 billion a year.
Specifically, the NRF declared that organized crime accounted for “nearly half” of the $94.5 billion in retail “shrink” attributed to theft or “other causes” in 2021. The claim appeared in the latest edition of the federation’s annual report on organized retail crime.
On Dec. 4, the federation acknowledged that its estimate was a fabrication and it “updated” its report to remove the estimate.
But the damage had been done. Politicians at the federal and state levels jumped on the original report to push legislation aimed at fighting the onslaught of thieves.
In October, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) staged a “Fight Retail Crime Day” event on Capitol Hill, at which he stood next to NRF executives to push bipartisan legislation to create a Center to Combat Organized Retail Crime in the Department of Homeland Security.
[…]
News organizations also swallowed the NRF’s assertion whole, partially because it fed into the perception, assiduously retailed by the retailers’ lobby, that the retail trade was suffering “unprecedented levels of theft coupled with rampant crime in their stores,” as an NRF official put it in September. “The situation is only becoming more dire,” he added.
The Washington Post editorial board, drawing on the NRF claim and a string of recent thefts in its suburban backyard, declared that “‘shoplifting’ is too mild a word” for what was going on and that “no community, it seems, is immune from the recent spike in organized retail crime.” The board called on Congress to pass Grassley’s measure, but quick.
The editorial writers cautioned that law enforcement would have to contend with thieves displaying “undeniable smarts,” though since the theft ring they mentioned in their piece had been caught in part because its getaway car got caught in traffic, the level of their brainpower might have been deniable after all.
There have been very few mea culpas in the press and I have little doubt that Trump will just keep saying he wants shoplifters to be shot because his crowds love it. So yes, the damage has been done.
Hilzik looked at how this whole thing came about and it’s interesting because we’re so bombarded with disinformation these days that it’s very hard to sort the real from the fictional. And when the mainstream media runs with it, it’s even harder. (Just look at the misconceptions that abound about the national economy.)
The goal of statistic-mongers might be to promote an ideological viewpoint or undermine accepted science, as when fossil fuel interests manipulated statistics to make it seem that global warming wasn’t happening.
Sometimes it may be to get attention, which seems to be the case with those annual estimates by the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas of the productivity losses suffered by employers during the March Madness college basketball tournament ($17.3 billion this year, supposedly); one look at the firm’s methodology shows that it’s assembled from conjecture built upon conjecture built upon conjecture, all adding up to absolutely nothing verifiable.
One of my favorite examples of the media running with an unverifiable statistical claim involved the seminal pornographic movie “Deep Throat.” The producers of a 2005 documentary asserted that “Deep Throat” had grossed $600 million, which they said made it the most profitable movie in history. Among the evidence they cited was that so much cash rolled in from theaters that the movie’s mob-connected backers couldn’t count it all, but weighed it in bags instead.
As I pointed out, no one said how many bags there were, or their size, what denominations were inside, or indeed how much they weighed. All we knew, I wrote, was “that a bag of $1 bills weighs exactly the same as a bag of hundreds, and that each weighs less than a bag of horse manure,” which I thought was in the bags the documentary makers were selling.
That’s funny but this is actually quite a serious problem. He goes on to unpack what happened with the retail sales statistics, pointing out that the figures these retail lobbyists routinely publish on “shrinkage” are bs. It’s not just shoplifting, it’s also pilferage by employees and lax inventory systems.
This particular lie found its way into circulation due to congressional testimony by a retail executive who threw out the 45 billion dollar figure for “organized shoplifting” based upon a 2016 report about all shrinkage. Evidently, the Retail Federation didn’t know the numbers were BS and just ran with it. (Or so they say.)
Hizlik holds the press mostly responsible,however, as we all should:
The news organizations that participated in this cabaret should be ashamed of their gullibility. Some, such as CNN, have expressed appropriate skepticism. The [Washington] Post corrected its editorial to reflect the NRF’s update, though its deputy opinion editor, Charles Lane, told Judd Legum of the Popular Information blog that although its editorial writers “relied on the NRF data in good faith, not knowing it was erroneous,” they stood by their policy prescriptions.
Yet why should anyone rely on the NRF data, given the industry’s obvious incentives to exaggerate the truth about organized shoplifting and obscure the facts?
Big retail chains have been using claims about mob shoplifting to obscure why they’ve been closing stores in some neighborhoods. Target has attributed closings of stores in Seattle, New York and San Francisco to crime, although in some cases those neighborhoods have been shown to have lower shoplifting rates than locations left open. The real issue, in other words, may be that the retailer made a mistake in locating these stores and is trying to blame local residents, rather than its own executive decision-making.
This, this, this. The over expansion of retail stores is the real story. All brick and mortar retail is being hit hard by the rise of mail order and the pandemic made it even more obvious. This isn’t about roving gangs of violent thugs destroying stores. It’s about Americans changing their shopping habits.
It’s also about scapegoating others for bad decisions made by executives:
Shrink, reduced to shoplifting, has become an all-purpose defense of executives tasked with explaining to investors why profit and margin growth may have slowed. For example, at Dick’s Sporting Goods, which has pushed the shrink narrative hard, Chief Financial Officer Navdeep Gupta told Wall Street analysts on Nov. 21 that the “shrink headwind” had pared about a half-percent from the firm’s profit margin on merchandise.
The company’s third-quarter earnings report told a more detailed story. There, Dick’s reported that margins had decreased by 1.3 percentage points — well more than double the impact of shrink — due to “higher markdowns … on excess product.” In other words, margins narrowed more because of faulty buying decisions made internally than from thefts committed by workers or marauders.
“We continue to invest in efforts to keep our stores, teammates and athletes safe,” Gupta told investors, suggesting an image of workers holed up behind barricades against interlopers, like the characters in “Night of the Living Dead.”
As Hilzik says, the media are suckers for taking these businesses at face value when they make claims like this. As he shows in the article, it’s really not that hard. And they certainly should be more skeptical of political actors who play this stuff up for partisan gain. But let’s face facts, these stories are catnip for them too. The grainy videos of marauding “urban youth” trashing the stores were played over and over again because they titillate the audience (and the newsrooms, no doubt.) It’s all part of a tabloid ecosystem that has degraded the body politic for decades.
The big problem here is that the benefits of any focus on crime always goes to the authoritarian wingnuts in our political system and it’s never good. It’s catastrophic now with a full blown authoritarian movement poised to take action if they get into power. The media has to be much more circumspect these days. They simply cannot afford to indulge these impulses right now. You don’t even want to think about the consequences.