Wow, that’s amazing.
“So what that means specifically for D.C. is that it accounted for 68% more retail crime than you would expect based on the national average." Which means that all of us on average are losing $200 a year. Ugh.
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I live near a Wegmans grocery store. Every week there is a rundown online of people arrested for attempted theft. Usually middle aged women. Just the other day it was a woman in her 40’s trying to steal $265 in groceries. She ran, the police caught her and she had drug paraphernalia on her person.
Wegmans takes theft extremely seriously.
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But is the amount lost to theft (which is included in and makes up much of “retail shrink”, the overall loss of goods to retailers) that much different from before?
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/organized-retail-crime-and-theft-not-increasing-much-nrf-study-finds.html says that “Retail shrink climbed in absolute dollars, but when reported as a percentage of sales as is commonly done, average annual shrink increased to 1.57%, up from 1.44% in 2021. The share is largely in line with past years. Average annual shrink was 1.62% of sales before the pandemic in 2019, though it was as low as 1.33% in 2017, according to previous surveys.”
However, if more goods are now sold by delivery, actual stores may be getting less sales volume, so the amount lost to theft may be a greater percentage of in-store sales than before.
Might depend upon where you live rather than which store. In some cities, police will not respond to shoplifting calls.
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They certainly don’t in Portland where I live. Muggings either.
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Seems that the retail store lobby exaggerated the losses to shoplifting…
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Just drove from the city to a much larger upscale suburban Target yesterday. Last time I went it seemed like half the store was locked up and it was a terrible shopping experience - well yesterday all the locked cabinets were open. Made the aisles tighter going around all the open doors - so guessing the staff just said to heck with the security and unlocked it all!
“much more prevalent crime of employer wage theft, which gets almost no coverage.”
The fact that this is in the second opening paragraph with no backup begs the question of who is giving misinformation.
To me this is just more drivel to be disregarded.
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Too late for this neighborhood store. Sadly the local residents that follow the laws and depend on this store will suffer.
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In our local stores it seems to still be only the expensive items that are locked up.
One thing that still bothers me is that my local Target is still a mess…I was in there the other day and the shoe section was chaos. Almost non of the shoeboxes had shoes in them and stuff was all over the floor…
I was in a CVS near downtown LA once and almost everything was locked up and they had a huge security camera by the entrance. In this location, I can see why everything was locked up…
The only things I see locked up are the bottles of liquor that cost between $200 and $5000.
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@GKUnion, if you’ll go halves on that $5,000 bottle, I’ll go find the person with the key…
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Same here
And baby formula.
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I’ve kept myself busy during dry January & February by hunting down hard to find bourbon. I’ve found those guys with the key to open the case several times, but no $5k bottles so far. 
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I had to get someone to unlock a pair of pinking shears at a Walmart in Chico, CA in January. I checked our local Walmart in Germantown, MD this week and that was not the case.
CVS has had issues in the DC area because they are so completely understaffed. Our neighborhood CVS has been fine, other neighborhoods not so much.
Most of the major retail stores here have had some items locked up for years.
I went to my local CVS to get Sudafed for my H this morning. The Sudafed and other decongestants weren’t locked away. Instead, there was a row of coupons with the decongestant name/price listed. I then had to take the slip to the pharmacy check out line. The kid there got my Sudafed. I asked if this was a new policy and he couldn’t answer. I’d not seen this before. Razors and razor blades at this CVS have been locked away for a long time.
At least where I live / lived, it’s been like that as long as I remember, because people have used it to make meth.
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Ditto here in the greater Seattle area. One also need to have an ID to buy these “meth precursors.”
Ditto here, and back in Illinois. It’s been that way as a Federal requirement since 2005.
What recently surprised me was that I had to enter ID information on Amazon to buy Robitussen DM. Apparently that requirement varies by state.
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