Flipped, in my case. Target is front to back groceries along one side of the store. The Walmart isnt one of the grocery super stores.
This isn’t about if we shop there or not, Read the article. Walmart is using public money instead of using their own money.
The local police department is having to stage a police department publicly paid person instead of Walmart paying their own supposed “loss” department. Pay your interior folks instead of sticking taxpayers with your personal costs
I remember an analysis in my county a few years ago. Walmart had the highest number of police calls. They were also the business that paid the highest sales taxes in our county, so I feel it evens out. It does seem to draw people from outside the area.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned the “People of Walmart” blog. Google it.
So walmart is leaching off public funds to keep profits high- what else is new? They’ve been doing this for years. They rely on welfare to subsidize their low wages and we continue to allow it.
shrug
There’s been no end of complaints about 'underserved communities over the last couple of decades and why some retailers don’t step up and fill the void. That I’d rather shop at the grungiest, non-chain, ethnic grocery in town, doesn’t mean I won’t admit Walmart does it more than most.
Why shouldn’t Walmarts, in low-income, high-crime areas, expect extraordinary support from the police? Other than an expectation they should bear the costs of private security and the lawsuits that tend to follow anything untoward happening to the shoplifter their rent-a-cops nab?
@catahoula Walmart itself contributed to this problem by cutting staff and getting rid of “greeters” who also served as “screeners.” Then the calls shot up and police are filling in the void Walmart created.
The internet at its worst – taking pictures of people without their permission and mocking them online.
The experience you have at any one Target or Walmart - or any national chain store for that matter - will vary depending on the neighborhood. I’ve even seen Marshalls stores that are filled with utter junk in some places, and I’ve seen Marshalls stores with $1200 designer handbags in “better” neighborhoods. Walmart and Target merchandise tends to be more standard from store to store, but the cleanliness, employees and customers can be really different.
I have seen some of those People of Walmart photos. It’s easy to forget that a lot of these folks are just trying to survive, or could have mental health issues, and are way past caring about what other people might think of them.
Like you, I read that in the piece. And after perusing it the second time, my conclusion is still the same - it’s their clientele, not that they cashiered that 68 year old greeter.
They’re doing high volume business with the underseved which means there’s a much higher percentage of felons, meth heads, etc. than the sensitive shoppers are likely to run into at Costco or Trader Joes.
Your conclusions likely differ from mine.
So @catahoula, are you saying that all of the sudden, Walmart’s clientele started stealing more and committing more violent crimes? For no reason at all? And that police, as well as business analysts are wrong in their conclusion that the crime increase is related to the decrease in Walmart staffing?
(I personally have no conclusion, but I also don’t have a reason not to believe the conclusions cited in the article.)
There is a WalMart store right next to the insurer in town. Since the WalMart opened, the insurer has had to take more security measures to keep its employees safe from violent crime, especially in the evening in the parking lot.
Our Walmarts have greeters and check your receipt at the door. That just started a few weeks ago.
All I saw in that article was an anecdotal case for correlation, katliamom… was there a graph somewhere in there? One where that sudden uptick you speak of is visible? Absent that chart, or even with it, a demographic shift in customers and their mores might as easily explain the bulk of whatever has occurred.
The article seems to be blaming the petty theft problem on reduced staffing, while attributing the high frequency of police calls to the number of shoplifters they’ve caught. Seems intuitively contradictory, unless the staff they’ve kept are the ones that were extra good at spotting theft. And while we can only guess at the number of shoplifters making it clear of the door, it’s evidently not enough to materially effect their bottom line.
Where the violent crime cited in the article fits into the reduced staffing level/dilapidated store argument I can’t figure out. Violent crime among your customers is nothing but a function of who’s shopping your store and if you keep your doors open late night, they will come.
Might even come in the afternoon, too, when they’ve gotten out of bed.
“The article seems to be blaming the petty theft problem on reduced staffing, while attributing the high frequency of police calls to the number of shoplifters they’ve caught. Seems intuitively contradictory, unless the staff they’ve kept are the ones that were extra good at spotting theft.”
you are missing the point, and it is an important one, one of the biggest deterrents to theft, to crime in general, is a visible presence, and that is something police departments had to re-learn in recent years, that deterring crime is a lot more efficient than in solving it after it happens. The old beat cop was a visible presence, the same way that the heavily armed cops and national guard they often deploy in NYC will help deter terrorism, when people know they are being watched it tends to deter crime, pure and simple. At a store like walmart, if you have people present in the departments, just the fact they are visible is going to deter a lot of people who otherwise might say “hey, no one is watching, what the heck”. Yes, it is neighborhood dependent, in the relatively well off suburb I live in having reduced staff probably doesn’t hurt them in this regards, but you do that in a marginal area where people are more likely to turn to shoplifting and such, it is going to lead to what this article claims.
I don’t have statistics, but Walmart back before it exploded had people in every department, they prided themselves on low prices but also on service, and I would bet pretty good money that 25 years ago, even in marginal areas (and Walmart was in those kinds of areas all along, maybe not big cities as today, but still marginal) they didn’t have the problem because of that presence.
Cops found that out, when they shifted to using cops on patrol in cars, crime rates jumped, and these days the eupemism of ‘community policing’ is pretty much a modern variation of the old beat cop. Likewise, in turning around the murder rate from 2500 a year to less than 600 in NYC (with the population increasing, mind you), they did it by flooding bad areas with visible cops, targeting bad areas, and it worked (there were other reasons as well, but this was one of them).
There is a famous study in organizational behavior (I believe it was a gas works) done back in the 19th century, where they found that productivity increased any time they changed things in the plant, so they made it dimmer, productivity increased, they made it brighter, productivity increased, they redid the layout, changed the paint color, and it all worked…and what they ended up figuring out is that people’s behavior changes when they know they are being watched, that it wasn’t the changes that made a difference, it was the workers knowing that someone was watching them.
“Where the violent crime cited in the article fits into the reduced staffing level/dilapidated store argument I can’t figure out. Violent crime among your customers is nothing but a function of who’s shopping your store and if you keep your doors open late night, they will come.”
There are a couple of reasons. One is the ‘broken window’ hypothesis that in terms of policing, meant ignoring low level things in communities like graffitti, low level misdemeanor crimes like drinking alcohol openly on the streets, low level drug dealing, petty property crimes and that the cumulative effect of this is to make people believe that no one cares. People have squawked about this (and there have been reasons to), but it has been found to make a serious difference, that if you don’t tolerate these kind of things and only focus on ‘the big guys’, is when communities get out of hand with crime and other problems. If a store looks dilapidated, it lends the impression that the area isn’t worth having a nice store, that those running the store see it as nothing more than screwing what little money the area has and treating people with contempt, and those in the area will internalize this and figure no one there cares, so it is a good place to do X, Y and Z
More importantly, when they realize there are few people monitoring the store or its grounds, it is what leads to violent crime happening. No one monitoring the parking lot, no visible presence? Drug dealers, prostitutes, muggers, all get the idea this is a free fire zone, it becomes an attractive nuisance and draws crime to it. Walmart on this one has nowhere to hide, when you treat an area like it is not worth serving properly, when you don’t tailor security and visible presence to the area you are in (or in my area, turning off people who otherwise might shop there because of no customer service), you have no one to blame but yourself. One of the knocks on Walmart that is true IMO is that they don’t care about the areas they serve, for all the warm hearted crap they put out about being a good corporate citizen, their track record over the last 25 years or so across the board is not good…and they are paying the price for it, in many ways. Their “buy american” campaign is in part because Walmart was one of big reasons manufacturing got sent offshore in the first place, and on the low end they are finding that even with their cheap prices, people can’t afford to shop there, and they have lost more affluent people with their no customer service, bargain basement approach to things.
“The article seems to be blaming the petty theft problem on reduced staffing,”…not to mention 50%+ of stealing at any store not just walmart is done by employees or assisted by employees.
I wonder if some of this is due to an increase in drug issues, meth, etc. which has becoming an epidemic in many areas. How do we know its not correlated to some external factor like that?
@doschicos:
Those issues tend to go along with the kind of marginal areas we are talking about here, and drugs for example often drive things like shoplifting and muggings, people desperate to get their next fix, plus not to mention the drug dealers supplying them may be hanging out near Walmart and the culture of violence in the drug trade. No one is saying Walmart is creating the crime, what the article and people are saying is that operating in areas where drugs and poverty and so forth are soaring, that the lack of security makes these stores a magnet for crime, attracts it. Little thing about crime, it is like lightening, it tends to be common in places where it is most easy to happen, a car thief will target a car that is unlocked before one that is locked, a mugger will operate in areas that likely doesn’t have a strong police presence, good lighting and a lot of people. By having their stores give the appearence that they don’t have much in the way of security, they may as well place a sign outsign that says “Walmart, help yourselves”.
I live in a community that isn’t marginal and heroin has become a problem. It’s not all about socioeconomics only. I’m not sure what its like in other parts of the country but up here in New England its not just the shady areas getting hit.
Also, I say good for Walmart for choosing to operate in all kinds of neighborhoods. Many areas have a lack of resources, especially places to buy affordable food creating food deserts.
I think its too simplistic to think it can be summed up by one factor.
Walmart’s pretty well present in both urban and rural areas, and the drug issues are different. Seems there’s fertile ground for criminologists and sociologists to do an actual, you know, study of whether there are differences related to drug use in different environments.