As center-left writer Matthew Yglesias outlines in his most recent article, thieves are rarely heroic or needy. Instead, the thieves that force store closures and cause employee and customer distress are organized gangs who descend upon a store, clear the shelves, and then list those unused items online through a marketplace such as Facebook, Craigslist, and Amazon. If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many listings for six-packs of detergent alongside that 1999 Plymouth Prowler you’ve been eyeing on Facebook, theft is the likely answer to that errant wonder. (Also, I’d advise against trusting a 24-year-old Chrysler product with your happiness.)
The theft rings then hide behind the propagandized imagery of impoverished mothers putting diapers and soap in their strollers — needful items as mom tries to make it until tomorrow. It’s nonsense, but the idea sells to the liberal sensibility that’s never met a legal or extralegal paternalism it doesn’t like.
Yglesias writes:
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.
You can read the rest here.
Growing up in Sheboygan, Wis., halfway between Green Bay and Milwaukee, I’d hear about our box stores routinely suffering diaper grabs. A regular (repeat and punctual) thief would load up a shopping cart and stroll out the doors with hundreds of dollars in merchandise that would then find their way to parents to our north or south who were uninterested in the origins of the Huggies — or would even be sold back to the stores through wholesalers. An especially sympathetic bit of larceny (“What monster would deny a baby clean diapers?”) has spread into household and textile goods. The paper parasol of goodwill (our emotions toward those desperately poor) can no longer hide the elephant (the scale of the thefts). We can no longer ignore the felonious fusion of post–George Floyd anti-policing and the ubiquity of masking.
Like spam call centers or the “Kia Boyz” stealing thousands of cars for joyriding and further crime, most crimes are committed by those who are 1) comfortable and capable, i.e. morally compromised and practiced 2) protected from prosecution. Retail crime sounds petty and unserious to the average person — “they stole some shirts, who cares?” But when stores disappear, it’s the people whom the thieves hide behind — the single mothers, the handicapped, the infirm — who bear the increased costs (time, price, and availability). Stores cannot protect themselves except to leave, and whatever Chicago says, a public grocery store is on a fool’s errand list. Police and prosecutors know the thieves, and practically know what time the theft takes place. Credit to Yglesias for speaking against the Left’s impulses regarding sympathetic crime, and may there be long sentences for those who’ve used the past three years to enrich themselves off of their neighbors.