Remember all the ooga-booga scaremongering about organized retail crime (ORC) this summer and fall? Con-media outlets ran breathless reports on an alarming rise in organized retail theft, usually accompanied by video of group smash-and-grab attacks on stores.
These reports were and probably still are a staple on Fox News and its con-media imitators. The implication being that rampant crime is part of everyday life in Joe Biden’s America, where liberal governments and prosecutors coddle criminals, unleashing chaos.
It wasn’t just liars and propagandists on right-leaning media. More respectable outlets like AP, CNN, the WaPo editorial page, Fortune, etc., also ran with the story. Well, it turns out it was all bullshit.
Smash-and-grab incidents do happen and have always happened, but the ballyhooed retail crime wave this year didn’t. This Popular Information report traces the crime panic back to a single source who was irresponsibly cited by multiple outlets.
The source was an executive who led an outfit called National Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail (CLEAR), which sounds suspiciously like an organization that would have a vested interest in perceptions about retail crime. He offered a wildly inaccurate interpretation of outdated statistics in a hearing. An excerpt from PI’s report:
The citation for the “research” by the National Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail (CLEAR) was actually a 2021 Congressional testimony by Brendan Dugan, then-President of CLEAR. Dugan testified that “CLEAR estimates that organized retail crime accounts for $45 billion in annual losses for retailers.” But in a recent interview with RetailDive, Dugan admitted that CLEAR did not conduct any research on ORC. Instead, Dugan was referring to the NRF’s estimate for total shrink from 2016.
The panic didn’t just play out in the media. As PI reports, lawmakers from both parties ran with that bullshit stat and crafted policy to combat the nonexistent ORC hordes. Naturally Republicans, including Trump, took it several steps further, using the phony stat to threaten violence.
Of course, none of this is shocking from con-media outlets. The Murdoch Cinematic Universe takes every opportunity to scare the shit out of its recliner-bound shut-ins because the more angry and afraid people are, the more willing they become to empower fascist blowhard Republicans.
But it’s alarming that mainstream outlets fell for this horseshit from one person from that particular organization. Would reporters swallow claims about the negative health effects of consuming butter at face value if they came from the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” people? Maybe!
It’s a shame because there were lots of important issues to cover this summer and fall instead of this ORC hooey. Like Orange Sauron’s increasingly unhinged fascist rhetoric. Or maybe women losing access to 21st century healthcare in the wake of the Dobbs decision. That they ran with the fake crime panic instead is a tell about priorities, and it’s rarely democracy and almost never women.
Open thread.
Alison Rose
Oh yes. I heard a whole lot about this supposed scourge here in CA because all the wingnuts loved using it as another cudgel against Newsom, as though if it were real, it would be the governor’s job to stop shoplifters. Also apparently no one ever stole anything under Republican governors, which is definitely true since when I got arrested for shoplifting, California was under the stewardship of that well-known far-left flaming liberal, Pete Wilson.
cmorenc
Well, the fact that chains like Target have closed stores in a few urban areas where shrinkage is particularly high, and retailers like CVS are changing how some items are displayed (in a less immediately customer-accessible manner) to prevent shrinkage -isn’t exactly helping to undermine the “organized retail theft” narrative, even though the primary theft mode is ad hoc individual shoplifting rather than organized gangster ops.
Old School
@Alison Rose: And as the article points out, that cudgel led to Newsom announcing a $267M investment in combating organized retail crime.
MagdaInBlack
Thank you for this, Betty. I always felt these retail crime wave statistics were hinky. One of the responses below the article talks about the poor inventory management and under staffing at these stores. But no, itsa crime wave, not store practices. FFS
Do they get to write off these “losses” on their taxes?
Betty Cracker
@cmorenc: Maybe, but there’s some doubt about those rationales too. If I were a Target executive, I’d rather blame crime than internal fuckups on product mix, etc. No one is saying crime isn’t a problem. But it’s a bad idea to take press releases at face value too.
JaySinWA
@cmorenc: External theft isn’t even the majority of shrinkage.
From the linked article:
Over half of the shrinkage was a combination of process/controls and employee theft. another 8.9% was unknown or other causes.
Chris
At the same time as retail giants everywhere were cutting their staffing to the bare bones, thus ensuring that there are as few people as possible to catch or deter thieves and that what people are there are so overwhelmed by the job they couldn’t do it even if they wanted to?
Yeah, it was transparent bullshit right from the start.
Geminid
Republicans:
“Hello, police? I want to report a stolen issue.”
Alison Rose
@cmorenc: I mean, it’s not always the reason, but often when people steal stuff it’s because literally just being alive is so damned expensive that no one can afford the shit they need. Granted, stealing electronics and such is usually for reasons other than penury, but often people take food or clothes or such because they need those things and can’t afford them.
Alison Rose
@Old School: Yeah, and even still, people will say he’s not doing enough and it’s all his fault and blah blah. Same as they probably do to every Dem governor.
Starfish
@cmorenc: A lot of shrinkage was due to genius MBA brains who wanted to have more self-checkout and fewer employees in the store. Do you know what leads to shrinkage? Letting the customers do the self-checkout. Do you know why people shop in stores instead of online? Because they want help with things, and they don’t want to wander aimlessly through the rat maze you have created where you move the mustard every week because some brand paid you money to put their mustard on an end cap.
MisterForkbeard
@Alison Rose: There’s a fair amount of electronics theft that happens because you can easily resell it all on ebay or whatever virtually risk free.
It’s interesting, because you can usually find someone selling 20 or 30 of the same thing basically at MSRP soon after it’s released. There’s no way that makes sense unless they got it for substantially below cost – either they have a hookup or they got them for ‘free’. And these sellers don’t have a large history, or their history doesn’t indicate they’re a storefront.
Ohio Mom
The last time we went to Micro Center for some electronic doodad, the very nice sales clerk couldn’t find it. Ohio Dad said he knew they had it in stock, he’d checked the website before leaving the house.
The sales clerk just shrugged his shoulders and made a remark along the lines of, “Sometimes inventory leaves through the back door,” meaning the staff was stealing it or helping someone else steal it (maybe those are the same thing).
Chris
@Alison Rose:
A decade ago when I was working at a shitty gift shop in small-town Florida, I remember an older co-worker talking about a time when he caught somebody stealing from the parking meters in the lot behind our business. All I could think of was “dude, if you expect me to squeal on a guy whose life has gotten so bad that stealing quarters from parking lots seems like a good idea, you’re on drugs. Nobody on this street pays people like us enough to Pinkerton for them.”
The fact that this was the same store where one of my co-workers later died from a condition that should have been eminently treatable if they offered health insurance for their employees, which they could easily have afforded, but didn’t, did nothing to change that view.
JaySinWA
@JaySinWA: But I have seen local reports of organized looting this year, including one from a local Costco where the perpetrators were caught after heading out of an emergency exit. I think this year’s stats might have greater organized theft losses based on copycat actions. Still nowhere near the levels of panic reporting.
Alison Rose
@Chris: Yeah, someone I knew who worked at Walmart for a while spotted someone taking a pack of socks, and she was like, I’m not saying shit about it. No one steals a 6-pack of crew socks to resell them on eBay or whatever. You steal socks because you need socks. Going after someone over what amounts to a few bucks’ worth of merchandise is absurd.
(I may be biased since that’s what they did to me, but you know :P)
MisterForkbeard
@MisterForkbeard: But also: Actual organized theft from retail seems very rare, from what I can see.
The stats and stores I’ve read indicate that employees are just a huge part of the problem, as is people just stealing stuff when it’s easy and they’re unsupervised.
FastEdD
“Would reporters swallow claims about the negative health effects of consuming butter at face value if they came from the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” people? Maybe!“
Especially if I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter is advertised on their media outlet!
cmorenc
@Starfish:
True, there are valid alternative explanations, like MBA geniuses in management reducing store employees and relying more on self-checkout toward that end. But still, the problem from a public perception standpoint is that the fact that stores are experiencing problematic shrinkage still feeds the narrative, because…a parallel principle to the “if you’re explaining you’re losing” dynamic is that the explainer in this type of situation starts at a disadvantage. The impression you’re trying to correct has the momentum of already being established in the listener’s mind, and you have to motivate the listener to be receptive to your alternative explanation.
Tony Jay
Absolutely sick with jealousy that I didn’t coin this one. Fricking descriptive gold on multiple levels.
Bowtatha Masta.
MattF
Kevin Drum had a post on this a few days ago. ‘Panicked racist bullshit’ is one of the informational modes we see a lot of. Along with ‘retraction and correction of panicked racist bullshit’. And there’s always ‘demonic possession of schoolchildren’ just in case run-of-the-mill racism doesn’t do the job…
Doug R
@Alison Rose: Organized smash and grab rings are NOT poverty-driven. It’s organized crime.
JaySinWA
@MisterForkbeard: OTOH the organized theft that has happened is often large quantities of expensive stuff, so even though it is a small percentage over all, it can have headline grabbing numbers. Of course one of the widely publicised thefts had a pretty inflated loss valuation.
It’s a bit like mass shootings, there are a lot more people killed or injured from guns in other than mass shootings, but mass shootings get national headlines, at least sometimes.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Last week’s On the Media has a full report on this.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@MagdaInBlack: There are supply chain issues, I’ve seen it. I believe most of the big corps have shrink insured.
JML
the “BS retail crime wave” reminds me of the Reagan era “welfare queen”: better narrative for the GOP to screw over poor people than reality. What’s worrisome is how deep into the bone that kind of crap can sink. To this day I know people who are convinced that people on any kind of public assistance are living large and just stealing from “heard-working people like them”.
What’s worse is because this is all based on feeling and belief, it’s incredibly hard to change someone’s mind about it. Stats are meaningless to someone’s belief.
John S.
This ORC nonsense has featured quite prominently here in the PNW. We are treated to breathless tales of retailers closing locations in Seattle and Portland due to “safety” concerns.
Of course it has nothing to do with downtown areas losing foot traffic or anything like that… must be ORCs!
ETA: I love the concept of the Murdoch Cinematic Universe! It’s just like the other MCU except with all villains.
Alison Rose
@Doug R: Sure, but the point here is that the narrative is “organized smash and grab rings” are this massive epidemic, when most retail theft is either individuals or employees taking things, and my personal point is that much (not all) of that kind of shoplifting is based on need.
Elizabelle
The media really needs to get smarter. They fell for this, and for those ridiculous polls showing Trump triumphing over Biden a few months back. Those results should have spurred numerous stories about how it’s possible to lie with polls, and who does and why.
That said, the media is owned (and edited) by sociopaths and psychopaths who don’t want to pay their fare share of taxes. Out you go, Democrats.
sab
@MagdaInBlack: They can write off the cost of the disappeared inventory and they don’t have to report the revenue that never happened because the inventory got stolen before it could be sold at retail price.
cain
@Tony Jay: I was thinking the same – I had a good LOL there!
Chris
@Elizabelle:
Yeah, it’s not a question of being smarter, the media has a bias, and it isn’t the one we’re always hearing about.
Though I admit, I’ve never seen them as bad as they are this decade.
bbleh
Well, ya wanna hed to grab eyeballs, Jack “You Can’t Pronounce The Original Klingon” Smith has just gone straight to the Supremes to resolve the “immunity” nonsense. Bet that’s gonna leave some ketchup on some walls…
Gvg
@Alison Rose: No, actually most food is stolen for the same reasons other stuff is. Profit. Employee theft is a big part of it and. Always has been. There are organized crime rings that go after food and other stuff, they like to get the truckers in on it, or managers in stores who can leave doors open. Individual employees often involve a friend and ringing them up with a discount. I was on a jury about that once. My uncle was a grocery store manager for decades and he had stories. It was a big part of his job to catch this.
Food also just has a spoilage and waste factor that cut into its profits but also make it harder to prove catch some theft.
People do steal food and some might be for hunger, but there are also well mental health issues and spite. Mostly though it’s money. And stupidity. Also people can be just weird.
Ruckus
We live in interesting times.
Where have I heard that before? We live with the concept that we are a nation of farmers and land owners, small business, and I ask, is it really all that small and unpopulated?
A lot of the stores are chains with a lot of stores and a lot of customers and a rather wide range of incomes in the population. And speaking of populations, I live in a county with a population larger than a majority of states. There are a lot of us, and not all of us have great, well paying jobs, live in McMansions and drive $50K and up cars, have 2 kids and a dog that eats better than 1/3 of the population.
I live in CA and Newsom is my governor and he does a decent job of running this state. He is far better, with a far larger population and harder job now than it was when Ronnie was governor. The state is building a rather large high speed rail system that will cover large portions of the state, especially the populated areas. And this will be far better than the current bus/train/bus arrangement that takes a lot longer to get north-south than driving, and that might allow the current rail line to be freight only, which will work better for most of the citizens.
A lot of us live in relatively populated areas that are not getting less populated because humanity does not work that way. We have to plan/work/live like that is not going to reverse itself because humanity doesn’t do that without major wars in which thousands upon thousands die. We can, as a species, slow that growth, but that rarely works the way intended by those selling the idea because humans do seem to like reproducing. Or at least attempting it.
To me, the bottom line is that the world is changing, which of course it always does. And does at a faster rate than even 50 yrs ago. Trying to keep doing the same thing the same way, never works. And we have technology that allows us to do better. I traveled in northern and southern Europe a lot 50 yrs ago and saw a world that worked a lot differently than the US did then and still often does now. We have a place in this world because of the structure of our government, the amount of land and what used to be open spaces, of which many are getting to be rather populated. (I wonder how that works…..) We do have a decent concept of government. We allow and encourage differing concepts and ideas. But some of those only work in situations that really no longer exist, at least in the manner and numbers that they used to. Life changes, life moves on, humanity has to adapt or suffer, it always has and always will be this way.
Scout211
Open thread: SCOTUS news
NBC News
And
ETA: bbleh got there first @#32
Elizabelle
@Chris: They are off the rails.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
There are folk that leave the store with goods that fail to pay for them, we do get runners that head out the emergency exit maybe once a week or so. We recently installed one-way gates at the store entrance, that quite predicably got destroyed within two weeks since they block access to where customer orders are stored. That said, shrink happens when we don’t get product that we were supposed to get(distribution says it is on the truck, but we can never find it), inventory is sometimes badly done(product gets double counted), employees that don’t properly markdown product for store use…
My job is basically to take a customer order, where the website tells the customer(based on inventory) that we have x number of a product; then find it. Every single day I’ll have multiple order that we have to cancel, due to not finding the product that the customer ordered. Usually what we will do, is go to a department head and have the on-hand corrected, that will be shrink.
Gretchen
The very entertaining podcast If Books Could Kill has an episode on the retail panic. You have to be a contributor to get the whole episode but the half hour summary is good and free. amp.listennotes.com/podcasts/if-books-could-kill-michael-hobbes-peter-e6n5WRADKSL/amp/
p.a.
At my local megamart the diy scanners don’t have an option for the organic produce, which is usually a bit more expensive. I always try to use a clerk, but when there’s one fucking live-attendee lane open…
I assume this could be considered ‘theft’. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Alison Rose
@Scout211: Surprised that Barrett didn’t dissent on that first one.
NotMax
Caravans of orcs swarming across the border!
//
Old Man Shadow
In their heads, Conservatives live in a bad 1980’s action movie where all of our American cities are full of violent (and stereotypical) gang members terrorizing poor, innocent white people and only a conservative with a gun can save people from Them and the liberals who coddle them by insisting on due process and respect for human rights.
Chris T.
Shouldn’t that be “NCLEAR”, pronounced either “unclear” or “nuclear”?
p.a.
@Old Man Shadow: You should see their faces when I called my wingnut relations out as “adolescent Charles Bronson fantasists.” When I still talked to them.
trollhattan
In the spirit of “all politics is local” here’s the local news on this topic.
Make of it what you will; IDK if there’s a there, there.
zhena gogolia
@bbleh:
Hahaha
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@JaySinWA:
I’m in St. Louis, and there were a few instances of this happening locally too. It doesn’t happen that often, but I don’t ever remember hearing about this locally until the last couple of years. Looting during a disaster, riot, or other unusual event is one thing. This is different, and I don’t blame people for being shocked and disturbed by it.
The thing the Murdoch Cinematic Universe does so well is take real things and exaggerate them. This is a real thing. It is more unusual and easier to do now that they’ve cut employees so much. We have to figure out how to better respond to things like this. Dismissing it isn’t helpful as it reinforces their stereotypes about liberals being soft on crime. Spending $267 million on a program is an overreaction. A study group is productive, but falls right into the same pattern: they hype, we study, and by the time the results are in they’ve painted us as criminal-friendly while moving on to the next destructive narrative. If I had hundreds of millions of dollars, I’d basically devote it to quickly investigating and stomping Murdoch CU narratives. I’d respond with media savvy simulations that show how understaffing makes it easier for thieves to get away with it that kind of thing… provide charts on how shrink has increased with staffing decreases, have undercover videos showing how easy it is to steal with self checkout, etc. Because the media is so lazy, I’d spoonfeed an amped up alternate narrative to them.
Sadly, I don’t have millions of dollars. I don’t even have millions of hours. I work too much.
Ken
One of the many reasons that Joe Biden is a much better person than me, is that were I in his office, I couldn’t resist the urge to file an amicus brief reading only “Don’t tempt me.”
Peale
@trollhattan: I do kind of got to hand it to the mindset that thinks getting charged with a misdemeanor means you don’t have to show up to court because “nothing is going to happen.” Like you’d only show up to court if you’re going to get 30 days in jail. I’m going to guess that the sheriff thinks everything short of a life sentence is some kind of ‘slap on the wrist.’
Peale
I’m also wondering whether the fact that this caught on isn’t just another instance of “its always projection with them” for panics. Like the idea that the public schools are full of “groomers” has an origin but one of the reason its a full on panic is that Evangelicals do have a problem with “groomers” similar to that that the Catholic Church had and they’re just thinking “well if its that bad at the holy church, imagine what it must be like in those devil schools.” In this case, I’m going to be that retail theft took off a bit during inflation and that there’s not a few good christian folks who decided to take 5 finger discounts and just thought “well, those “urban people” in the city do this all the time, so why shouldn’t I. It must be a living hell where they are. It must be worse there.”
Soprano2
@Starfish: One of the things I love about Aldi is that the stores are relatively small, and they NEVER MOVE STAPLES. Everything is always in the same place every week except for the special stuff and the “aisle of surprise”. I hate hate hate how places like WalMart move stuff around to make you look at everything. They remodeled the one we go to over a year ago and I still have to hunt for some things.
Ruckus
@Old Man Shadow:
The only point I might argue with is the 1980’s reference.
I think it goes back farther than that. Conservatives always want to conserver something – something that they think existed a certain way at some time in the past that really didn’t in their lifetimes. They seem to want a mythical past from long ago when men were men and about 90% of the modern world didn’t exist, including the premise of their demands. I believe they don’t really think the world rotates and time moves on, they want a world, not of dreams but nightmares for their chosen enemies.
Betty Cracker
According to HuffPo, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate (thought he was in jail for rape, but maybe not?) and assorted other terrible people had a livestream on the former Twitter last night. During the livestream, Ramaswamy gave new meaning to the word by taking his device in the bathroom and pissing without muting it. Someone had to ask him to mute it. Jesus, these people are such disgusting pigs in every way.
Soprano2
Employee theft is probably something you don’t want to talk to me about right now. After my previous manager left, we discovered that two employees were stealing from us to the tune of thousand and thousands of dollars (evidently even though she told me she’d learned about all the ways people could steal and was keeping an eye on it, she wasn’t doing jack shit to watch it at all, because the voids were SO FUCKING OBVIOUS)! Both voiding cash tickets and keeping the cash (sometimes a couple of hundred dollars) or giving away massive amounts of alcohol to their friends. You may think small amounts of theft aren’t a big deal, but if everyone feels they can steal $5 or $10 dollars worth of stuff from a store, it adds up for the store owner pretty quickly. All of us are paying for the stuff people steal from these stores.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: UGH OH NO I CAN’T DEAL WITH THAT
ETA: Bad enough to hear him talk, but to hear him pissing? 🙁
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Soprano2: While most of our stuff is in the same place, they do move stuff to multiple places. Tools may be in their regular place(the home), or this time of year they may be in the gift center(conviently located by the entrance for easier theft). We also have(the much hated by employees) wing stacks that may or may not be in the same department as the item. Wing stacks make finding stuff a PIA and make the place look trashy(especially after being hit a few times with a forklift).
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Peale:
The courts here (St. Louis) tend to throw out a lot of misdemeanors because poor people can not pay the fines and if you jail them, they also can’t work. I’m not sure how it is in California. The end result is that literally nothing is going to happen. That is a source of friction here. There should be some consequences, reparations, community service, something.
mali muso
@Gretchen: I enjoy that podcast and did listen to that episode (the shortened version). They explained this whole panic quite some time ago by following the trail back to the industry-shill source noted above.
Tony Jay
@cain:
A really good analogy just pings, doesn’t it?
StringOnAStick
The “theft is out of control” thing affects perceptions of the craziest things. Our brain damaged but nice enough neighbor no longer feeds birds because she claims that’s encouraging them to be lazy and steal, plus they should have to work for a living like everyone else does, and she came up with that bat shit formulation at the height of this ORC crap last summer.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Soprano2: I hope you are pressing charges.
Soprano2
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: Geez, I ordered a bathtub faucet from Menards in the store. When I went to pick it up, it took them almost 30 minutes to find it because they had put someone else’s name on the box, and there was nothing on the outside of the box that told what was inside it! I was pretty mad, but kept it in check because I know it wasn’t their fault. It’s either a shitty stocking system or an employee who mislabeled the box, I don’t know which. My husband worked at Bass Pro when there was only one in the whole U.S.; he said their fastest-growing department was returned goods, because they got so much wrong stuff in people’s mail orders due to their shitty storage system.
eclare
@StringOnAStick:
Wait, WTF? She quit feeding birds?
Soprano2
@trollhattan: I think they should be able to combine amounts stolen in one day. If you’re stealing more than $950 a day you’re not stealing because you’re in need. I know they increased the amount because of inflation, which makes sense, but this idea that someone could steal $900 worth of goods in one day from multiple stores and only be charged with a misdemeanor for each one is bullshit.
Betty Cracker
@StringOnAStick: Good lord. I am sorry you have to live in close proximity to such a fool.
I’ve heard something along those lines before. The blood-gargling sociopath who used to be the NRA lobbyist in Florida, Marion Hammer, made a similar argument to keep the state legislature from making the Florida Scrub Jay the state bird. The birds are friendly and will eat out of people’s hands, which Hammer said signaled a “welfare mentality.” (I wish a flock of Cassowaries would invade her yard and kick the shit out of her.)
NotMax
@StringOnAStick
Without attracting a buffet o’ birds what does she expect her cats to eat?
//
Miss Bianca
@StringOnAStick: Are you serious?!
I mean, granted, that take does sound suspiciously close to that of some environmentalists’ I’ve heard, but still…to hear someone honestly profess it that way would make me go “and this is how Nature tells me ‘Do Not Touch'” as I slowly back away…
Soprano2
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: I don’t mind that. What I do mind is what they do in a lot of stores, where they completely rearrange everything so that you have no idea where the hell anything is anymore. They want to make you look at everything again.
eclare
@Betty Cracker:
Those birds mean business!
Jay C
@zhena gogolia:
Is there really that much of a difference?
BellyCat
Already looking forward to the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Lamb this Easter!
Soprano2
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: We decided not to, because although we know this happened proving it in a court would be quite a different thing to do. I decided it wasn’t worth our time and trouble to mess with it, and consider it a lesson learned. How can I prove that someone gave liquor away to people? I can’t, but we know it happened based on knowledge of the industry and employee observation. One of them was the mother of my previous manager!!! That woman had spent time in prison; I knew that, but let her daughter hire her anyway because she had gotten cleaned up and swore she had changed.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Soprano2: We had an order on Saturday that two of us couldn’t find. I’ve tried to impress on my co-workers to update the location when they move stuff around in our storage area, but it is never done(partly because our systems don’t support it for some orders).
Hob
@Gretchen: Yeah, this information has been available for a while, Hobbes was able to connect the dots in October without digging too hard (although the Retail Dive story from November that’s driving the current coverage did provide some more details). I’m glad it’s getting more visibility now but it’s pretty shameful that the press was so credulous until now.
trollhattan
@Soprano2: The spouse once had a manager jerb at a women’s clothing chain. The loss prevention training focused largely on preventing employee theft, which the experts at the time believed to be by far the larger concern over shoplifting. Of course they were trained on that as well.
Gets very tricky as to policies about retail employees confronting thieves.
She was robbed at gunpoint (by a woman) at a different store earlier in her working life, so had some experience in the whole retail crime realm.
cain
@Betty Cracker:
lololol – way to represent us Indians, asshole.
trollhattan
@Soprano2: I have to believe the Costco racks are motorized and do a nightly robot dance rearranging themselves around the store. Like a river, you never step into the same Costco twice.
NotMax
@BellyCat
Along the same lines, appreciate they went to the effort of creating the lid label.
:)
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
They are angry about the world changing and them just being small fry in the overall concept. Sure Elon has money, but what else is he besides that? What would he be if he hadn’t inherited a huge pile of money? NOBODY. As the world grows more populated, everyone’s place in it becomes smaller. People who think they are the absolutely best are afraid that they are just becoming an even smaller dot on the map. And they are. Look at SFB. He’s never been all that and shot of 100 yr old cognac. He’s rubbing alcohol in that shot glass. OK battery acid. If he didn’t have an ego that is bigger than the state he lives in, he’d be a retired parking lot attendant. (A job that hardly exists any longer.) IOW he’s worse than completely, utterly, useless, he’s one costly human mistake. Millions born every year and we had to get him? What did we do, individually or collectively, to deserve this?
Suzanne
@Chris:
OMG this.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Philadelphia, and I stopped at a Rite-Aid. It’s a huge store on Chestnut Street. I think I saw two people working, one at the cash registers and one out in the sales floor, ostensibly stocking shelves. The shelves were 90% bare in the “health and beauty” sections. Just…. nothing. It’s not that thieves took it. Literally, there was just no merchandise placed there. If I worked there, and someone tried to steal some moisturizer or whatever…. first of all, I wouldn’t see it, because in a huge store like that with two visible employees, there’s no way I could surveil. And secondly…. who cares? I’d totally let someone take it. It’s not worth the risk. The company obviously doesn’t GAF, why should I?
Sister Golden Bear
@Scout211: Alito in particular has made clear that he’s salivating to take away LGBTQ+ rights, and re-criminalizing us. But her emails…
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan: We are not allowed(“subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination”) to confront anyone suspected of stealing. The official policy to provide extreme customer service, but that is difficult when you have one person covering multiple departments.
NotMax
@trollhattan
Rack ‘n’ roll.
:)
Alison Rose
@Suzanne: John Oliver did a segment on dollar stores recently and noted how often there is only one employee working the whole store at a time. There were shots from customers of aisles completely filled with boxes of merch and racks, stuff spilled everywhere, customers helping to shelve stuff while the employee ran the register. Fucking insane.
Sister Golden Bear
SF did have some high-profile shoplifting incidents, friends of mine witnessed a few, but the bigger problem for CVS and Walgreens is they over-expanded with too many unprofitable locations.
Saying you’re closing a store due to shoplifting is a convenient way for executive to avoid acknowledging they made bad decisions.
narya
Chris Hayes did a segment on this on Friday, too. Nothing that hasn’t been covered above (OP and comments), but I’m always glad to see journalists doing their jobs and pushing back on bullshit.
Also too: several folks in this thread have noted how disorganized and failure-prone the stocking and tracking systems are, in multiple national retailers’ operations. Let me guess: some MBA decided to purchase this brand new system (it’s sure to work THIS time!), and either it’s a crap system, or folks weren’t trained in how to use it, or some combination of the two. Does the person who chose the system get pushback? Nope. I realize you need some kind of system to manage supply chains and inventory, but it seems the ones they have now make it impossible to know what a store has, and make it difficult to tell just how much is being stolen, and by whom.
@Soprano2: Yours is a different case from what I’m saying, and oof, I’d be seriously pissed off, too.
Barbara
@Sister Golden Bear: I worry about these kinds of laws because they can be cited as precedent for laws that make other treatments, but particularly hormonal and other gender reassignment related services, subject to similar state sanction. Of course I don’t support “conversion” therapy, among other things, it’s almost always coercive and it is essentially religious indoctrination disguised as psychotherapy. But the precedent is not necessarily favorable.
Scout211
Continued good news out of Michigan. NBC
Big Gretch continues to be an amazing governor.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@narya: IT costs money and doesn’t directly lead to sales, it is the first place they skimp on.
Martin
A few other things showing up as I’ve been following this:
This is how fascism works. The state (republicans, specifically) coordinate with retail lobbyists who were advancing this narrative, using the media to uncritically disseminate the lie, to shape the publics social viewpoint – that liberal cities are shitholes, that gangs of minorities are trying to steal your shit, that these store closures are because of these liberal minorities, and not because they’re terrible at running their business and don’t know how to stand up to investors.
Been saying this is bullshit for a while now. Always nice to be vindicated.
NotMax
FYI.
More than 2,800 stores are closing across the US in 2023. Here’s the full list.
Martin
@Chris: And this isn’t new. It was probably 2015 or maybe even earlier when I observed one of my local Apple Stores had about as many employees than all other retail stores in that section of the mall one evening (Crystal Court, the little mall wing across from South Coast Plaza). It was right before mall close, but still, it was alarming.
My interest was why Apple would staff in this way, not why the other stores would, but that piece later fell in place during another wave of apparel retailers going under.
Jeffro
From the WaPo’s piece today on trumpov’s “commanding lead” in Iowa as the caucuses draw nearer:
SEVENTY-THREE PERCENT THINK TRUMPOV CAN WIN ‘DESPITE THE LEGAL CHALLENGES’!!1!
That’s just unreal.
That’s what happens when an entire party insists that the (orange) emperor does have clothes, the very best clothes, don’t you know. Um, what??? (It’s also what happens when the FoxBubble constantly portrays President Biden as so doddering and weak that anyone – even a guy facing 91+ felony counts – can beat him)
narya
@Martin: I loathe self-checkout. I use it sometimes–e.g., I have two items and the line at the one checker is 6 people long–but I really don’t like it. And I won’t use it if I intended to pay with cash but the self-checkout only takes cards. Staff the stores with actual people!
catclub
Do we need a thread on Jack Smith taking an issue to SCOTUS before Trump does?
NotMax
@Martin
Best Buy isn’t on the ropes yet but they are in sight of them. They recently revamped their product mix, ditching entire categories of goods.
Chris
@Martin:
I’ve thought for a while that the national narrative provides a really fucking terrible incentive to businessmen to never have to be good at their jobs, because every time they fuck up the whole country rushes to explain to them that it’s not their fault, it’s the fault of the greedy unions, and the oppressive government, and the unreasonable customers, and, and, and, literally everybody but them. And since a lot of them prefer the emotional high of watching their business die but “knowing” they have somebody else to blame, over the material benefit of actually running your business well but having to acknowledge that many of its failings will be your fault… you keep getting more and more shitty businessmen.
Thought that ever since I met my first landlord in Miami, a prize Republican shithead whose business was taking off like a chained sloth.
Martin
@NotMax: This is because retailers long ago determined that employees are costs to be cut, and not the reason people go to the store in the first place. When I first worked retail I did like 10 different jobs in the store, one of which was I was trained to mark up suits for tailoring. There was a worker in the men’s section at my local Nordstrom that I regularly went back to when I needed to buy clothes for work or an event, because he gave me really good advice. I could have gone to a cheaper place, but that guys advice was worth every penny.
And that was the answer to why Apple staffed their stores that way – Apple Store is the most expensive place to buy any Apple product, and yet it’s also the most popular place to buy any Apple product (14th largest retailer in the US). It’s because the employees know stuff, and are there to help, and customers value that. The end. It’s that fucking simple. People value service.
But almost the entirety of the rest of the retail world freaked the fuck out at Amazon and convinced themselves that the thing people liked about Amazon was the price, when in fact it was the reviews as a source of information about products that they couldn’t get from retail employees. Costco also didn’t fall for this, hardware stores kind of did, getting rid of their employees with trade knowledge for regular retail workers, and a few others.
Chris
@Martin:
Yeah, for at least five years and probably nearer to ten every retail experience I’ve had has come with long lines and barely any staffing. Even when the store is almost completely empty, you’ll still have a line, because there’s only one register open.
SiubhanDuinne
Open thread? I just wanta say, I really don’t think I can survive another election season’s worth of Steve Kornacki. I’m not sure I can cope with him for another week, tbh.
Kosh III
The Nashville Fox local affiliate recently ran a “story” about this. Breathless anxiety emoting all over the story. They focused on the high end mall in a rich neighborhood. It included videos of black(of course) people running away with stuff and an interview with an elderly white woman who worried about her personal safety while shopping.
Martin
@NotMax: They’ve been on the ropes for years. We’ll see if this post-Covid shift helps get them out of that spot. When I helped my dad buy a TV there last year it was kind of a shit show. The employee was better than I was expecting, but the store still looked like a warehouse – which I don’t fault them for too much given that delivery is what got them through Covid so they turned each store into a distribution point rather than a showroom.
Still pissed they bought my beloved Pacific Sales. They went downhill instantly after that went through.
NotMax
@narya
Was in Target on Saturday during the monthly trip into town to pick up a few necessaries. Place was jam-packed with shoppers. Can’t recall, outside of the grand opening, ever seeing such crowds there. To the store’s credit, 13 of the 16 cashier stations were open (most I’ve ever seen active), allowing checkout to move smoothly and quickly.
Starfish
@Soprano2: Yes. They move things to make you shop more, AND the brands pay them to move stuff.
Our local grocery store has never quite recovered since the pandemic, is now always understaffed, and is always missing some weird thing that you would never expect.
When that big grocery merger happens, we will have one major supermarket chain, and they will probably close our terrible store so we will have to go to the other terrible store.
Martin
@Chris: The important element here is that Republicans are so eager to score community points that they chose to be complicit in the effort, rather than focus on what was best for the country. Republicans didn’t just buy into this narrative and set up hearings for these lobbyists to lie (expect no contempt charges here), those same Republicans went on Fox News and social media to advance the claims themselves.
prostratedragon
@catclub: Don’t you just love surprises?!🤩
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: I agree. The amounts should be abled to be combined.
Martin
@Chris: Yeah, don’t buy into any ‘this is because of Covid’ narratives. This long predated it. This is also a tactic of venture capital – to buy up struggling retailers with high staffing levels and then slash the staffing. They figure they have consumers over a barrel. If that’s your only place to buy milk, you’ll shop there no matter how shitty it is (see aforementioned John Oliver dollar store segment).
Another point of pressure on these stores is going to be young people who fucking hate corporations, in part because of this shit. They’ll almost always go out of their way to shop at an independent chain, or locally owned business. Right now they aren’t slinging a lot of dollars to have a big impact (except on hiring, they don’t want to work there either) but that’ll change with time.
Almost Retired
@SiubhanDuinne: God Bless You! I thought I was the only person who thought Kornacki’s exuberant Khaki-clad nerdiness was growing tiresome.
NotMax
@Martin
This tech store in japan is wild. (First ten minutes of the video, the remainder is mostly unboxing.)
Elizabelle
@Chris:
Had to see that again. LOL. My sympathies.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin:
I’m all over the store picking up orders for customers, online and in-store. When I’m in an aisle, folk have the expectation that I know something about that department, I don’t. I understand that expectation, and will explain that I’ll try and find someone. Often, there is no one there; they may be at lunch or on break or may have called out that day.
I’ve gotten to the point to say that I’m already assisting a customer as I hear “Attention Associates, NEW ORDER” on my phone.
Kay
@Chris:
Agree 100%. Remember the baby formula shortage? The company was making contaminated baby formula so was shut down and media spent WEEKS blaming Joe Biden.
I have no idea why alack of baby formula is not the fault of the baby formula industry! WTF?
StringOnAStick
@Betty Cracker: The neighbor had a severe brain injury 3 years ago; people who knew her before that tell me she was a completely different person. Now she’s someone that her kids should be monitoring a LOT more closely but they live 4 hours away and i think there’s “history”. She so shocked me with that comment about not feeding birds anymore that I just looked at her and walked away. Granted I have to do the “walk away” thing a lot because she goes on and on and on, and does not recognize cues that I’m busy. I just try to avoid her as much as possible. I also deployed more bird feeders in our yard!
Elizabelle
Having one employee in a Dollar store, or any store, seems to me dangerous for the employee. They would be defenseless.
Have seen a few Forensic Files episodes on what happens to one person soloing in a (late night) retail job.
Ruckus
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
I like shopping in stores that allow self checkout, like Target. I don’t know of any grocery store that does this. It’s normally faster, easier and less hassle. And all the stores that do this have someone watching the self checkout area.
Starfish
@Scout211: If the national Democrats were bold, they would be repealing the Hyde amendment and doing it to improve on health insurance access as opposed to saying “Look at us. We did ACA, and it is great” when it is not all that.
SiubhanDuinne
@zhena gogolia:
I’m not sure I’d be able to discern the difference.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Starfish:
If it wasn’t for the ACA, my parents likely wouldn’t have health insurance due to pre-existing conditions and I wouldn’t have it from my employer. I owe both the ACA and my union for my major medical/hospitalization insurance
Sure, the Hyde Amendment should be gone, but do you think that will happen in this Congress?
NotMax
@Ruckus
Chain supermarkets here offer self-checkout. Whole Foods seems to be the exception.
Even Costco here recently put in a self-checkout lane.
Martin
@NotMax: See also Huaqiangbei. Even larger.
smith
So the woman in TX whose abortion was blocked by Ken Paxton has gone to another state to get it. Let’s see if he tries to cook up a bogus prosecution when she gets back, if she decides to come back. Anything to keep his name in the news, I guess.
Poe Larity
So now rather than relying on mass media dystopian memes and nextdoor trolls to rid us of pearl-clutching gentrifying masses, I actually have to go out knock over Target and pay a tiktok influencer to stream it?
Is there patreon channel for bail?
Hob
@Starfish: Boldness is not actually what determines whether a bill becomes a law.
There’s never any shortage of shallow “they didn’t even try!!!” rhetoric on any subject, but it’s impressive that you’d pick this particular idea of being able to repeal the Hyde Amendment with solely Democratic votes immediately after we went through nearly a year of one single Senate asshole blocking military staffing entirely because he didn’t want federal employees to be able to get abortions.
Ruckus
@SiubhanDuinne:
Given the output I thought that him talking was more like #2……
Martin
@Kay: Because we are so well trained to be uncritical of capitalism that you cannot blame the industry. It’s not McDonalds fault a combo meal costs $17, it’s Biden’s. People in struggling rural towns can’t blame the capitalist forces that caused the town to struggle, but Trump can fix it. We are totally bought and sold.
Suzanne
@NotMax: I hear Costco is getting rid of self-checkout. Not sure if that’s confirmed.
I hate it. Accidentally scan something twice, have to ask for someone to take it off. Unexpected item in the bagging area is my goddamn purse, which I would like to set down so I can take my wallet out. Get fucked.
ETA: Whole Foods here has self-checkout!
Martin
@Ruckus: Ralphs has self checkout everywhere I’ve seen.
catclub
@Hob: yeah, call back about the Hyde amendment when the Democrats have 60 RELIABLE votes in the senate, and the House majority.
The last time the Democrats had 60 votes – end 2009 – July 2010 – there were ten or so Democrats in the middle who would be VERY unlikely to vote to repeal it. They came from states like Missouri and Louisiana and Montana and North Dakota and Indiana and NC.
ETA: I think they had 60 votes from July 2009 until December when Ted Kennedy died.
VFX Lurker
I beg to differ on your dismissal of the ACA. I have three rejections from three separate insurers when I sought private individual coverage prior to the ACA. When I left a toxic job in December 2014, I was able to get two years of good and affordable coverage through CoveredCA, until I finally qualified for health coverage in Jan 2017 from my new employer.
The ACA was a Big F’in Deal for people like me.
Scout211
No, they announced that they were keeping self-checkout but adding more staff in the self-check area. Members were letting non-members use their cards for self-check, so the shrinkage for Costco was in the membership revenue, which is big for Costco.
evodevo
@Alison Rose: Besides, from a few horror stories I’ve read lately, confronting the thief can get you injured or killed, or if you are successful, fired by the big boss for ???… so anyone making retail clerk wages is certainly not going to take the risk…
StringOnAStick
@VFX Lurker: The ACA provided my husband and I with insurance for two years before we reached Medicare age. Without it, my husband is uninsurable because he has been diagnosed with a chronic blood cancer. I’ve had enough orthopaedic surgeries to also likely be uninsurable prior to the ACA. The ACA is a HUGE deal for us!
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Ruckus: some of the grocery stores here in nyc have self-checkout. i think it sucks bc it’s taking jobs away AND the damn scanners are made for short people. they’re MUCH lower than the conveyor belt and register bagging area where the actual people work.
at my size (6’6″), it makes packing things SO much rougher on the knees and back. arranging pounds and pounds of cat litter along with canned goods and other noms in our recyclable bags totally sucks on the self-checkout scanner pad.
fuck that shit.
lowtechcyclist
@NotMax:
Tuesday morning, please be gone I’m tired of you,
what have you got to lose?
;-)
ETA: I’d honestly never heard of this chain before.
StringOnAStick
@evodevo: My late BIL was a loss prevention guy for decades as that career path evaporated. In his last job, pursuing a shoplifter out the door was a firing offense.
Ksmiami
Our main stream media companies are bat guano.
catclub
@lowtechcyclist: I bet more than that opened. Maybe not quite as large chains, though.
There is immense churn in retail. Also restaurants have short lifespans but new ones are always opening.
gvg
@narya: How do you know it was a brand-new MBA? It’s popular to bash them but in my experience the reasons for bad equipment and software are just more varied, and often never really known.
Years ago, it was time to upgrade our departments phone line switching system. Our managers who had successfully upgraded the time before and had done multiple other system upgrades for other things did their research, checked with colleagues, checked reviews, listened to presentations and took bids then selected. It was installed and didn’t work. They pulled it and tried to fix, retried same thing. 3 rounds. It just crashed under the load, which research said it should handle plus an assumed future increase. Eventually we purchased another system. I don’t know if they were able to get any money back. We definitely didn’t get an answer as to why.
Another time I think the older experienced administration far above us just made a bad choice (people soft phoey) and cheaped out on enough support software even though I know they did spend quite a lot in the early stages.
Way back I think an inexperienced department just got scammed at the beginning of the switch to computer everything. Mid 90’s they required students to buy certain laptops which turned out to be lemons.
New MBA’s don’t make all or even most of the stupid choices in business. People are people.
Suzanne
@Scout211: Oh gotcha. I love Costco, but I do not do the self-checkout there.
gvg
@Martin: There are hardly any apple stores. They don’t put one on every corner. In fact there are none in my small city although they have an “area” in a couple of places like the university bookstore.
Martin
@StringOnAStick: Same here. We bought my work policy off the exchange. Will carry us the next decade. Ms Martin and daughter are both uninsurable without the exchange.
Kay
@Martin:
Sometimes I just feel really far apart from the rest of the country.
This isn’t complicated to me:
That is the fault of the managers in that facility. I can’t imagine how many mental gymnastics media had to do to get to “Joe Biden is at fault”. They’re crazy people. It’s irrational.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
I don’t know how Ace Hardware is in general, but my local Ace still has all their old guys who can answer almost any question, and the lines almost always move fast even on Saturday afternoons.
During the pandemic they started closing on Sundays, and they haven’t gone back, which I think helps keep the old guys in the game, having a day of rest that they can absolutely count on.
If they went out of business I’d be heartbroken. The only times I’ll shop for anything hardware-related anywhere else is if either a home maintenance emergency has cropped up on a Sunday, or when I need something they simply don’t carry. If I can buy it from them, I will.
Martin
@gvg: Yeah, but they are not just common in the big cities where all of this retail theft is supposedly happening, they are prominent and valuable. Their biggest stores do a billion a year in sales out of 10,000 sqft. These should be shoplifting magnets but they aren’t.
Martin
@lowtechcyclist: I always liked mine. Was sad to see it close. They were doing fine but the property manager wanted something higher revenue and has proceeded to burn through 4 anchor stores in the space they combined storefronts to create.
My son has two in his little town and they’re great. One is a catch all for weird stuff, gardening, housewares, and the other is a proper hardware store, lumber, etc.
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
One of the Aces here has a store within the store dedicated to nothing but Christmas decor and tchotchkes.
evodevo
@Soprano2: yes.this…they just finished the “remodeling” of our local WallyWorld, and no one can find anything. You see people wandering around lost, trying to find bird seed or the baking supplies aisle or whatever. Some of the depts were relocated clear to the other side of the store. It took me a week to find the dog food aisle…
Chris
@Kay:
I remember when there was that big incident at a mine in West Virginia a decade or so ago, and miners being interviewed were like “oh Lord, I hope they don’t shut down the mine because of this!”
And yes, I know interviewers will always select the quotes that drive certain narratives, but even so, Jesus fucking Christ, so many born serfs in this country.
Hob
@catclub: I mean, it’s also not at all true that the Democrats have been resting on their laurels and just saying “the ACA is great, nothing better is needed.” They have been continuously making and publicizing efforts to expand coverage and improve subsidies. Some of those efforts succeeded, others were blocked by the usual suspects i.e. Republicans & Manchin. Whether most people are aware of this is a different story, there’s the usual difficulty getting through media fog and citizen apathy, but Starfish’s claim went beyond “people aren’t getting the message” or even “there should’ve been more pressure on Manchin somehow” to “the party thinks the ACA is perfect and is saying literally nothing except that”, which is clearly false and it pisses me off to see someone making so little effort when it’s a subject they care about.
lowtechcyclist
@Ruckus:
Here in the DC area, grocery chains Giant, Safeway, and Weis all have self-checkout. I also prefer it to regular checkout; I can almost always just walk right up to a register and start scanning, rather than waiting in line behind even one or two other people, and be out of there a lot faster than I otherwise would. Also, I can bag stuff together that I want bagged together.
The only drawback is that Giant and Weis checkouts have a nag-voice that says, “place your item in the bagging area” in the most irritating way possible if you aren’t moving as fast as it would like. But I’m willing to put up with that to get out of there and on my way quickly.
Soprano2
@Martin: I’ve always thought self-checkouts were obvious points for massive amounts of theft. Our Walmart makes you show a receipt for anything in your cart that isn’t in a bag. I could bring bags and put stuff in them and they would never check it.
Suzanne
@Alison Rose:
I hate shopping so much. For this and so many other reasons.
SuzMom and I went shopping at our local mall yesterday. It was packed. I successfully procured multiple Christmas gifts, but I ended up walking out of a couple of stores because I was in no mood to deal with it if something is difficult to find. I knew I would need to start that trip with a coffee, and I did, and it all was fine and now I don’t have to do it again until next year.
I expect stores to do a really good job, at this point. I won’t put up with understaffed nonsense. No messy stores, no empty shelves, no long lines, I want nicely arrayed merchandise. Easy to find what I want. Clean. If you have a physical storefront, you better make it worth my while to be there.
Soprano2
@Starfish: About the time you finally know where stuff is, they move it. I wonder if they know how much this enrages shoppers? I don’t have time to look for things I buy regularly. Sometimes I use the Walmart app to find where stuff is in the store, that usually works ok.
Hoppie
@NotMax: Ah, Yodobashi Camera. We bought a printer at their Yokahama store once while merchandising the Worldcon in Japan. Every hour they stopped to sing the company song to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic. Japan is a remarkable place!
trollhattan
Remember the squeeze coin holders old men would carry in their pocket to proffer at checkout, then slowly and deliberately take out coin after coin after coin, arranging them on the counter until they had the desired sum in the preferred value distribution? I’d like to become that guy and clog up self-checkout, “yes, I’m paying cash thank you very much. Now see here, I’ve lost count. That’s twenty-five, thirty, forty…[ting] oh dear, I’ve dropped a dime, can you help me find it?”
Kay
@Chris:
My friend Anne listens to C SPAN, the show where people call in. She says ordinary people act like “volunteer lobbyists” for big corps – call in and say shit like “well, Wal Mart has to a make a profit!”
She now works for Sherrod Brown, so, good fit! :)
Soprano2
@Kay: It is simple, but maybe that company is an advertiser so they don’t want to criticize it too much, thus blaming the big bad government instead. I agree, it was dumb, like blaming him for temporary increase in egg prices.
Kathleen
@Betty Cracker: Does she think that birds “shoplift steaks”?
Splitting Image
@Betty Cracker:
Example #32,781 of so-called Christians paying no attention to the guy they pretend to believe is the Son of God.
“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life?” – Matt. 6: 26-27.
The average Monty Python fan is probably more aware of this passage than the average fundigelical, but that’s true of a lot of the Bible. They’ll be complaining about the lilies next.
Kathleen
@Jay C: OK. You had me laughing out loud. Cincinnati definitely not bringing its best here.
BethanyAnne
I’ve gotten used to self checkout. I like it at the local Walmart, and don’t at the local Krogers. The Walmart system is better by far. It doesn’t nag me, and there is plenty of room for my reusable bags. Kroger’s system is always on my ass to put something on the scale, did you take something off, could you move faster, you work for us and we have standards, slowpoke.
Martin
@Soprano2: They are, but retailers are fine with theft as long as it’s below the costs they’d incur to prevent it. Self checkout was a typical automation play that never really worked out – they never solved the various flaws in self checkout, which would have required broader changes to their operations.
Amazon did that work with their Amazon Go stores, but I don’t think they feel it’s worked out either.
Apple does have that in their stores, though. You can use the Apple Store app to self-checkout most things in the store just by scanning it with your phone. It works well, and feels weird to just scan a few things and walk out. But Apple making it so any employee can check you out on the spot makes it easy enough to do that most people just do that.
Searcher
@Soprano2: Re: mail orders, I just got two wrong items in the Christmas presents I ordered. The items I ordered cost $50; the items I received totaled nearly $200.
They told me just to donate the extra items to a charity rather than deal with the return.
I’m guessing that gets marked down as part of the $45B of shrinkage.
Kathleen
@Jeffro: Did you see Glenn Kessler’s hard hitting takin’ it to the Democrat man “timeline” on Hunter Biden, STARTING WITH HIS EFFING BIRTH? Hit piece from start to finish. I saw there were 431 comments but I couldn’t access them when I selected the link nor could I make a comment. I’m guessing the ratio was awesome and WaPoop quit while it was covered in its own pixel puke.
Was there anything comparable about Trump, Kushner, etc? Bueller? Anyone?
Searcher
@trollhattan: So I *mostly* hate self-checkout, but one thing I do like it for is every so often I go to one, drop my pocket full of change into the funnel that whisks it away and counts it, and then scan the rest on my card.
The hilarity then happens when I need to return an item from my order, because they’ll have to give me the $1.72 in cash I put in before refunding the rest on my credit card.
sab
@Searcher: I mostly love self-checkout at my grocery. Friendly machine. I get to bag it as I want (frozen stuff together, never snuggled next to the flour bag). No standing in line forever getting rammed by the cart behind. However, at age almost 70, I seem to be developing carpal tunnel syndrome from scanning my own groceries.
And today the printer jammed and I had to wait for a guy to run to the main front desk behind the post office and customer service to get a receipt so I could leave.
I worked thirty-five years in public accounting so I am familiar with malfunctioning printers and was pleasantly patient. The grocery guy was middle-aged and first day on that job and I thought he was going to have a stroke. Normally they can almost sleep on their feet at that job.
sab
@sab: I tried self-checkout at CVS Drugstore and that was a mistake. What a rude machine. It yelled at me constantly, very loudly, and I still had to get help from the one lonely cashier. “Go faster, you stupid customer! Bag it now! Hurry! I don’t care if your scan failed! You should already have had your credit or debit card out of your wallet before you started!”
ETA: Completely different experience from my local grocery chain self-checkout.
I like meeting cashiers. I have chatted with some of them for decades. But many of the older ones I knew disappeared during Covid. The kids are not as friendly.
artem1s
@Elizabelle:
no, they created it. think about it this way, what makes a more engaging story? hordes of black kids bum rushing the aisles, pushing down old ladies, and grabbing whatever they can before the cops arrive? or average Joe white guy employee lifting a couple of socket wrenches during his lunch break and then passing them out as Christmas presents for his buddies?
If it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead. the less actual details and facts the better. Faux News barely has to lift a finger to get their audience to paint the picture in their heads. in their imagination, the audience isn’t casting guys that look like them or their buddies in the bad guy roles.
Jay
Keep in mind that all Retail “shrinkage” is 1% to 1.5% of claimed inventory.
Shrinkage includes bad inventory practices, damaged inventory, inventory that never arrived and theft.
When I ran the Stores for a Tech Manufacturer, we started every day with cycle counts based on the A,B,C methods. A items were the top 50% of inventory value, eg CRT’s, Flat Screens, fully assembled circuit boards, expensive chips. B items were the next 30% of inventory value, cast housings, transformers, etc. C items were the bottom 20%, capacitors, resistors, nuts, bolts, screws.
All A items were counted every week, B items once a month, C items every quarter.
My crew would go out first thing every morning, do their counts, bring the count sheets back to me, and I would check the counts against on line inventory, and then do an audit if there was a discrepancy. 99.9% of inventory errors were transactional, basically “computer error”.
When I worked Retail, inventory was done once a year. An outside Company using temp workers*, did the counts, there was no audit. Meanwhile, every day we had half a dozen Associates wandering the isles, climbing ladders or using pickers trying to find inventory for a Customer that the system said we had, but nobody could find it.
*People who had no clue about what they were looking for or what the item was, they were just running off the barcodes and location tags. The guy who managed the Plumbing Department would fill boxes up with used plumbing parts that customers brought in as “do you have this?” samples, slap a barcode and item number and stick them on the top shelf of the racks, at the back, to cover up his departments shrinkage. The Inventory people would scan the barcode, read the tag and note that there were 14 computerized ring thermostats in the sealed box, ($1400) when it actually held $1.25 worth of scrap metal.