From my experience in retail, if you're in a majority-black neighborhood you're going to see >90% shrink on Little Debbie and Hostess branded junk food... which is why neither does consignment in such areas - THEY are on the hook for losses on consigned merchandise, not the store.
This is several months old, but I'm skimming through highlights and you just triggered hardcore retail wagie memories and I just had to drop in with "the fatigue" from pre-COVID times.
I did my time with both grocery store retail and big box store retail, and in both cases, the fucking nogs were always the worst customers to deal with. Even my black coworkers hated dealing with black customers. Why?
From my time in grocery store retail: I hated EBT customers the most because they'd always have 3-4 wagons loaded to spend all the damn money on the card on the last day of the month, and even then, they're arguing over the last $3.24 something left on the card, and trying to make sure that two doublemints or like a 3 pack of Twizzlers can get it off or whatever. It was horrible. I say that's amateur hour. We all know EBT brings out the worst in people both on the customer side and on the store employee side. WIC cheques were a horse of an entirely different colour. You never wanna be the last cashier closing for the night when it's busy, and have a WIC customer hold you up for like 45 minutes to an hour. ESPECIALLY if it's a boog who has a fucking WIC cheque.
WIC shuts down your register for an indeterminate amount of time. It's the nature of both validating that they bought all the items that the WIC cheque explicitly lists, in the exact quantities, and in the exact weights. The stores always get reimbursed, but there's an assload of back-end stuff the government uses to validate the authenticity of the transaction. Inventory logs are scrutinised in some cases to make sure you ain't manually adjusting SKUs post-hoc. You can't be a fucking moron and let 24oz Kellogg's Corn Flakes pass through on a WIC cheque that explicitly lists 11.9oz. You can't let Enfamil with the DHA, ARA, and all that other gobbedlygook marketing crap slide through when the cheque explicitly lists normal Enfamil. You can't let someone buy Sargento deli cheese slices when the WIC cheque explicitly states fresh cheese (re: sliced off at the in-house deli) or generic brand only. Even then, white American and Swiss are a-okay, provolone and cheddar are skirting the line but technically permissible, Pepper Jack? Fuck no. Without exception, it was always the fucking nogs who'd cause an uproar and a big stink about why they can't have the 24oz box instead of two 11.9oz boxes of corn flakes, or they try to play dumb when they slip the premium Enfamil onto the conveyor belt, or when they act like we're being stingy when we say she can't buy the fucking $6.99 organic Stonyfield half-gallons instead of the singular gallon jug of $2.99 normal store-brand whole milk. It was painful, it was tedious, it was a huge part of why I hated working grocery in college.
All that being said, I really don't like talking shit about WIC. Why? Well, I now work in a field where everyone regardless of department needs to be on the up and up about compliance. In the business world, compliance just means "don't run afoul of US Customs or the IRS." In the "overworked, underpaid retail wagie stuck as the last cashier on a closing shift with a WIC cheque holding up the line" world, WIC cheques are the best form of benefits compliance I've ever seen with hindsight. This is one of the few forms of direct government aid that honestly can't be abused unless the storefront is in on the bit. Yeah, UPC databases fuck up all the time, but you can still prove that your database fucked up and slide through that way. It won't be fun, but you're covered if a genuine problem out of your control happens. WIC being designed to weed out businesses who redeem the transactions with tangible consequences for abuse is amazing.
On the big box wagie retail side of things, it was a parallel yet wholly distinct experience. You're no longer manhandling poorly wrapped or punctured chicken breasts and chicken thighs, scrutinising cereal box weights and making sure it matches with the cheque and the WIC book, or standing at your register waiting on a price check only for your supervisor to tell the customer exactly what you told them 15 minutes ago. It's definitely better in that respect, but conversely, it's many orders of magnitude WORSE when you're not worried about Hostess, Entemann's, or Lil Debbie pastries getting stolen or nogs holding up your line in other ways.
There are two forms of shrink in big box store retail. There's "operational shrink" where stuff like manual discounts, normal returns, physical inventory discrepancies, and so on get reconciled and your store's operating budget naturally takes the hit. This is 100% expected, and generally controllable to a point. In ooga booga fucking big box store located at the biggest mall closest to several black neighbourhoods, you get "volatile shrink" aka "niggers fucking stealing all your shit or otherwise trying to "game" the system." Pre-COVID, you could actually stop the fucking boog at the door, make them wait in the AP office, and then have the cops take them away. Even then, shit slips through the cracks.
You ever had your register held up by some boog who swiped a credit card, it declines like 4 separate times, they step away from the register to call someone, they pull out another credit card, it declines 4-5 times, and then it's like "even if I give this guy the benefit of the doubt, fucking call your bank not your homie." We also have nogs who try to slip counterfeit $100s through to pay for whatever they bought, we mark it with the highlighter, and the ink fucking turns black right then and there. Oh but good luck waiting for your supervisor to haul ass and back you up because that nog's over there acting like I'm saying he's scamming, he's using fake bills, using stolen credit cards, or anything else like that. Mind you, the boog's over here fucking snitching on himself while acting like I'm the fuckup. It's like nigga what? I don't even know who you are, I'm a fucking retail drone, I'm trying to get through my shift. The pen marked your bill black. I gotta call my supe to validate the goddamn bill. You could just keep your goddamn mouth shut and just play it cool, but no. They wanna be on that MF Doom Rap Snitches Tellin All They Business See the Perpetrator Yeah I'm Right Here type beat. And that's ignoring the fucking bold ass hood niggas who run into a store, cut the scissors on the security alarm for the shelf display of some big ticket item, and then run like hell out the front door.
I picked up extra shifts at nearby stores when I did big box store retail, and without fail, the store with the highest shrink budget was the one that was in a gigantic fucking mall that's near like several black neighbourhoods. And of course it's a mall, so the niglets are gonna be running around causing all sorts of chaos and trouble. Given that, it was also the store that needed actual external security to back up asset protection. The work culture at such a store is also horrifically dysfunctional because general management is always focused on driving up numbers, focusing on getting more applications for the bullshit store credit card, getting positive surveys... but this is the fucking store where every goddamn boog shows up to either steal the Blu-rays and 4K discs on display before running like hell out the door. Or maybe they're spending their tax return on a gigantic fucking Roku TV that they end up breaking on the drive to the house because they declined to have our guys properly load it into the car, and then they wanna argue the next day over why it's not their fault and how we're racist for denying his fucking return. Point is that management is in denial doing the canned "we need to have good numbers" song and dance while the store's bursting apart at the seams because of the business environment.
Bro, that store can have the highest revenue in the entire district, consistently put out the highest number of successful credit card applications in the entire district, and even make records for that quarter of the fiscal year for highest customer satisfaction, and it still won't fucking matter. You know why? Because that same store's gonna be 250-300% over their goddamn shrink budget because of theft, and it's such a fucking eyesore compared to the rest of the district, let alone the market or the territory. Most big box stores on a bad year can hit like 125-150% of their shrink budget, and it sucks. But that's what I'd call "normal" on a bad fiscal year: too many returns at this store that they can't deny, physical inventory discrepancies, human error during training, you get the idea. Meanwhile, that same big box store is gonna be fucked if they're in an area infested with boogs who steal and no one wants to buy anything at your store anymore because everything needs to be locked up. without fail, everyone fails to understand that high foot traffic and big numbers are fucking pointless if your operational backend doesn't cut the goddamn mustard. Do you think Walmart likes closing down stores? No, they really don't. Shit has to be so fucking bad for a heavily trafficked Walmart, and like a properly big Walmart with all the fixings and trappings, to shut down. There's no goddamn way you can ever blame operational shrink for store closures like that man. There just ain't.
I'm so fucking sick of all these boogs acting entitled when big box retail stores, grocery stores, or just stores in general get the fuck outta their neighbourhoods. Dude, every big ass store from Burger King to Walmart to fucking Rite Aid, Walgreens, and CVS all closed down and the storefronts remain vacant for months, even years after the fact. The only stores that are still open are the fucking shady ass Lebanese deli that sells loose ciggies and smuggled weed gummies from California and the goddamn liquor store. And those stores have fucking bulletproof plexiglass and everything behind the counter. How little self-awareness must you have to realise that it's a fundamental problem within your own fucking community that you refuse to address because everything has to be the fucking white man's fault.
Dude, I'm a fucking minority too and I got the goddamn nigger fatigue. You don't think our parents and grandparents didn't warn us about los negros, the kala wale log, the heiren, kokujin, or $insert_euphemism_here? People in my fucking age bracket used to thumb their noses at the conventional "wisdom" of their backwards elders until it was their family stores getting robbed by fucking boogs followed up by an impotent police response. You wanna talk about White Flight? Well guess how fucked you're gonna be when the goddamn Chinese spot closes down because someone tried to rob the fucking auntie wrapping up someone else's General Tso's chicken for the umpteenth time. Or how screwed you are when the local grocery store shuts down because surprise surprise: low margin businesses can't fucking survive with unchecked and structurally unmitigated shoplifting.
Anyway, that's my stream of consciousness out the of way. Thank you for reading if you did.