Plastic barriers at a Walgreens.
By German Lopez
Nov. 29, 2023, 6:43 a.m. ET
Is the U.S. in the middle of a shoplifting wave? Target and other retail chains have warned of widespread theft. News outlets have amplified the story. On social media, people have posted videos of thieves looting stores.
But the increase in shoplifting appears to be limited to a few cities, rather than being truly national. In most of the country, retail theft has been lower this year than it was a few years ago, according to police data. There are some exceptions, particularly New York City, where shoplifting has spiked. But outside New York, shoplifting incidents in major cities have fallen 7 percent since 2019, before the Covid pandemic.
Why has the issue nonetheless received so much attention? Today’s newsletter tries to answer that question while taking a deeper look at recent shoplifting trends.
The data
The various sources of crime data — from government agencies and private groups — tell a consistent story. Retail theft has not spiked nationwide in the past several years. If anything, it appears less common in most of the country than it was before the pandemic.The most up-to-date source is the shoplifting report published this month by the Council on Criminal Justice, which uses police data through the first half of 2023. The other sources go through only 2022.
The council tracks 24 major U.S. cities. Overall, shoplifting incidents were 16 percent higher in the first half of 2023 than the first half of 2019. When New York City is excluded, however, reported shoplifting incidents fell over the same time period. Out of the 24 cities, 17 reported decreases in shoplifting.
The shoplifting problem “is being talked about as if it’s much more widespread than it probably is,” said Sonia Lapinsky, a retail expert at the consulting firm AlixPartners.
Other data also indicates that shoplifting is not up in most cities since 2019. Retailers’ preferred measure, called shrink, tracks lost inventory, including from theft. Average annual shrink made up 1.57 percent of retail sales in 2022, up slightly from 2021 (1.44 percent) but down compared with 2019 (1.62 percent). The F.B.I. and the Bureau of Justice Statistics also found that theft and property crime ticked up in 2022 but remained below pre-Covid levels.
The notion that the U.S. is enduring a period of higher crime in some areas is not wrong. Car thefts are up by more than 100 percent since 2019. Murders are on track to be 10 percent higher this year than they were in 2019.
Many major downtown areas have also become emptier and more chaotic since the pandemic, which may explain why drugstores and other retailers are more often locking up items even if shoplifting isn’t much more common than in the past.
The noise
There seem to be several reasons that shoplifting has received so much attention lately:- Events in New York tend to receive outsize scrutiny. It is the country’s biggest city, a big retail market and the headquarters for much of the national media. Another city where property crime has risen is Washington, D.C., where many journalists, as well as politicians, also live.
- Videos of extreme but rare crimes can go viral today. On social media, people post videos of looting flash mobs or thieves ramming cars into stores. “There are millions of property crimes a year,” said Jeff Asher of the research firm AH Datalytics. As a result, people can always find outlandish anecdotes, even if crime is down.
- Conservative media has promoted these videos as evidence of disorder in liberal cities and under President Biden.
- Retailers have an interest in spreading the shoplifting narrative because it can suggest that disappointing profits are beyond their control.
- Inflation may play a role, too. Even if retail theft is not up, retailers might care more about it now. After all, higher prices have eaten into their profit margins by increasing the underlying costs of doing business. That makes reducing theft more important.
- The rise in murder, car theft and some other crimes makes shoplifting seem like part of a larger story even if it isn’t in most cities.
Related: Some middle-aged white women shoplift at self-checkouts in Britain because people assume they won’t steal, a Guardian columnist argues.
Source (Archive)
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