Target expects organized retail crime-fueled losses to jump by $500M this year | Hacker News Reader

Target expects organized retail crime-fueled losses to jump by $500M this year

cnbc.com

29 pointsjameslk30 comments

As I watch stores and fast-food outlets switch to store designs which are highly secure to protect workers from violence and product from theft and damage. I wonder if it is changes in societal norms which are forcing retail to catch up.

We've had bad areas before, we've had widespread poverty before. What is new are certain normalisations that it's ok to escalate to violence with staff and that damaging property is fair for settling disagreements, disappointments or even normal as seen in various TikToks trends.

Are open counters and accessible product going to be something that goes away in retail, or is this just a reaction to rising cost of living expenses? Seems like we're entering an era where retail approximates a midpoint between looking like a bank and a vending machine.

The future of culture is even harder to predict than other aspects of the future.

But for my money we're in for the long haul. Americans no longer feel like they're all part of the same society. Look at countries in colonial Africa where tribal identity is much stronger than national identity for the kind of environment that leads to.

> Are open counters and accessible product going to be something that goes away in retail

No, expensive areas with private security and access control will still have open racks of merchandise, people walking around to assist you and generally be lovely.

Poor areas without those things will look more and more dystopian, be more hostile and generally offer less items and less help. I suspect the automated self checkout will takeoff.

One of the reasons to publically fund the police was to remove the market for private security. Once upon a time it wasn't uncommon to hire a spare coachman to "ride shotgun" which meant literally manning a shotgun.

I suspect deliveries to these areas may see the "shotgun messengers" return...

Subway sandwich shop encased in bulletproof glass pic

https://preview.redd.it/sjkdeavpg7r31.jpg?width=1024&auto=we...

https://whyy.org/segments/council-vote-set-bulletproof-glass...

The next step is a robot police next to the self checkout that will grab shoplifters

Solution is easier than that. Charge people $99/year to enter the store.

It won't be sold that way. It'll be bundled. You'll pay your fee for free shipping and some music/video access and oh also here are retail stores just for "members".

Or go back to the old fashioned model of "you tell the clerk what you want, and they fetch it for you". The last store I'm aware of that did that faded away in my lifetime. (Brand Names, although maybe it still exists somewhere). I remember going to Toys-R-Us as a kid, and to purchase video games, you took a ticket off of the wall, and paid for it, and then exchanged the ticket for the actual item at a locked booth near the exit.

We've been moving back to that. Curbside/instore pickup (and now curbside returns) is a thing at most of the major retailers. It got a big push during pandemic store closures but e.g. Target had been doing it since 2014ish

I didn’t even make that connection, but you’re right—that’s basically the same thing.

Costco/Samsclub are already there.

Previously posted the actual statement from Target here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35973619

Approximate annual figures:

$100bn revenue

$25bn gross margin

$3bn net profit

If they could magically eliminate the $1bn of shrinkage, net profit would be 33% higher.

This kind of scale requires eliminating the human element. It's harder to steal from or hurt a person. It's easier to steal from a faceless corporation or abuse someone in a position dehumanized by decades of "that's where you'll end up if you don't study hard."

"It's harder to steal from or hurt a person."

I'm not sure. Mom+pop shops suffer from shoplifting (and even armed robberies), even though in many cases the owners are living hand to mouth, and can't really afford the losses.

A human can convince themselves of anything (about corporations, about immigrants, about any 'other' group), if it helps them self-justify the actions they want to take.

Harder, not impossible. Though there's probably data out there, and it might show I'm wrong. Maybe it's the same or worse, proportionally.

I have seen a couple barcode scan all the items for one product, wasn't in the department store long enough to see the bigger picture. At a guess, the data would be used to trick the department store's information system at some offset in cyber to collect cheese, maybe to collect faked refund.

> based on calculations from the company’s financial filings. With the anticipated increase, shrink this year would surpass $1 billion.

>It can be difficult to quantify theft, since shrink includes inventory loss from other causes, such as employee theft or damage, too.

Based on this story it seems like they could just totally fabricate this number? Surely such numbers would spur a deluge of police reports or at the minimum a wave of insurance claims.

Are those signals also present?

Could they fabricate the numbers? Perhaps, although this is what auditors do. More bizarrely is what incentive they would have to artificially reduce their reported earnings?

You seems to be suggesting that you know more about Target’s business than Target does, and I have to believe you’ve already come to the conclusion that retail theft hasn’t increased because that’s a social narrative that suits you.

> More bizarrely is what incentive they would have to artificially reduce their reported earnings?

The overall shrink number is known and auditable, but they have plenty of incentive to adjust which proportion of shrink they attribute to external theft vs internal theft vs damages if they think one will play better with shareholders than the other. (E.g. external theft is likely to be an industry-wide problem, whereas an increase in internal theft might indicate that Target specifically is struggling to hire high-quality staff)

RTFA. They haven’t done any of this. The headline is for their shrink number, which they said is fueled by theft.

But theft and looting is 10x more difficult to solve than other shrink. It plays worse with investors. If their stores are indeed becoming dangerous, that might also reduce sales from normal customers. All other kinds of shrink they can implement internal processes to reduce.

This narrative makes no sense.

Extraordinary claims (this year they will have had $1 Billion in assets stolen) need extraordinary proof

I fear that this will give Amazon even more of an advantage over brick and mortar stores.

We have our best men on closing that gap: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KM2UzqO33AY

Amazon also benefits because that’s where a lot of the stolen merchandise gets fenced. You get a good deal on laundry detergent there because it was stolen from Target.

They've laundered the victimhood to their customers.

Last I heard, they were famous for their loss prevention. Has this changed, or are other stores worse off?

Wtf is going on in US? Are poor people that desperate that they consider getting shot for groceries? Especially considering how insane policing in US looks like. I live in a poor country and this is not a problem, not at this rate anyways. There are plenty of self serve stores and there's a big push for self checkout too although people hate it.

Large retailers don't have armed security. At least, not mostly. Things are still at the point where they are more worried about liability than the stuff getting stolen.

The $500 million is less than 1% of their cost of goods. It's an easy place to look for improvements, but it isn't really a threat to their business.

I definitely think things have gotten worse. I've directly noticed a couple of thefts at my local Walmart in the last couple of years and hadn't seen any in previous years. In one case I saw a person just push their cart through a self checkout area. In the other, the self checkout I walked up to had an incomplete transaction sitting there.

Self-checkout seems to remove some of the human connection in shopping—there isn't even a face to the corporation anymore.

> Are poor people that desperate that they consider getting shot for groceries?

The liability and reputational cost of a store security guard injuring a shoplifter, or even getting injured themselves is so high that they might not even be allowed to physically intervene. Naturally, knowledge of this spreads.

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