Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Retailers use the equation (inventory in db - what's on shelf) = shrink, which conflates many different types of problems in one. Shrink can happen with errors in dbs and cycle counts, but the large part is due to actual theft. However, theft can take many different forms:

* Items "falling off the truck", i.e. you expect 100 units to be delivered to store, only 90 were delivered. Workers rarely check counts while receiving in store backrooms, so retailers think these were stolen from the shelves;

* Employees stealing stuff directly, either from the backroom or from the shelves;

* Employees working in conjunction with non-employees to steal, e.g. sweethearting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweethearting);

* Plain old shoplifting, e.g. somebody swiping a few items from the shelf into their pocket;

* Organized Retail Crime (ORC): People coming into the store and brazenly stealing entire shelves or racks of merchandise.

The first four has been around since Retail was invented, but their impact is relatively small on a store basis. It is the last item that is the killer and what is referred to as the rise in "shoplifting" recently. This is not shoplifting in the traditional sense at all. As an example, consider Cotopaxi closing their flagship store in SF: https://sgbonline.com/cotopaxi-closes-store-in-san-fransisco...

Retailers are very reluctant to deal directly with the problem, i.e. stop the people walking out. The reason is that the usual profile of people engaged in OCR as well as its relation to various progressive causes makes this a taboo subject in the US. This also makes it hard to discuss the problem. Just the other day I heard a segment on NPR saying retail theft has not increased and "statistics are hard to come by".

Edit: For those who (rightly) point out the fact that retailers are doing cost benefit analysis and deciding that the bad press is not worth it: consider walking into a bank in California and stealing (without using a weapon, just intimidation) less than $950 (lower than the misdemeanor theft limit for retail) and see if the bank would do a similar analysis.

> Retailers are very reluctant to deal directly with the problem, i.e. stop the people walking out.

This isn't due to some kind of "woke" policy. You can't expect minimum-wage workers to literally risk their life trying to stop a potentially-armed shoplifter. The company sure isn't going to pay their healthcare costs when they get stabbed or shot, so why would the worker care about a slightly lower profit margin?

From what the employee said, they're reluctant to take any action at all, like hiring more staff or caging certain merchandise like beer.

> Corporate ignored employees’ requests to put booze in locked cases because the liquor aisle is an area of the store that attracts some especially “sketchy” characters. It also blew them off when they warned of camera blind spots that shoplifters were aware of. “The company didn’t really seem that interested in solving the problem, they seemed more interested in, I don’t know, complaining,” he says. The cops weren’t much help, either. They’d show up hours after being called and ask whether the perpetrators were still there (they obviously weren’t) and which way they’d gone (what does it matter if it was six hours ago?).

...

> “All these companies that are screaming about theft, they’re kind of complicit in it because they keep reducing staff,” says Steven Rowland, the host of The Retail Warzone podcast and a former retail store manager. “From an hourly standpoint, a lot of these folks feel like they’re not paid enough to care anyway. And then you have store managers who are bleeding out, basically, because they have a lack of payroll, they don’t have enough staff just to get their basic functions done.”

You're right that store workers cannot be expected to interfere. What I meant was that they are reluctant to take more draconian measures, e.g. armed guards at the store and calling police immediately.

I knew someone who did 7.5 years in prison because he was the getaway driver for his female friend who stole a $5 hat from Walmart on the way out of the door and the shelf-stacker tried to be a hero and chase down the car, had to jump out of the way, hit their head on the kerb and was in a coma for months.

Walmart paid the medical bills which came in at over $2m.

Source: they were my cellmate in jail

Edit: but I live in the hood, and twice recently I've seen shoplifters beaten to shit by retail workers in Family Dollar and Walgreens for being caught stealing...

I saw a purse snatcher get walloped by bystanders in Shanghai. The police came by and just laughed, ya, you don't want to be a purse snatcher in China.

It’s simply more expensive to deal with the public relations and legal consequences of organized retail crime than to deal with it itself. These are national or even multinational corporations. They will let the stores in dysfunctional cities bleed out and write them off for the quarter, and remember this the next time they choose where to invest.

Also political .

After having worked in retail for 20+ yrs, both in the field and in IT, what I saw as the largest cause of shrink was always just simple accounting errors.

For example, I saw all the time a store would receive a case of merchandise from a vendor containing 100 toothbrushes, the computer says it's a qty of 100 for $2.99, but the receiver scans in the barcode for the whole case instead of the individual toothbrush and puts in a qty of 100 received. Now the retailer thinks they should have 10k instead of 100 brushes on hand, which gets picked up as a loss. I've seen similar things where the case pack sizes or prices were fat fingered by the corporate buyer and wrong in the system causing massive perceived shortages.

But that would only explain the ~20 billion dollar increase in shrink if stores had very high turnover due to low hourly pay (and a recent push for employees attempting to demand more), a strict immigration policy (or the afteraffects of low immigration during a recent pandemic) and poor working conditions (for floor employees), resulting in poorly trained employees that may not realize their mistake!

...which actually adds up.

I would also naively expect that trying to intervene directly is dangerous. Organized hints at multiple people, you do not want to start escalating things in such a situation.

A company would much rather lose some inventory than deal with an employee that was injured or killed trying to stop a thief.

Only because one side of that equation costs more than another. Let's not attribute any sort of positive morality to the company here.

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