{"id":32026,"date":"2023-10-19T19:41:26","date_gmt":"2023-10-19T19:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/innodebt.com\/investing\/the-shrinking-truth-about-retailers-theft-complaints\/"},"modified":"2023-10-19T19:41:28","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T19:41:28","slug":"the-shrinking-truth-about-retailers-theft-complaints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/innodebt.com\/?p=32026","title":{"rendered":"The Shrinking Truth About Retailers\u2019 Theft Complaints"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The recent spate of headlines about the retail theft crisis implies that shoppers have suddenly gone rogue, on a crime spree ranging from cheating at self-checkout kiosks to those brazen smash-and-grab attacks.<\/p>\n

But a look behind the headlines suggests there is a problem but not really a crisis. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Furthermore, it\u2019s less about customer behavior than it is about gaps in merchants\u2019 inventory controls and a plague of cheap counterfeit goods available online, which are considered retail theft crimes.<\/p>\n

For starters, the notion that shrinkage \u2013 the industry term for all categories of missing inventory \u2013 is a crisis is not backed up by the math, nor some experts.<\/p>\n

The biggest headlines were those reporting a study released last month by the National Retail Federation, a trade group, that estimated a 20% surge in total retail \u201cshrink\u201d last year, or about $18 billion worth of goods. That\u2019s a big number, but as a percentage of all retail sales in 2022 (about $5 trillion), the increase represents about one third of one percent \u2013 a pretty small number in the overall scheme of things.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the NRF said that when survey respondents were asked to disclose their inventory shrink as a percentage of sales, the average was 1.6%, slightly above a five-year average of 1.5%. And when companies talk about shrinkage they are referring to causes that include goods that are damaged, expired, stolen from warehouses, and stolen by employees.<\/p>\n

<\/fbs-ad><\/p>\n

When Target recently announced that it is closing nine of its stores in locations where it has been \u201cunable to manage theft and organized retail crime,\u201d the rationale struck some as suspect. David Blumenfeld, whose company owns one of those locations, a shopping center in Harlem, New York, told Bloomberg that the closing was a \u201cbusiness decision to move to small-format stores.\u201d He noted that Target had already signed a lease to open a store less than half the size only a mile and a half away.<\/p>\n

Another sceptic is Nicole Lewis, an editor at the nonprofit news organization The Marshall Project. According to a report on Marketplace.org, Lewis did a deep dive into the issue and concluded that retail theft \u201cremained stable from 2016 to about 2022.\u201d She said data on retail theft is scarce and she couldn\u2019t find a single agency that breaks out shoplifting as a specific category of crime.<\/p>\n

The headlines may be enticing, but the impact seems to be limited in many ways including certain locales.<\/p>\n

Perhaps a benefit of the retail theft issue is the debate it has triggered over how customers feel about shopping.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent spate of headlines about the retail theft crisis implies that shoppers have suddenly gone rogue, on a crime spree ranging from cheating at self-checkout kiosks to those brazen smash-and-grab attacks. But a look behind the headlines suggests there is a problem but not really a crisis. Furthermore, it\u2019s less about customer behavior than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-32026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-investing"},"yoast_head":"\nThe Shrinking Truth About Retailers\u2019 Theft Complaints | Innodebt<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The recent spate of headlines about the retail theft crisis implies that shoppers have suddenly gone rogue, on a crime spree ranging from cheating at\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/innodebt.com\/?p=32026\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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