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The "Organized Retail Crime" Panic (Patreon)

Published:
2023-10-26 09:00:05
Imported:
2023-10

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Content

Retailers have been sounding the alarm about a shoplifting epidemic driven by organized criminal syndicates. In a shocking twist, it turns out that their story is mostly made up. Join us as Peter tries to figure out where this panic originated and as Mike finally comes clean about his criminal past.

You can play this episode directly through Patreon or use our RSS feed to add it to your podcast app. Here are the instructions from Patreon.

As always, leave suggestions for bonus episodes in the comments!

Comments

Anonymous

Have you all heard of the Swedish Obscurantist of the Year award? It seems like a perfect source of new material for future podcasts! Features many authors of shitty airport books and pseudoscientists peddling bullshit. Your podcast is one of two podcasts I consistently recommend! Thank you for being awesome!!! Cheers.

Anonymous

I will forget this by the time the Mark Mason episode drops: In the intro. “Surely, there are better Mansons though.” I was sure Michael was setting up a Garbage joke. The band.

Anonymous

I'd love a bonus episode about the whole "money doesn't buy happiness passed $75,000/yr" nonsense.

Ann Parker

As a bonus (or regular) episode I’d love it if you guys did go back and read Blink and Tipping Point- the Outliers episode is so good and I feel like there’s so much more Gladwell to dig into

Anonymous

My Californian coworker (we live in Louisiana) tried telling me today about how bad the crime is in S.F. and first mentioned Walgreens and then mentioned he knew about all of this because.... His friend's brother is a DA! It was wild to see it in person, that this really is coming straight from law enforcement.

Anonymous

Hgmkhj

Anonymous

Tbf to those of us outside the US your news sound like the world is ending on pretty much any topic.

C’mon

Ps why i came across this podcast is that i live in the Bay Area and my husband is in retail…. We kept hearing about this terrible crime wave by organized criminals and scratching our heads… Classic case of boots on the ground versus a program like Good Morning America . When i heard it all came from a Target ripoff and social media, it suddenly made sense! Yes organized retail theft happens, i recall the Target incident but in reality its exactly as the hosts describes if you live in the Bay area … it’s not happening as some new crime wave … it just isn’t lol

Anonymous

ok i work in a grocery store and i have to say that all of the security measures they keep adding are just straight up creating more work for the employees and making our lives harder and more inconvenient. they installed a gate recently that blocks off the exit area from the rest of the store, and if someone behind the customer care desk doesnt push a button to "buzz you in", it sets off sn alarm when you go through it. but my department is on the store side of this gate and the break room and time clock are on the 'exit' side of the gate so like every employee in the store has to walk through this thing like 4 times a day and there isnt always anybody there to "buzz us in" so the alarm is just going off constantly and the customer service staff are so dead inside from having to put up with it already.

Anonymous
>>128755582

So is there actually a lot of theft from your specific store that led them to do that? I imagine there must be some reason they’re paying to put in something that makes life more difficult for employees and paying customers?

Anonymous

There’a an issue that I don’t think is really addressed in the episode—if shoplifting really isn’t rising, then what is the motivation for stores to lock everything up? It makes it more difficult for paying customers to buy the products, so they lose money. Where I live, if you go to any pharmacy in certain neighborhoods, everything is now locked up. And in fact, those pharmacies have started closing to the point where it’s becoming a major social justice issue with a lack of pharmacies and access to medications in minority neighborhoods. Clearly these pharmacies aren’t making tons of money at those locations if they’re closing them. Also, the data cited in the episode touch on overall shrink. It’s certainly possible that overall shrink can be static while shrink at certain locations has risen, leading to the closing of those locations. I can tell you one thing—my father worked as VP of Auditing at one of the country’s largest clothing retailers. And he confirmed that shrink was becoming a major concern in recent years, to the point where the corporate board was asking the CEO whether it made sense to retain stores in major urban locations where shrink was becoming an increasing problem. They are basing this off of their own numbers…

Anonymous
>>128861474

I'm going to cite the entire back catalogue of the "You're Wrong About" podcast for the many times our country has had a disproportionate response to perceived, and often wholly fabricated, threats. https://open.spotify.com/show/1RefFgQB4Lrl7qczcTWA3o?si=7b2f6459754044e7

ES

Idk Mike, as someone who’s about to go in to a retail job I hate and be tortured by millionaires who only pay me $27,000/year, I think shoplifting is pretty cool. It’s annoying when they steal booze or tobacco, because the state is very uptight about those things and we have to audit our inventory pretty tightly, but for really anything else the formula is: someone in my community getting something they need (or want, who cares) for free + this highly profitable corporation that surely pays less in taxes than I do taking it in the shorts a bit.

Nostromo.89

This episode is so good and so timely. On my third or fourth listen and this is one I really wish I could send to people. I live in Minneapolis and since 2020 there has been constant propaganda from the police and from large retailers that they are dealing with a crazy crime wave that just doesn’t show up in the stats, and it’s wild to see people that should be skeptical start to believe that it’s true under the barrage of news sources repeating what the police and retailers tell them. Fucking great episode.

Benjamin E VanWinkle

Sounds like "enemy of the pod" Mike Pesca is a Patreon subscriber because on Wednesday 3/20s "The Gist" podcast he excerpted part of this conversation to present to a retail crime analyst. It's a portion where our Michael and Peter talked about how the stats around retail crime are pretty much completely made up and used in a circular way. The guest basically agreed that retailers aren't providing real data, but I guess "trusts" that retailers know the numbers and since they say it's a problem, he trusts them when they say it's a problem. Pesca tried to test the theory that of course retailers are going to over-state the problem for lobbying purposes (it's a case for advancing legislation that subsidizes retail security with taxpayer dollars) but I don't think his guest was able to engage with that follow-up question. Pesca was a little sheepish in asking it, trying to be careful to avoid sounding big corporate conspiratorial, I think? Which maybe gave his guest more room to dance around it. One good point made was that no matter if the problem of smash and grab is rare, the imagery of it is intolerable to many Americans. It's another example of how alarming images really do defeat reasonable discussion and analysis of good data (and we all agree the retailers aren't releasing good data.)

THUNK

Speaking of alarmist nonsense - Michael, you should check out the evidence for/against cultivation theory. I've always taken "scary news scares people" as a given, but if there's any effect, it's *much* smaller than I'd expect. 👀

Samantha McIvor

I remember when I worked at Chapters (large Canadian bookstore) they calculated their monthly loses due to theft in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows books (I worked there a while ago now). It was insane what they listed. Would have added to millions in a year. After having worked there for a couple years I would say a decent chunk came from annoyed employees. And another decent chunk was just lost inventory with no theft at all. It didn’t have great security so there definitely was lots of theft but to suggest it was millions a year just made me giggle

Katharine

Does anyone know why overall retail shrink basically doubled from 45B to 94B between the 2015 data and whenever the report was written?

Katharine
>>143752274

Im assuming the amount of corporate profits or cost of goods went up so significantly that shrink as a percentage of their total revenue did not actually increase much, but I don’t know.

ES

Michael, your little voice is the only think keeping me out of the abyss of depression.