Good. I don’t care if people are stealing from corporations. They’ve stolen enough from us 100x what any single person can.
Yes, steal away! Just make sure you always return those shopping carts though!
Gotta give the next group a place to put their stuff too.
At least this article calls out that the stores kept open also are busier, so the higher potential for theft has less impact on profitability.
Nobody closes a profitable location solely over theft. The only closures that shoplifting is driving are ones at stores that were already underperforming. If increasing theft drives a store into the red, that’s a sensible closure, but profitability is the real driver, not theft.
I could not care less. Who the hell cares and why is this a recurring story? Seems like some weird vendetta against target solely on the .ml instances.
It’s recurring because, in the last couple of years, this false narrative has been propagated by a several large retain chains and repeated by corporate media. Either they each individually, and at virtually the same time, just so happened to decide to push this false narrative about their chain, or they colluded.
Reuters: US retail lobbyists retract key claim on ‘organized’ retail crime
And you’ve seen this on the .ml (and hexbear) instances for a while because we noticed something fishy was going on long before corporate media finally broke away from the false narrative.
First of all, the source is CNBC, so it is not a “weir vendetta […] solely on the .ml instances.” This and e.g. their prior article (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/organized-retail-crime-and-theft-not-increasing-much-nrf-study-finds.html) are well in-line with economics reporting as their core business. And then, it is Target and CEO Brian Cornell and NRF — where Cornell is also a board member — pushing this narrative (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/business/target-store-closures-theft.html), that lead to news outlet to their investigative reporting. There are further legitimate concerns by press regarding NRF’s legislative lobby effort based on non-existent evidence: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/26/retailers-lobby-congress-to-pass-combating-organized-retail-crime-act.html
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Its a recurring story because it made banner headlines in the right wing news sphere that “Stores are so overun with crime in cities they have to shut down.”
The above was stated by a national retail org and target/walgreens executives, which a year later have all came out and either said “oopsy doopsy, we didn’t actually source our numbers and just believed what some guy said” or “we may have heavily over stated the effect of retail shrinkage” when doing earnings calls.
Basically, retail theft is actually down for the last few years across the board, and these corpo fucks lied to blame their failure at running certain stores on completly fabricated crime stats, fueling the culture war and actually changing how people voted to “combat crime.”
That’s why people are pissed and still posting about it.
I think if they just said we don’t make enough money there I would respect them more.
Another fucking article on this?
I Books Could Kill did a deep dive on the Organized Retail Crime myth. It really shows how little fact checking goes into stories propagated by capital.
It’s on their Patreon or available free here: https://kemono.su/patreon/user/82569578/post/91601254
*reported crime
