What can we do about shoplifting, a new urban plague?
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A woman’s razor finally gives out, so she throws it away and decides she’ll pick one up on the way to work. She pops into a convenient drugstore, only to find everything locked behind a thick cage of steel. After 10 minutes of waiting, in vain, for an associate who can unlock the magical Cavern of Gillette, she gives up in disgust and leaves.
Sadly, that’s no joke: That woman was me a few months ago, and as soon as I got to my desk, I ordered new blades from Amazon. Judging from the internet, I’m not alone. Nor is it just the drugstores where this is happening.
Where I live, in Washington, D.C., one local grocery store recently banned backpacks, which means I can no longer shop there on my way home from work. Two other stores now require receipts to get out, which I discovered only after I had unwisely thrown mine in the trash. It has become increasingly tempting just to order groceries online, along with my razors and flu medicine, rather than hassling with the escalating security.
Cruise around social media sites and you’ll see a lot of people share my aggravation. Like me, they have endless stories, and all those stories end the same way: “I ordered it online.”
This is a crisis for urban retailers. It’s also a crisis for cities, because without street-level retail, walkable neighborhoods easily turn into dead zones. And unfortunately, fixing it requires tough choices.
The people managing these stores are not stupid, of course; they understand that all this security deters customers as well as thieves. Alas, they’re choosing from a menu of bad options thanks to a secular surge in shoplifting, which has nearly doubled since the pandemic, according to a recent survey from the National Retail Federation.
Progressives have disputed those numbers — arguing that they are self-interested fiction from an industry group interested in proving that shoplifting is a huge problem, and that this alleged problem doesn’t show up in crime statistics or reflect the growth in the economy. But shoplifting often goes underreported (especially in areas where it’s unlikely to be prosecuted), and the economy hasn’t grown 90% since 2019. Moreover, the shoplifting skeptics never explain why retailers suddenly got so interested in proving shoplifting was a big problem, if it hasn’t really increased — or why they are spending so much money on security measures, including measures that drive many of their customers to the internet.
It seems safe to say that shoplifting has become a bigger problem for retailers, and also that the surge hasn’t crested and begun to recede as fast as other parts of the postpandemic crime wave: In at least some major urban areas, shoplifting is still elevated, even rising. And that’s despite added layers of security: cameras, guards, locking up the most shoplifted items or removing them from shelves entirely. One New York clothing retailer told the news site THE CITY that she’s added staff at slow times to deter shoplifters, while a hardware store owner said he only allows customers in one or two at a time to deter the people who wait for the store to get busy and then grab power tools.
All that security is expensive, either because it costs stores business or because it costs them money. (Or both: One manufacturer of retail security products told Bloomberg Business that each locked cabinet costs retailers about 500 annual labor hours to operate.) Retailers are apparently eating those costs because they’ve calculated that they’d lose even more by allowing their inventory to continue walking out the door.
Something has changed beyond the most commonly cited causes such as progressive prosecutors, or self-checkout lanes, or corporate “no touch” policies, that discourage associates from chasing down shoplifters, all of which have been around for years.
It seems depressingly possible that they’re right — that as long as shoplifting remains such a big problem, they’re better off losing customers to Amazon than losing more inventory to five-fingered discounters. It also seems depressingly possible that they can’t really afford to lose the customers either, and in the long run, many of those stores will end up closing unless cities and retailers together figure out some way to get shoplifting under control.
Alas, that’s a really hard problem. Something has changed beyond the most commonly cited causes such as progressive prosecutors, or self-checkout lanes, or corporate “no touch” policies, that discourage associates from chasing down shoplifters, all of which have been around for years.
One of the biggest changes may simply be that potential shoplifters now realize how common and easy shoplifting is, and ironically, the outraged conservatives sharing all those viral videos may be helping to spread the word and helping to shift us from the relatively low-crime, high-trust equilibrium cities enjoyed five or 10 years ago to the current one, where shoplifters steal with impunity until stores start treating all their customers like potential criminals.
Which doesn’t just pose a problem for retailers or their customers, but for everyone committed to dense, walkable cities.
If you’ve ever walked a long block taken up by concrete towers without ground-level retail, you’ve probably noticed that it’s a lot less fun to stroll along a long concrete wall than a thriving commercial corridor.
Most obviously, if people cannot conveniently buy what they need near to where they work or live, they’ll get off the street and into a car. And if you’re already driving everywhere to get what you need, why not move to a suburb where you can enjoy more space and maybe occasionally get hold of some laundry detergent without first clearing a TSA checkpoint?
Less obviously, stores can provide “spillover effects” to each other, so that one retailer brings more customers to the other — if you step out to buy a razor, you might also decide to grab a sandwich. So losing one store can hurt the whole street. Stores also make streets more pleasant to walk on, even if you’re not shopping, because shoppers provide eyes on the street, and storefronts provide variety for the eyes.
If you’ve ever walked a long block taken up by concrete towers without ground-level retail, you’ve probably noticed that it’s a lot less fun to stroll along a long concrete wall than a thriving commercial corridor. Urban planners call these places “dead blocks” because nothing is happening on them except people trying to get somewhere else, as fast as possible. I get that same feeling walking along a street of empty storefronts, along with a pervasive sense of disorder and decline, and I can’t imagine I’m alone. Having too many such streets, along with the hassle and inconvenience of supermarkets locked down like a supermax prison, risks driving people away from the urban core.
Cities need to treat this like an emergency, because it is.
That requires a pretty big cognitive shift, because objectively, shoplifting isn’t that serious, at least when you look at individual incidents. No city has fallen into ruin because an opioid addict got away with a can of baby formula and three bottles of cold medicine. So shoplifting is the easiest crime to overlook, whether you’re a progressive prosecutor looking to reduce incarceration or a police chief or DA trying to allocate limited resources. Every shoplifter who gets prosecuted uses police and prosecutor time, not to mention space on court dockets, that could have been devoted to something more serious.
But collectively, unchecked shoplifting can become a kind of urban murder. The blighted-out streetscapes I remember from my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s were mostly the result of crime that had made retail unviable in those locations.
Of course, crime isn’t as bad as it was during the great 20th-century surge. But retail itself is more vulnerable, thanks to competition from the internet. Fifty years ago, there was no place to buy groceries or medicine other than a physical store, so stores that had big shoplifting problems could jack security, and prices, to compensate for the losses. Today, that just drives their customers online.
Add in a number of factors that have gotten worse since the pandemic — like rising rents and soaring interest rates — and it probably takes a lot less to kill a store now than it did 50 years ago, or even five years ago. And if we let the stores die, they will leach blight into the neighborhoods around them.
Every shoplifter who gets prosecuted uses police and prosecutor time, not to mention space on court dockets, that could have been devoted to something more serious. But collectively, unchecked shoplifting can become a kind of urban murder.
So just as retailers have had to make hard choices between preventing theft and alienating customers, cities will need to make the hard decision to allocate more of their scarce resources toward deterring shoplifting — not just by making it easier to charge the thefts as a felony, but diverting man-hours from “more serious” crimes, trying to bring us back to the old high-trust, low-crime equilibrium.
Ideally, that can be achieved through focused deterrence on hot spots and serial offenders — and a social media campaign that makes prosecution look as ubiquitous as shoplifting. But whatever it takes, cities have to protect their retail corridors, lest today’s series of petty annoyances add up to tomorrow’s urban disaster.