this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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I’ve read a few articles on this over the last few days. I feel like this one (and it’s well cited references) finally gets me to the point of being confident that Target is full of shit.
The articles I read before this tended to be vague and focusing on data that is at least a year old if not from 2020 which, while helpful context, doesn’t do much to counter the claim of rapidly growing theft. Additionally, they often focused on national trends instead of store or store-area specific analysis. A particular store or area can have a big problem even if regional or national numbers don’t show the same issue.
This didn’t mean that I thought target was telling the truth—just that there was still room for doubt about the article’s conclusions.
I really like the crime data analysis linked in the article, which is looking at very recent crime data for a couple of the specific stores cited by Target. That analysis is very strong evidence that Target was full of shit… along with Targets continued failure to actually produce any of their own data supporting their claim.
I have a friend that is a DM of a rapidly expanding gas station/restaurant chain here in southeast. They just opened self-checkout lanes in their stores. I asked about theft/shrink and he said it's a tiny part of their bottom line at this point in a GAS STATION, and with the traffic they are getting, the convenience/cost of labor makes up for it in spades. Target, Walmart and the like are full of shit.
edit: There’s my shit memory again. I went to look for the number Target claimed. It appears it wasn’t a specific % growth in organized theft. It was % growth in violent theft. Otherwise, I think the concept I laid out stands, subbing in “violent theft” for “organized retail crime.” The quote: “Unfortunately, safety incidents associated with theft are moving in the wrong direction. During the first five months of this year, our stores saw a 120% increase in theft incidents involving violence or threats of violence.” Remainder of my comment unedited:
And the “organized retail theft” claim they were making was a clear red herring. I can’t remember the number Target claimed off the top of my head, but their claim was something like “organized retail theft has grown 200%”. Yes, a 200% increase makes it sound like a huge problem, but is meaningless without the context of how big it was before the increase. If it had gone from 2% of sales to 6% of sales, yes that is a really big and impactful 200% increase. But evidence shows it didn’t. It appears to have gone from an insignificant portion of sales to a number 3x as big that is also insignificant.
So Target took the approach of (1) find a topic that sounds big and scary: “organized retail theft”, and (2) find a way to spin the stats related to that topic to make them sound big and scary: 200% increase (or whatever it was).