A Boring Dystopia

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).