Doesn’t seem like a day goes by without a video of a group of people hauling a load of merchandise out the door of a retail store like demented Santas.
beat the crowds and employees, do your shopping early this year!
It’s gotten so bad, both customers and employees have had enough.
Of course, like all trends, celebrities had to do it first.
No one’s scared of a shoplifting celebrity, not with TMZ on speed dial.
Mind you, this isn’t shoplifting, like shoving a candle into your pocket and hoping no one notices.
ugh, Japanese Cherry Blossom? never coming to Bath and Body Works again!
It’s not the desperate, a la Miserables, taking a loaf of bread to feed their families.
my family exclusively survives on expensive ice cream!
It’s not looting either, in the wake of a natural disaster, controversial police shooting, or the hometown team failing to clinch a W in the World Series.
true diversity
It’s a form of disorganized crime that would make the mob blush in both its scale and scope, a $100 billion per year industry pushing the abilities for the modern store to operate.
Of course, it’s hard to feel sympathy for the American corporation, especially retail ones that are customer facing.
These are the same places that forced people to wear bags over their faces to get in the door while making them line up like kindergarteners to walk one direction, shuffling through closed-off aisles for the better part of a year.
“you mmphhhhh to wear your mmphhhhssssk!”
These are also the same places that have no problem selling tucking panties to kids, stocking ridiculous clown world merchandise for every fake holiday, and forcing their employees to jump through increasingly diverse hoops just to maintain gainful employment.
future clearance rack
And these are yes, those very same places, that bulldozed Main Street shops in the name of tax-dodging, ever-expansive suburban sprawl and profit margins.
But they’re insured, right?
That’s what you’re always told, usually in some deeply obnoxious, whinging tone.
After all, insurance isn’t an unlimited quantity.
You can’t get into 18 car accidents in a week and expect your insurance to keep you.
Eventually, you’re too high of a risk, and the whole principle of insurance – paying into a risk pool that gets doled out in extreme circumstances – goes to hell.
When a store can’t be insured, it closes.
And many stores around the country, especially in the Bay Area, are starting to close due to large-scale retail theft.
When a store closes, it doesn’t mean Ye Olde Annie’s Vegan Knitting Box opens in its place to provide what the former big-box store used to sell.
funny enough, the actual “women & women first” book store from Portlandia closed
It means it’s replaced by nothing – an empty storefront, a dead mall.
coming to a town near you!
“They should put security guards in front of every store!” booms a boomer.
To a degree, that works.
High-end retail, which suffered greatly during the Summer of Love 2020 (apt that this generation’s Woodstock 69 is just Woodstock 99, but everywhere) has a “we limit the number of people in the store” feature in many places (except Vegas, the city of impulse purchases and 1000 cameras).
most boring club ever
Ostensibly it’s to provide excellent service to every client, but they didn’t just decide to focus on customer service – it’s embarrassing for Goyard to have a group of “teens” run off with one item worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Another store where you’re familiar with this level of security is Costco.
The membership model works, even if it seems the person up front appears clueless.
There’s something to the “you must pass this person on the way in” and “you must pass another person on the way out” that’s left Costco generally unscathed in this bout of retail plague.
I see two baby back bitches, you and these ribs you stole
But there’s something ugly about TSA-ing the shopping experience – why get hassled going into or out of a store by someone with a dummy gun when you can just order the item and home and get it stolen off your porch?
This isn’t a new problem in principle – those godforsaken peel off stickers, the things that embarrassingly beep on the way out of the store, cable tie downs – all have been used as theft deterrents.
But who cares when you’re used to a beeping smoke alarm and cord-cutting?
who could forget the blue oyster cult hit, “don’t fear the sensor”
Stores have gotten so desperate they’ve resorted to classical music to deter crime – a method which allegedly works!
Hell, it beats having to shop for deodorant under lock and key plus it puts today’s horrible pop stars out of a job creating store muzak.
Braving blasts of Brahms, getting clipped by looters, stared down by underpaid retail workers, all to encounter locked-up lip balm and eventually closed stores is the true victim here: the customer.
Shopping is an enjoyable experience – a chance to socialize and discover new things.
Even a trip to the grocery store, monotonous as it seems, is an opportunity to be creative with your carbs, chat with neighbors, and be prudent in how you spend your hard-earned dollar.
What used to delight everyone from capitalists to communists is now a miserable experience, and it’s not the only one: restaurants suck too.
they have so many types of vodka here!
The 2008 recession decimated small to midsize stores, leaving commercial real estate in a slump only lifted by restaurants – which were knocked out in 2020.
Perhaps it was inevitable – you can do have everything at home now: a job, a Louis Vuitton purse, and a steak dinner.
an introvert’s dream!
But as we saw after the great “opening up summer” of 2021 – people like eating out, and they like shopping at stores.
Downtown streets and shopping centers are vital to the American experience. There’s a reason agoraphobia is “fear of the marketplace” – humans have always gravitated towards meeting spaces where they can trade, share, and eat.
The health of a society can be measured by the health of its public spaces. Stores are not excluded.
And what happens to all those stolen goods? After all, there has to be a secondhand market for stuff, people don’t just take specific valuable items to create a gallery.
ricardo montalban in “the naked gun was evil”, but that pen was a gift!
They’re sold online, from Facebook Marketplace to eBay, Craigslist, even Amazon.
People operating those points of sale are very small in number – in fact, only 327 people in a city of 8 million were responsible for a third of shoplifting arrests.
shoplifters at the annual shoplifter convention
It’s not hard to make it hard for people to resale obviously stolen goods.
But anymore as a society we don’t do things because they’re easy, nor because they’re hard, we only do things because we want to.
And when we don’t want to make public life better, we really don’t want a society at all.
