this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Shoplifting happens 93% more often now or is the statistic that the value of stolen goods increased by 93% in total? I feel like that matters a lot.
Edit: the article quite well written if you ask me, but lacks sources. There is a graph, but that doesn't show the numbers mentioned. It shows losses of 31.1B in 2019 and an estimated 47.8B in 2025, which is a rise of ~54% not 93%. It presents itself as investigative journalism, but feels more like a op-ed instead.
Here is the actual report.
I started reading it but am out of time for now. I'm fairly sure that the 93% number is number of known shoplifting incidents and is unrelated to the value of the items. I'd need to read more to be sure.
I do wonder whether the dollar numbers are inflation adjusted or not. I'm sure that info is in the report.
An increase in the number of known shoplifting incidents would be conflated with increasing surveillance. It would be hard to distinguish observability vs actual increases.
I feel like they would still know about it when doing inventory, no?
Inventory would measure $ worth of goods missing, but wouldn't ascertain the number of incidents that caused those losses. So the $/incident and incident count figures should be treated as if they have high uncertainty even if the $ figure is accurate.
Thanks, I continued looking further into it as well and found another article on it, which states:
So I believe you are right. Guess op proves that often you can have either interesting text with poorly supported numbers, or boring text with well supported facts. Too bad though, cause i did actually enjoy reading the article (so extra shout-out to op for sharing).
Remember during the pandemic, when they kept bitching about the incredible wave of shoplifting going on, and it turned out that what they were actually bitching about was "shrink". The thing is that shrink refers to loss of inventory from all causes.
So yes, it includes shoplifting. It also includes spoilage, like if you over-order something and you can't sell it all before it spoils (management error). Or you order something and it arrives late (supply chain issues during the pandemic, tarriff and ensuing port-clearance issues these days (especially with cuts to government staff)) and you can no longer sell your spooky"Happy Halloween" merchandise/candy for full price in November. It includes employee theft and vendor fraud, administrative error and return fraud, inefficient processes and a poor economy. It's the difference between optimal sales during a period, and actual sales excluding items that can be carried over to next period. Like, if I don't sell enough tvs, I can carry that over to next quarter, but I can't do the same thing with lettuce and tomatoes.
And I can't help but wonder if this is the same thing happening again. Yes, there's an increase in shrink, but how much of it is actually shoplifting, and how much of it is due to tariffs and shipping difficulties, managers having ordered products for the economy they expect to have vs the one we actually have. Like, maybe prior can't afford your organically-grown arugula and bought plain lettuce instead - or just stopped buying short-lived leafy green stuff because they can't afford it Just because you didn't get the sales you wanted doesn't mean the entire difference disappeared into shoplifting - but admitting that would admit that you're not a perfect manager, and that would threaten your bonus, so shoplifting it is!
It is, see my other comment.