this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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[–] Vorticity@lemmy.world 16 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Fermion@mander.xyz 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I feel like they would still know about it when doing inventory, no?

[–] Fermion@mander.xyz 1 points 13 hours ago

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.

[–] huppakee@feddit.nl 8 points 2 days ago

Thanks, I continued looking further into it as well and found another article on it, which states:

Retailers reported a 93% increase in annual shoplifting incidents in 2023 compared to 2019.

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).