Retailers Wage War on Shoplifters
US store owners are worried about shoplifting – what can be done?

Retailers say shoplifting has become a growing problem – so how are merchants fighting back?

In Manhattan, where the New York police department reports shoplifting levels not seen in nearly 30 years, a Rite-Aid store announces it’s closing because of theft losses. Small retailers in New York have given their district attorney an earful. Residents and shop owners in San Francisco say that crime there has “spun out of control”. Chicago has been the target of “rampant” shoplifting incidents. Reports of “flash” shoplifting gangs have prompted legislators to introduce bills to protect businesses as far apart as Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Washington state.

Is this real or moral panic? The Los Angeles police department recently announced that robbery, burglary and theft are actually down in the city compared with 2019. An activist group in Seattle says that in some cases shoplifting is “justified”. One retail association says that retail theft would be less if Amazon and Facebook didn’t make it so easy to sell stolen goods.

When you ask retailers, they’ll tell you that shoplifting is a big and growing problem. Just ask the National Retail Federation. Half of the respondents in that organization’s 2021 retail security survey said they saw an increase in shoplifting this past year. So how are merchants fighting back? Unfortunately, they’re having to spend.

Many of my shop-owner clients are taking the obvious internal steps. These would include making sure their stores are organized and tidy, that their employees are trained to be on alert for typical shoplifting tactics, and that mirrors are added to avoid blind spots among updated and prominent signs that warn of prosecution. A handful have hired security guards. Those with very high-dollar inventory (jewelry, say) are taking more steps to secure these products or removing them from their stores each night. Others are installing more protective glass on their exterior windows and display cases.

Many others are investing in new security systems or re-designing themselves to thwart shoplifting. A Safeway store in San Francisco, for example, has added automatic gates that immediately swing shut behind entering customers in order to prevent thieves from running out of the store with full shopping carts. Other retailers are setting up coiled wire or putting more of their items under lock and key.

Or you could do what one small merchant in Denver is doing: charge all customers an additional 1% fee on top of everything else to cover his shoplifting losses. Calling it the “Denver crime spike fee”, the owner says it helps him to recover thousands of dollars in losses. theguardian.com

24 States Push Bills to Fight Surging Retail Theft
Retailers want to fight smash and grab thieves by targeting online resellers of stolen stuff

Proposed legislation in Virginia, Maryland and 22 other states would force platforms like Amazon to collect information verifying the legitimacy of sellers

Virginia, Maryland and at least 22 other states are aiming to slow down a disturbing trend of organized "grab and go" robberies by making it more difficult for thieves to sell stolen goods on major shopping platforms like Amazon, according to the Virginia Retail Federation which is pushing the legislation in the commonwealth.

Retail stores throughout the region say they are under assault from so-called “grab and go” organized theft rings according to the National Retail Federation which reports $700,000 out of every $1 billion in sales is lost to organized theft.

In-store employees are instructed for safety’s sake not to engage in physical confrontations to catch suspects, making it easy for them to escape. As a result, retailers are hoping legislators will help them go on offense against people who are later selling the stolen goods online.

Bills now under consideration in Virginia would force platforms like Amazon and Esty to collect identifying information like tax ID numbers and bank account information to verify the legitimacy of frequent sellers before allowing them to list items. Maryland is considering similar legislation.

“Our hope is that it will be a deterrent for these organized retail crime rings to stop doing this and realize that it's not going to be so easy anymore to sell on the markets if we can get this through Virginia,” said Jodi Roth of the Virginia Retail Federation.

The bills have not received final votes in Virginia or Maryland. wusa9.com

New Report Shows Significant Increase in Deaths Over Last Decade
National Institute of Justice Funded Research Amasses Details of a Half Century of United States Mass Shootings
The Office of Justice Programs’ National Institute of Justice (NIJ) today published an article discussing the NIJ-supported and publicly available Violence Project Database that identifies common traits of persons who engaged in mass shootings between 1966 and 2019.

During that time, mass shootings in the United States notably increased, with more than half occurring after 2000, and 20% occurring during the last five years of the study period. The death toll in mass shootings in the last decade has grown dramatically. In the 1970s, mass shootings claimed an average of eight lives per year. From 2010 to 2019, the average was 51 deaths per year.

The study includes a discussion of demographics, motivations, warning signs and other key findings. The article is available at “Public Mass Shootings: Database Amasses Details of a Half Century of U.S. Mass Shootings with Firearms, Generating Psychosocial Histories.” Funded by NIJ, it covers 172 mass public shooters and more than 150 psychosocial history variables, such as those individuals’ mental health history, past trauma, interest in past shootings and situational triggers.

“This study — one of the most extensive assessments of mass violence to date—reveals a deeply unsettling trend: more Americans are dying at the hands of mass shooters than at any point in recent history,” said OJP Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Amy L. Solomon. “This analysis paints a portrait of shooters, giving us a better idea of who commits these crimes and helping us detect the warning signals for these appalling acts of violence.” justice.gov

Shootings Targeted at Police Officers Up 67%
At least 30 police, law enforcement officers shot last month
At least 30 police and law enforcement officers were shot in the month of January – up 67% from the same time last year, new statistics show, as the head of the country’s largest police union calls the violence against cops "the worst I have ever seen."

Five of the 30 officers shot in the line of duty were killed, and four of the shootings were "ambush-style attacks," the National Fraternal Order of Police said in a Tuesday press release. The union found that five officers were shot and three were killed by the ambush gunfire.

The statistics account for the shootings in New York City, where two officers were killed and three more were wounded, and Houston, where four have been shot this month. Three officers were shot in Wisconsin, and three more were wounded in Georgia. Other states that reported officers shot include Nevada, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Oklahoma, California, Illinois, North Carolina, New Mexico, Montana and Washington State, the group found. An officer was also struck in Washington, D.C.

"In just the first month of 2022, we saw the real-life consequences of and felt the immense pain caused by the recent surge in violent crime and the heinous acts of cowardly individuals whose sole motivation is to injure or kill a law enforcement officer," Yoes said. "No officer should be at risk of being violently targeted simply because of the uniform they wear."

He said violence toward law enforcement "is skyrocketing" as crime rates also climb. foxnews.com

Violent Crime Surges 20% in Seattle
Mayor Harrell announces a revised approach to public safety in Seattle

Police and Fire Chiefs share data from last year on crime and call outs

Mayor Bruce Harrell in a press conference at Seattle City Hall said that his administration intends to take a different approach to public safety including crime, homelessness and responses to 911 calls.

Following through on the commitments made in his inaugural speech to take a more focused approach to these issues Harrell was joined by Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz, and Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scroggins as well as Deputy Mayors Tiffany Washington, Kendee Yamaguchi, and Monisha Harrell.

“I want to be very clear – we will not tolerate crime in Seattle. Whether organized retail theft, crimes of violence against our most vulnerable, crimes of hate, or especially gun violence, we will not look the other way while the fabric of our neighborhoods and city is destroyed,” said Harrell.

The Seattle Police Department today released its 2021 Year-End Crime Report which showed increases in violent crime and gun violence compared to 2020:

“I have directed Chief Diaz to focus his efforts on those places in our City where crime is concentrated, disrupting the lives of the people who live and work there,” said Mayor Harrell.

Chief Diaz said, "Overall crime last year in Seattle was up 10% Over 2020. Violent crime increased by 20%, and much of that violence is gun related. Nearly every month, last year saw more shots fired incidences than the same month from the previous year and homelessness related shootings and shots fired increased by 122% over 2021.

SPD is recovering more than 1000 guns each year as they have for the past five years. Despite the fact that SPD has said they need more than 350 officers, many of whom left last year they are working hard to stay on top of the situation. westsideseattle.com

RELATED: Seattle business owners react to latest record crime numbers

Mayor, governor discuss Baltimore violence as lawmakers promote crime plans
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Gov. Larry Hogan held a private meeting Thursday to discuss the pressing issue of crime, as lawmakers promoted competing plans for combating violence. The Democratic mayor and Republican governor — whose last planned meeting on crime was nixed when Hogan contracted COVID-19 — met behind closed doors at the State House in Annapolis. baltimoresun.com

Washington Post Op-Ed: Want to fight crime? Take on the gun lobby.

Walgreens Security-Discrimination Lawsuit
Fired Black security manager for Bay Area Walgreens stores claims racial and age discrimination

Drugstore chain was downsizing, struggling with shoplifting problems

As Walgreens was shutting down drugstores in the Bay Area and across the country and struggling with a theft problem, it fired three Black security managers without giving them the severance payments offered to laid-off white security managers, a new lawsuit claims.

Alameda County resident Marcellus Clark, 63, alleged in his age- and race-discrimination suit filed Thursday in San Mateo County Superior Court that he was fired — after a 21-year career in security for Walgreens — by a newly arrived supervisor “known for terminating older employees once he acquired a new territory.”

Clark worked primarily in a San Mateo Walgreens. His duties included scheduling all the security guards for the company’s San Francisco-area stores, according to the suit.

In August 2019, the supervisor fired two white security managers, both around age 60, and offered them severance packages, the suit alleges. Over the course of a year, the supervisor — responsible for security in California stores — also fired at least three Black security managers over age 40, including Clark in February 2020, with none offered severance, the suit claims.

The drugstore chain had said in an August 2019 regulatory filing that it planned to close 200 U.S. stores to cut costs, and by the end of that year had begun a wave of closures, including in the Bay Area. While the company had been suffering from what Bay Area authorities described as organized retail theft since at least 2017, the closures turned controversial when Walgreens officials in October 2020 began linking San Francisco store shutdowns to a surge in shoplifting, rather than cost-cutting. mercurynews.com

Retail Gig Workers
No more familiar faces at the checkout? Why stores are hiring gig workers.

“The demand that we’re seeing for outsourced work, meaning gig work, is easily 10 times what it was pre-Covid across household name companies,” one expert said.

The explosion in popularity of ride sharing and food delivery apps means that gig work, or contract work, has become a much more common form of employment across the country. But the mass exodus of workers from the retail industry over the course of the pandemic means many companies are now also hiring gig workers for in-house tasks like stocking shelves, assembling displays and packing online orders.

“Grocers and retailers in general are definitely looking at it now more than ever for in-store over the last couple years,” said Marco Di Marino, director of retail and grocery with consulting firm AlixPartners. “They’re looking at these platforms not really as a labor replacement but as a way to scale up and down that otherwise in the current condition would be very difficult.”

From Midwest grocery chain Meijer to discount retailer Big Lots, stores are buzzing with gig workers, a contingent of independent contractors who do short-term work for multiple companies. Walmart uses third-party vendors and gig workers “as a complement” to its existing workforce, spokesperson Anne Hatfield told NBC News. Fedex offers flexible schedule options, including the ability for workers to pick up extra shifts when it’s convenient, the company said in a December earnings call.

Fedex CFO ​​Michael Lenz told investors the company is “aggressively” addressing labor shortages through flexible employment that is “not as binary as full-time, part-time. The scheduling flexibility helps as well in terms of navigating labor availability when and where you need it,” he said. nbcnews.com

RELATED: Food Companies Rely More on Temp Workers as Labor Shortages Persist

1,200 New Starbucks Locations Opened in 2021
Starbucks opened more new stores than McDonald's & Subway, the two biggest chains in the world, during the pandemic

The coffee chain opened nearly 1,200 net new locations in 2021.

As of January 2, 2022, Starbucks had 34,317 open stores across the world, just under 17,000 in the US. The number looks poised to keep increasing after years of steady growth from Starbucks. It added 484 net new stores the first quarter of 2022 and 538 the previous quarter. It added 1,173 net new stores in the fiscal 2021 year, and 1,404 in the 2020 fiscal year, according to end-of-year data provided by Starbucks.

There's no real end in sight for Starbucks' potential growth. The chain plans to open 2,000 net new stores in fiscal 2022, Starbucks said at the end of 2021. In a February earnings call, President and CEO Kevin Johnson addressed the question of opening new stores.

McDonald's, which has over 38,000 worldwide locations, added nearly 1,000 new locations in 2020 and 650 restaurants in 2021. The chain announced plans to open 1,800 new restaurants in 2022. Subway closed over 1,000 locations in 2019 and reportedly closed over 2,000 in 2021. businessinsider.com

What retail has in store for 2022
A month into the new year, here are some of the top forces impacting retail, the trends we're watching and predictions for what is to come.

American worker got a 5.7% raise in January, but it may not be enough to solve the labor shortage

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