How Shoplifting Got So Bad
If you bargain shop online, there’s a good chance you have bought stolen goods
By Nic Rowan, managing editor of The Lamp
The grocery store a few blocks from my house in Washington, D.C. was for many years known as the Social Safeway. This tongue-in-cheek appellation referred to the fact that it was the only full-size grocery store within walking distance of Georgetown and, for that reason, a place where inhabitants of the city’s clubbiest—though not necessarily wealthiest—neighborhood would naturally rub shoulders. I remember in high school sometimes walking up there to gawk. I was not the only one: In 2010, Safeway, seeking to capitalize on the location’s swank reputation, hosted a late-night cocktail party on the store floor, where the company literally rolled out a red carpet for local eminences, city government officials, and D.C.’s shadow representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton. It was a strictly black-tie affair, afterwards considered a triumph for one of the country’s largest grocery chains.
Such gaiety is almost unimaginable now. By the time I moved into the neighborhood at the tail end of the pandemic, the reality of the Social Safeway had changed. The neighborhood was still clubby—and even wealthier than before—but you wouldn’t know it from visiting the grocery store. There was a homeless encampment out front. The bathroom inside was regularly subject to urban barbarisms. And more often than not, entire shelves were wiped clean of merchandise by shoplifters. Not just expensive things—everything.
Early last year, I saw a kid who could not have been older than 13 loading up a backpack with bottled iced tea. No one tried to stop him. Besides, it wouldn’t have done much good. Someone else would have stolen the same things again the next day. I was not surprised when, only a few weeks later, Safeway erected a wire fence around the shopping floor perimeter and installed checkout turnstiles that can only be cleared by scanning a receipt. All around the city, other Safeway locations did the same. No one liked the fencing, but its installation did not come as a shock. Most people grumbled and pushed on. The Social Safeway even acquired a new nickname: Fort Safeway Georgetown.
Shoplifting is not an issue local to my Safeway. It’s a national problem. Almost everywhere, reported incidents of the crime have increased dramatically since the pandemic. A study released by the National Retail Federation at the end of last year found that from 2019 to 2023, the average number of shoplifting incidents rose 93%. In that same time period, shoplifting-related monetary losses for retailers jumped 90%. And, the study suggested, this was a new type of shoplifting. Many offenders were bolder and more organized than the shoplifters of decades past and, when confronted, more violent.
Practically every city-dweller I’ve spoken to says this characterization tracks with their experiences. Like everything else in the pandemic, the rise in shoplifting was unexpected, jarring. Unlike so many other uncomfortable things of that era, it did not go away. In some places, shoplifting has become a fact of life, to the point that a significant number of people consider the practice of buying things at the store—something George W. Bush once accurately identified as consonant with “the American way”—optional. And beyond that, a smaller, but dedicated, group of shoplifters has made a profession out of it.
While those in this second group, those practicing what the industry terms “organized retail theft,” are not representative of the majority of shoplifters, they operate under the cover of a populace that in the last few years has become much more accepting of petty theft. In fact, more than 1 in 5 Americans have admitted to shoplifting in the last year, according to a survey conducted by LendingTree. Many are millennial men. About a quarter of them say they are bold enough to walk out of the store without hiding their theft. The things they are most likely to steal are depressingly banal: food, soda, clothing, jewelry, makeup.
Their reasons don’t seem to justify their actions: frustration with the state of the economy, a gnawing desire to save money, or, as is often the case for younger offenders, simply for sport. About half of them get caught on the way out of the store; of those, only 24% are arrested. And, even as many more stores hire private security and install new anti-theft technologies—such as the turnstiles at my Safeway—18% of Americans, not far short of the entire shoplifting population, claim that a crackdown will not deter them from taking a five-finger discount.
A change in attitude so pronounced doesn’t occur on its own. The rise in shoplifting is in large part due to poor policy decisions, which in turn accelerated the spike in organized retail theft during the general disorder that reigned under pandemic-era regulations. In California, in whose cities incidents of retail theft have increased the most, the state has proved particularly inept in addressing the problem. In 2014, voters passed Proposition 47, a ballot initiative which downgraded certain nonviolent offenses, most prominently drug possession but also including shoplifting, from felonies to misdemeanors. At the time, nearly all debate over Prop 47 focused on the drug question. It was only after retailers reported steadily increasing losses to theft that this aspect became controversial.
On its face, the shoplifting provision in Prop 47 seemed sensible enough. Since 1982, the state had considered the theft of goods worth more than $400 a felony. Prop 47 revised the threshold up to $950. The idea was to bring the law in line with the realities of inflation and, as with introducing leniency toward drug possession, reduce the prison population of non-violent offenders, and in the process save California some money.
Instead, the law incentivized would-be shoplifters to make sure they limited their thefts to less than $950 per run. (One repeat offender was caught in San Bernardino with a calculator, which he used to make sure he always stole within his limits.) That way, when apprehended by police, the worst they would receive is a citation. “It’s a slap on the wrist the first time and the third time and the thirtieth time, so it’s a virtual get-out-of-jail-free card,” complained San Diego’s police chief about a year after Prop 47 was put into effect. “We’re catching and releasing the same people over and over.”
When the state shut down in 2020, what had been a steady source of frustration for retailers and law enforcement became a public scandal. California was the poster child for bad pandemic governance, a reputation derived in large part from viral videos of smash-and-grabs where police were basically powerless to restore order. To make matters worse, many of these incidents occurred in tandem with the protests that animated that long, strange year. At the time, it was fashionable among some commentators to claim that the protests were the catalyst for the increase in retail theft, but this was only true in a facial sense. The shoplifting problem was worsening well before George Floyd died under the knee of Derek Chauvin. But the protests and riots that followed Floyd’s death, along with the growing public discontent over pandemic regulations, led to a breakdown in public order. What was lost could not be restored: people who were already running shoplifting rings became bolder, and those who otherwise might not have stolen found themselves swept up in the frenzy.
By the time Governor Gavin Newsom intervened with a law in 2021 aimed at combating organized retail theft rings, it was too late. Shoplifting and commercial burglary had become a depressing but accepted fact of life for Californians. Newsom himself admits that the problem appears intractable. Early last year, he told a story of how, while in the checkout line at Target, he witnessed a man walking out of the store with an armful of merchandise. “He didn’t pay for that,” he told the woman behind the checkout counter. “Why don’t you stop him?” When she told him that it was pointless because California law couldn’t hold shoplifters accountable, the governor became angry. “Why am I spending $380,” he asked, when “everyone can walk the hell right out?”
What Newsom witnessed was very likely organized retail theft. The National Retail Federation’s study found that around the same time the governor was shopping at Target, store employees across the country were noting changing trends in shoplifting habits. Now more than in past years, shoplifters tend to work in groups, often clearing out whole shelves of items that they have targeted before entering the store—all signs of organized retail theft. If someone walks out of Target, his arms laden with blue jeans, it’s unlikely that he’s in desperate need of pants. More likely he’s planning to sell the jeans on the secondary market, sites such as Amazon, Craigslist, eBay, or Facebook Marketplace.
In 2022, one criminal justice reform group estimated that up to 10% of e-commerce sales, about $500 billion, were of goods shoplifted in this manner. And with the online market more open and accessible than ever before, it’s a much better business model than it was even 10 years ago. From 2015 to 2020, organized retail theft increased nearly 60%, costing retailers more than $700,000 per $1 billion in sales. In the years following the pandemic, those numbers continued to rise, with most of those stolen goods resold online at a steep discount. Most people, whether they know it or not, are complicit in the cycle. If you bargain shop online, there’s a good chance you have bought stolen goods.
Of the top 10 cities where businesses claim organized retail crime is worst, four are in California. Los Angeles has topped the list two years in a row, with San Francisco and Oakland filling in the slots immediately below and Sacramento rounding off the bottom of the list. The other cities impacted—New York City, Chicago, Miami, and Philadelphia among them—are of course some of the largest cities in the country. They are also places where lawmakers, law enforcement, and businesses have struggled to confront shoplifting effectively.
In New York, for instance, shoplifting is only a felony if the theft exceeds $1,000. Since most thefts don’t exceed that threshold, and since the city’s criminal justice system is already overwhelmed, there’s little energy to prosecute so many misdemeanors. And so a cycle similar to the one in California has played out over the last few years: Once shoplifting rings realized that the city was either unwilling or unable to crack down on them, they became much more aggressive. Between 2019 and 2023, one study found, New York saw the largest increases in shoplifting incidents in the country, even as the city attempted to make serious moves against retail theft.
For most businesses, the best they can do in this situation is lock up their wares and hope the plexiglass is discouraging. But, as everyone who has ever hunted down a CVS employee to unlatch the shampoo cabinet knows, locked shelves are often as intimidating to buyers as they are to thieves. (I experienced this myself in Los Angeles just a few weeks ago, where almost every single aisle in a convenience store was gated off.) Ditto on security guards, surveillance cameras, and, in my frequent experience, turnstiles. Stores implement measures like these because they feel they have no choice—I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a Safeway employee apologize to someone lost in the maze of store security—but they give customers the impression of shopping under siege.
It goes without saying that increased security is bad for business. People do not like being watched when they are shopping, and they like even less having to ask for help in the personal care aisle. Recent studies show that the average person is much less likely to even attempt to buy something if it’s locked away in a case or hidden behind the store counter. That attitude puts businesses in a double bind: they already lose massive amounts of money each year to shoplifting, but when they lock the merchandise away, they continue to lose money due to customer timidity (or exhaustion). Walgreens’s CEO, Tim Wentworth, summed up his company’s position neatly in a recent earnings call with investors: “When you lock things up . . . you don’t sell as many of them.”
Still, sales losses beat the alternative: closure. Last year, Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid all announced that they were closing thousands of stores across the country, in part because of the long-running decline hollowing out the drug store industry but also because of the shoplifting surge. One CVS in Washington, D.C. became an oft-cited exemplar of the problem. Although its pharmacy was in working order, its shelves were almost always bare. A few months before the company shuttered the store, a security guard on duty told local media that it was without a doubt the “worst” store where he had ever been stationed. Since he was not authorized to confront shoplifters, just to protect customers, he could only stand by helplessly as the same people entered the store and shamelessly filled up their suitcases and reusable bags with knick-knacks, leaving without even the pretense of hiding the crime. Eventually, CVS stopped stocking the shelves and, when shoplifters continued to pick over the remnants, closed the location entirely.
Gibbon observed in Decline and Fall that a censor may maintain, but never restore, the morals of a state. The same is true in a grocery store. Once the public has decided that payment is optional, the only way to compel it is through force. Some large retailers have come to that same conclusion. Both Walmart and CVS, for instance, are test-running new app-based keys that allow customers to unlock the panels blocking off store shelving in some stores. Walmart is also testing body cameras in some locations, the idea being that if a shoplifter comes to view store employees as law enforcement figures, he may come to fear them the way most people dread the approach of a police officer at a traffic stop. Other retailers, such as Lowe’s, Macy’s, and Kroger have begun experimenting with an array of AI-powered security systems, including facial-recognition cameras, license plate readers, autonomous security robots, and predictive analytic software.
These strategies may well be effective and good for the bottom line, but they reveal an underlying lack of social trust in public spaces. Once walls go up, once it becomes customary to lock away even the most insignificant items, it’s very difficult to recover the easygoing confidence in the grocery store—or anywhere else for that matter—that marked much of American life in the last half century.
For my part, I avoid my Safeway unless strictly necessary. When I do navigate the maze of security to get inside, I sometimes think of the scene in Don DeLillo’s White Noise where the narrator rhapsodizes about his local supermarket. “Some of the houses in town were showing signs of neglect. The park benches needed repair, the broken streets needed resurfacing,” he says about his small college town. “But the supermarket did not change, except for the better. It was well-stocked, musical and bright. This was the key, it seemed to us. Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.”
Neither DeLillo nor his narrator, of course, sincerely believes this sentiment; the author is making a bitter joke about how consumerism is so deeply embedded in American culture that we can gauge the health of it by the shininess of the grocery store. But joke or not, there’s more than a little truth in the statement. Ours is a commercial society. It was built on trade, and without the usual animating forces of a nation (war, religion, and the like) to fall back on in times of trouble, its success largely depends on its members’ ability to safely and peacefully conduct business. When those transactions can only be mediated through bars, it indicates a loss of faith in a whole way of life. When the supermarket slips, odds are everything else is slipping too.
These days the Social Safeway is a profoundly anti-social place. Outside, there are the security hurdles. Inside, it’s strangely quiet. The shoplifters have mostly been kept out, but so have the shoppers. What was once a common meeting ground for anyone who lived in the neighborhood has become a compound where all who enter are treated as potential threats. Some soldier on, that smaller, purer cohort of shoppers who will buy things in-person no matter the obstacles. But most give up. They leave the task to delivery app runners, workers who rush around the store filling carts for other people safely sitting at home, walled away from a world they find too inconvenient—and too unpleasant—to face in public.