Smash-and-Grab Retail | City Journal
When police busted a shoplifting ring operating out of a liquor store last spring, they calculated that the dozen or so people involved had swiped at least $375,000 worth of goods from retailers such as Walmart, Lowe s, and Walgreens. The pair heading the ring relied on small-time thieves, including several with drug arrest records, to launch brazen grab-and-go operations in which they snatched expensive goods and then raced out of stores and fled in cars with phony license plates. Though police and prosecutors often categorize shoplifting as a nonviolent crime, the gang s sprees resulted in several physical confrontations, including one in which a gang member assaulted a store employee with a stun gun. This may sound similar to the organized smash-and-grab lootings that have plagued high-end retailers in San Francisco and other Northern California communities recently, but this gang was operating out of Daytona Beach, Florida and had done so for nearly two years.
In fact, retail crime has been rising throughout the U.S. for the past five years, with organized criminal rings targeting stores everywhere from Woonsocket (Rhode Island) to Greensboro (North Carolina) to Grafton (Wisconsin). The National Retail Federation reported that store losses mounted from $453,940 per $1 billion in sales in 2015 to $719,458 in 2020. The biggest increase over that period happened not during the pandemic but in 2019, when total losses from shoplifting surged to $61 billion, up from $50 billion the previous year. The Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021 moderated losses, largely because stores were closed or had curtailed operating hours. Now that retailing has resumed, crime has spiked again.
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