Editor’s note: Apropos of Bloomberg Businessweek’s talky story last week about how stores like Target and Walgreen’s “locked up their products […] and broke shopping in America,” I’m reprinting a popular Fingers column that originally ran around eight months ago (December 7th, 2023) about the absurdity of that practice when applied to something as cheap as malt liquor. The piece below has been lightly edited. Hope you enjoy, and thanks again for your patience as I wrap up this project. Home stretch!—Dave.
Have you heard about the retail-theft crisis sweeping the nation and pushing America’s helpless widdle megacorporations within billions of dollars of missing their quarterly earnings forecasts? Of course you have! It dominated the headlines of major media outlets for 18 months in the thick of the pandemic thanks to relentless kvetching from Walgreens, Target, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and other huge companies, and sensational “reports” from trade groups like the National Retail Federation and the California Retail Association.
Not only are vast shareholder fortunes being erased one stolen tube of toothpaste at a time; our precious norms of unfettered consumption are, too. “Brazen and sometimes hostile shoplifters [and] organized theft rings” are ruining the vibes of shopping in America, argued reactionary dipshit and New York Times opinion section columnist Pamela Paul in a thinly sourced dispatch in August 2023. “Stores simply feel less safe.”
We’ll come back to Spamela’s feelings in a moment. But first, the facts. Shoplifters didn’t seize the pandemic as an opportunity to knock over the nation’s convenience stores and supermarkets, as many retail executives and their fellow travelers would like you to believe. In reality, most of the country saw a net decrease in shoplifting over the past few years: the NRF’s own data clocks average annual inventory “shrink,” which includes theft, at 1.57% of retail sales last year, which is a smidge more than 2021 (1.44%), and a smidge less than 2019 (1.62%). And in early December of last year, the trade group quietly retracted an incendiary claim from its influential April 2023 report that “organized retail crime” drove $45 billion in collective losses in 2021, admitting that this assertion was based exclusively on unverified, two-year-old Congressional testimony of another industry advocate. Oops!
Of course, the damage had already been done. In June 2023, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance held hearings on this (exaggerated) “threat to public safety.” That September, California governor and future former Democratic candidate for president Gavin Newsom announced the state would grant $267 million to cities to fight the (mostly fake) scourge of shoplifting. Innumerable Fox News uncles and Facebook aunts have been fed videos of one-off shoplifting incidents and told they’re evidence of broad moral decay that can only be stanched with state violence.1
Most relevant to our purposes: as a result of this searing national spotlight on shoplifting, stores began locking up tallboys of malt liquor.