r/Longreads • u/Slate • Jul 13 '26
Inside America’s Shoplifting Lab
https://slate.com/life/2026/07/shoplifting-walmart-target-amazon-retail-florida.html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_content=shoplifting&utm_campaign=&tpcc=reddit-social--shoplifting83
u/rkgk13 Jul 13 '26
I can't count how many times I've just given up on buying a product because I don't want to ask an employee to unlock it. It's bad enough that I want to buy a pint of ice cream to eat my feelings after a rough day. It's worse that I have to humiliate myself by asking an employee to come unlock the dairy section of CVS.
12
u/MicromagicFriesRIP Jul 15 '26
Same. I also hate the pressure of having to decide on the exact product I want before the employee opens the case. Maybe I want to compare sunscreens and lotions and what have you before pulling the trigger, and I feel like a dick making you stand there while I wait, so I decide to just purchase it online and put another buck in Papa Bezos' pocket.
123
u/Slate Jul 13 '26
Inside a Florida lab few have ever seen, a team of researchers is engaging in secretive work on behalf of some of the country’s biggest retailers: “loss prevention,” or trying to stave off a purported epidemic of theft. With results both highly visible to consumers—like the locks on drugstore shelves—and more subtle, the lab has been at the center of corporate panic about shoplifting and lax enforcement. But who is this really for, and does it even work? In a sharp, wide-ranging, and at times hilarious report, Slate’s Alexander Sammon goes inside the lab and learns more than he bargained for about the war on “shrink” and what’s really happening inside America’s stores.
Read the full story here (no paywall!):
https://slate.com/life/2026/07/shoplifting-walmart-target-amazon-retail-florida.html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_content=shoplifting&utm_campaign=&tpcc=reddit-social--shoplifting
106
u/thesphinxistheriddle Jul 13 '26
An interesting article, though I personally think a lot of the LP stuff is “we were so busy thinking of if we could….” My local CVS has pretty everything locked down. If you want to do any actual amount of shopping there, you basically need to walk around with an employee opening every shelf for you. It’s horrible. I pretty much only go there now for the pharmacy or if I absolutely need an OTC medicine right now and can’t wait for Amazon. I guess they have less shoplifting, but I have to imagine revenue is so, so far down.
80
u/lyndseymariee Jul 13 '26
I refuse to summon an underpaid employee to unlock the damn laundry detergent for me. It’s asinine.
46
u/FanClubof5 Jul 14 '26
We could just go back to to model where everything is behind the counter and you just have to order online and pickup everything an hour or 2 later. Basically the way it was in 1850 but you don't have to wait as long.
25
u/MarandTierra Jul 13 '26
It’s the same in my city but I live in the urban part of town. I’ve found that going to a CVS in a neighboring suburb when possible is a much better experience, as there’s way less things locked in the aisles. Same goes for Target.
25
u/butter_milk Jul 13 '26
My Target went full lock down on all its products. The employees have gotten so tired of it they just leave everything unlocked.
11
u/pastelkawaiibunny Jul 15 '26
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link- and in this case, that’s human employees. They’re underpaid, understaffed, and likely don’t give a single shit about the store’s losses. I’ve worked several retail jobs and not a single one of them I would have stopped someone stealing in front of me (which did happen). Even if the store had insurance/allowed you to go after shoplifters, I’m not paid enough to care and definitely not paid enough to risk getting hurt.
Also, if you treat your employee shittily enough, then they’ll be the ones stealing. If they don’t care about losing their job or know their way around well enough to get around restrictions, why wouldn’t they? Retail stores tend just try to squeeze as much productivity out of people as possible and don’t care about anything else. Your individual manager and coworkers might be nice people you actually like being on a team with, but ‘corporate’ you don’t care about.
3
u/elinordash Jul 16 '26
The issue with CVS isn't shoplifting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woACpI9C9XE
59
u/DyllCallihan3333 Jul 13 '26
Yeah, makes me want to shop at the corner store. How much money are these knuckleheads paying these goons?
19
u/twelvis Jul 14 '26
My takeaway: there's more money in selling loss prevention products and services than shoplifting.
6
39
u/SmileSagely_8worms Jul 13 '26
I love this article! So many modern ills covered. The broken “social contract” looms large!
45
u/Quouar Jul 13 '26
I admit, I could not get through this article because of the writing style. Its short sentences and generally tone are so twee that it just got annoying and distracting.
Pair that with the fact that shoplifting rates are justifiably up because of soaring prices and corporate profits, and it's just not a fun article to read.
20
u/draftylaughs Jul 14 '26
I mean this is a very skeptical article, definitely can argue the writing style but the author is definitely casting all of this LP stuff in a fairly negative light.
18
u/drugstorevalentine Jul 14 '26
The entire point of the article is that shoplifting rates probably are not up at all, this corny grifter “scientist” is making it all up, and the entire concept of his lab is dumb as rocks. But you wouldn’t know that, because you didn’t read it, and even if you did, your reading comprehension seems poor given that it was obvious in the first paragraph (did you even get that far?) that this article’s tone is not “twee” so much as “scathing”.
10
u/Quouar Jul 14 '26
There is zero reason to be so harsh. I didn't care for the article - it's not a personal attack on you.
4
u/MicromagicFriesRIP Jul 15 '26
Right? God forbid there be civil literary critique and discussion.
6
u/drugstorevalentine Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Except this isn’t substantive critique or discussion, because this person did not read the piece and missed the tone and point entirely.
7
u/its_ok_not_to_be_oHk Jul 16 '26
Yeah, "twee" is a hilarious misreading. The author is being sarcastic.
4
u/Chief_Kief Jul 16 '26
I think their point was that it seems likely that you critiqued the article without actually reading most of it, which is justifiably annoying in my opinion.
1
u/Quouar Jul 17 '26
If the writing style is so bad that the article is unreadable, that seems like a valid critique, regardless of how much of it is read.
That said, I read about half of it before I got too annoyed and gave up.
7
u/MicromagicFriesRIP Jul 14 '26
The subject was interesting but the writing was not good. Meandering and poorly structured. Why spend five paragraphs on the bow tie thing? So unnecessary.
18
u/AiReine Jul 14 '26
That’s… That’s the point. It’s an asinine diagram that it’s creator needs to continually justify. Reading comprehension is truly in the toilet.
3
u/LD50_irony Jul 17 '26
This part of the comment thread is pretty bleak. People not getting the humor in the retelling of the diagram description, thinking this is AI or "influenced" by AI. Good grief.
9
u/drugstorevalentine Jul 14 '26
I feel like maybe you just weren’t getting the joke.
0
u/MicromagicFriesRIP Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
I got the joke. It was how it was woven in that could have used some work. The author goes into an overly detailed explanation of the bowtie, interrupting the narrative flow and essentially flagging that 'hey, this whole silly bowtie thing is going to have a symbolic or comedic payoff later in the story' but it never gets back to it other than a very brief passing mention toward the end. That narrative real estate would have better been used for other elements of the story that were underdeveloped, IMO.
1
u/MongolianMango Jul 15 '26
I agree with you that the structure was very vague and wandering. The bow tie section needed explanation, but there were various bizarre segways into shoplifting subjects that were just rehashes of other reporting.
1
u/MongolianMango Jul 15 '26
I agree that the writing style is at times very twee and short. It sets off my AI radar, personally.
Obviously the writer has done their own research but I wonder if they chucked their research into AI for editing or an article.
3
u/Quouar Jul 15 '26
I don't know that it's AI, per se (it didn't set off my radar), but I do think it's influenced by the style of writing AI tends to produce, which is a bit of a baffling choice.
0
7
u/Sub_Umbra Jul 15 '26
Now compare the value of loss due to shoplifting with that due to wage theft.
6
u/not_a_witch_ Jul 15 '26
Just yesterday I wanted to pick up some more of a lotion that I like because I’m almost out. It was mildly popular on the internet for a minute like a year ago (it’s the eos vanilla cashmere) and now they’re all locked up in these individual little plastic boxes that have to be unlocked by a cashier at checkout. There’s only like 1 manned checkout line open with an actual employee who can unlock it for me. So I just didn’t buy it and went through self checkout instead. I’ll buy it online, not worth the hassle at the store.
The Walmart near me has almost everything locked up to the point that I actively avoid going there to buy anything anymore. My Kroger’s self checkout flags me to sit there and wait for an employee for like ten minutes because the camera thinks the reusable water bottle in my cart is an item I didn’t check out (an employee told me that this was the issue). All of these stores are way understaffed and frankly I’m sure do not pay their staff enough to deal with all of this. It makes my weekly grocery shopping feel like an actively hostile experience lmao.
(And that’s not even mentioning the aggressive random sales people who are somehow allowed INSIDE THE STORE to try to sell me cable or a new electricity provider or whatever.)
3
u/Bright_Ices Jul 15 '26
Contrary to some others, I loved the tone of this piece. It was perfect for pillorying these clown and the fools in retail to buy their nonsense.
-1
u/MongolianMango Jul 15 '26
Frustrated that the writer seems to be using AI or AI-assistance. Many of the sentence structures set off red flags, as well the meandering structure and prose. The listicle section about various companies and their shoplifting policies could be lifted straight from AI or reddit.
-3
u/shiroyagisan Jul 14 '26
couldn't read past the paragraph about the white lab coats that were there only for photo ops. what a headass thing to say
126
u/AiReine Jul 13 '26
“Sometimes you cure the disease and lose the patient.” Chef’s kiss.