Gerry Doyle: US retail lobbyists retract key claim on 'organized' retail crime

US retail lobbyists retract key claim on 'organized' retail crime

US retail lobbyists retract key claim on 'organized' retail crime | Reuterswww.reuters.com The main lobbying group for U.S. retailers retracted its claim that "organized retail crime" accounted for nearly half of all inventory losses in 2021 after finding that incorrect data was used for it...

now that the damage has been done by planting the seed, the people who could be swayed against them for this shit instead will say "well they retracted that statement" and they roll on forward. Horrible.

I thought about sending the article to my mom and then realized she'll just tell me she knows because she saw it just like everything else 🙃

🎯

this is my unsurprised face

There’s a great If Books Could Kill that discussed how they made up that number

If Books Could Kill is the greatest name ever. I wish I had thought of that as an album title

I just found them on here and listened to the podcast and it lives up to the name. Salute to @ifbookspod.bsky.social

Completely expected item in bagging area.

Oh word? That thing everyone called bullshit last year turned out to be bullshit? Huh. Crazy.

My favorite detail in these stories has been that one of the biggest forms of "shrink" is incorrectly priced products. Store-level employees don't program those barcodes at chains—that's Walgreens deciding that if they sold something for $8 that was supposed to be $18, somebody stole $10 from them.

Yeah or somebody has a coupon that doesn’t work in the computer so the checker is like “fuck it” and just manually applies the discount — they probably call that shrink whether or not they can then return the coupon for the manufacturer reimbursement

Shocked. I’m not shocked. Marketing strategy to pivot once the panic narrative no longer serves it’s distraction purpose (to counter/temper public outcries against inflation & greed)

I know where can find some organized crime in the retail sector.

HR is getting really smart, they organize these flash mobs when they do wage theft now.

They deserve to have to deal with organized retail crime for this

Sub rides for capitalists.

The first paragraph is wrong. They were already aware that their claims were false; they had to deliberately manipulate the data to accomplish that.

This is also untrue. They frequently use the term to refer to theft in stores.

The person who wrote this article did a really bad job. Are they not familiar with the issue?

I don't get why they're giving up. It's like they just got tired of the lie.

Telling that bullshit to investors would be securities fraud and they’ve all recently had or will shortly have earnings calls, so the game was up

They've already won

Yeah I guess so, but I can't figure whether they're sad/guilty or they're gloating.

They're playing both sides so they can avoid long-term criticism of promoting bullshit, after benefitting from promoting bullshit.

founder and CEO of K2 integrity? Actor Nick Kroll's brother!

For anyone wondering: instead of the 50% claim, the real number is reportedly a fraction (possibly just a small fraction) of 36%.

But what about the roving bands of antifa bursting into the Walmart and robbing them of all their lobster or whatever

Not really though. That is external theft as a percentage of total shrink, not of total theft. I.e. internal theft is not 64% of shrink.

It doesn’t say the rest of shrink is theft or internal theft. It says the other % of shrink includes “shipping mistakes, clerical errors and any other cause”.

Note that I’m not claiming they are right. Their claim is BS. But there’s essentially no number we can look at that’s relevant to disproving their claim.

Agree no way to get exact, but I would assume that all “Organized Retail Crime” is within “external” even if an employee was part of it, because it also involves an “outside criminal network”. And they appear to have a separate categorization for “Employee/Internal” theft. From Wikipedia:

Yes, but even with that assumption (which I agree is reasonable), the percentage they’re quoting is a percentage of that 36%. So they claim it’s ~18%. It’s more likely small single digit, but no way to prove it.

Yes, I know. I’m saying that the “half” claim they are reporting is organized theft/total theft and the 36% is external theft/total shrink.

The problem with this isn’t that the lobby group made a mistake. It’s that newspapers & news channels ran with the story without checking the data. It was headline news for weeks

This article reads very strangely. They keep repeating in paragraph after paragraph the debunked claim & only say what the true figure is at the very end.

Once again, @michaelhobbes.bsky.social is proven right.

It kinda sounded like bullshit from the jump.

Also cool that, even though this lie has been weaponized against Biden and the Dems, there's still no political upside to pointing out that it was all a sham.

So if only half all inventory losses are due to retail crime, is the other half just lost due to the retailers' incompetence?

Big variety of things I suspect, products expiring unsold, employees taking home product before it gets inventoried, some data entry person typoing the price of an item and they sell 25000 units of something at 90% off before anyone catches it etc

A lot of perishables expired during that shipping blockade a year or so ago & had to be marked as loss.

This will forever tarnish the reputations of "K2 Integrity" and the "Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail". Or probably not...

We should steal more.

Retail "shrink" has been at about 1.5% of revenue for the past decade. It's not exploding and it's not going away.

I’m sure the media will give this the same attention as the original claims. Nothing to see here, move along

Me guess they just got their insurance premium updated and they went «holy shit!»

mfers would just shruggle and say “oh well”. There should be repercussions but there won't be

If you are caught lying to a Senate subcommittee, you should then also have to reach out to individual members to clarify the record.

Maybe they’ll unlock the shelves at Home Depot so I don’t have to wait on the one guy with the key/code to come back from his nap.

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