The stories are everywhere: Walmart store closures in Portland and Chicago; an epidemic of drug store thefts in New York. In Baltimore, a “landmark” grocery store shuts its doors after nearly 25 years in a community desperate for fresh food.
While in San Francisco, reports of big-box chains abandoning its downtown have become near-daily occurrences.
The cause: rampant, often organized, and seemingly consequenceless shoplifting.
Indeed, the US is deep in what many are calling an epidemic of thefts that cost retailers nearly $100 billion in 2021.
And this epidemic is impacting both the bottom lines and operational strategies of massive companies ranging from Macy’s to Ulta.
From 2014-2015, I lived on Los Angeles’ Skid Row as a homeless drug addict.
My daily heroin and crack-cocaine habit cost hundreds of dollars, which I primarily supported through professional shoplifting (also known as “boosting”).
The trade was lucrative and the threat of arrest was fairly minimal.
Across the political spectrums, analysts and academics endlessly debate the causes of this scourge, but for me, the roots could not be clearer.
“Working” just four hours a day, I would “earn” up to $350 in untaxed cash, which allowed me to maintain my drug habit for over a year.
Items that are typically “boosted” and then sold to stolen merchandise dealers (aka “fences”) are mostly health and beauty products, over-the-counter medications, and even food.
Once a working relationship is set up with a fence, they’ll typically provide “grocery lists” of the items they’re seeking, and boosters — like I once was — are usually paid between 10-20% of their retail value.
Back then fences either resold the stolen goods to local corner stores or set up tables at unofficial flea markets to offload their items.
In recent years, however, fences have also turned to Amazon, eBay, and even Facebook where they sell their stolen bounty with ease.
This, in combination with lax enforcement policies in major cities like San Francisco and New York City, has created an economic boom for thievery.
Ten years ago during my criminal career, there was always the threat of arrest – even after the passing of Prop 47 in 2014, which made shoplifting items valued at more than $950 a misdemeanor in California.
Prop 47 ensured that I couldn’t get sentenced to prison, but I often endured short stints in jail.
There I would go through violent withdrawals from heroin, but still, I continued to steal once I was released a few days later.
But following the 2020 push to defund the police and the subsequent loss of officers, professional shoplifters now operate in public and with clear impunity.
Every day, videos emerge of robbers blithely filling duffle bags as store employees watch helplessly out of fear of violence or legal retribution.
Rather than try and prevent pilfering— which was once considered part of their jobs — workers have become impotent enablers of a new criminal class that functions seemingly without conscience or consequence.
Politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have defended shoplifters as victims of an oppressive economic system, and vilified citizens and police officers that stand against them.
“It’s much easier to frame people who steal baby formula and medicine as monsters to be jailed than acknowledge our politics and economic priorities create conditions where people steal baby formula to survive,” Tweeted AOC last year.
Backed by this sort of political messaging, professional shoplifting has skyrocketed — up 26.5% nationwide in 2021 according to Forbes.
And as a result, everything from allergy medications to instant coffee is now barricaded behind lock and key in order to keep them safe.
Take Walgreens — a staple of everyday life across America.
In 2021, Walgreens closed five San Francisco outposts due to organized shoplifting.
Two years later, the company debuted an entire “Anti-Theft Store” in Chicago this past May, locking nearly every item away in a storage area and requiring customers to order them from a kiosk.
True, Walgreens CFO James Kehoe recently conceded the company may have overstated the effect of organized theft on their bottom line.
But the visuals — metal detectors to gain entry, QR codes to request items — speak for themselves.
Unsurprisingly, actual paying customers have become fed up with everyday staples now barricaded behind plexiglass panels. In fact, it’s common for item sales to drop 15-25% once they are locked away, which only pushes customers to purchase these items online.
Already battered by the dominance of retailers like Amazon, brick-and-mortar chains must now contend with both relentless shoplifting — and those shoplifted goods resold, with no little irony, on Amazon.
With police battered from combating organized theft, and customers frustrated by the retailers’ “lock everything away” approach, professional shoplifting has begun to appear intractable and unsolvable in many cities across the country.
No wonder some New York City shops have even begun installing anti-theft devices on $6 pints of ice cream.
In May, Wal-Mart announced the closing of 23 more stores nationwide.
Just a month earlier, Target revealed plans to close four stores amid reports that the chain is slated to lose $600 million to organized theft by the end of the year.
As is often the case, the most vulnerable communities suffer most from stores shut down; remember that “landmark” Baltimore grocer that closed last month due to rampant theft? It was one of the only retailers of its kind left the city’s historic Mt. Vernon district.
It’s not just big-box stores and major corporations that are feeling the pain.
Theft among small-business owners in New York City has risen by 77% over the past five years to $330 million.
Unlike along much of the west coast, NYC officials are responding.
This May, Mayor Adams proposed an anti-theft plan for his city.
The plan, however, is far from meeting the demands of a rising cohort of anti-theft advocacy groups, such as the Collective Action To Protect Our Stores coalition (CAPS), which is comprised of local business owners.
CAPS has called for reinstating bail, creating an NYPD and DA unit dedicated to retail theft, and raising assaults on retail workers to a Class D Felony — which presently includes offenses such as burglary and robbery.
Instead, Mayor Adams is offering “solutions” such as de-escalation training for retail workers, early intervention programs in lieu of jail for thieves, and most preposterous, the installation of kiosks at retail stores to link potential shoplifters with welfare programs.
Not only is this a slap in the face to citizens and local business owners, but it’s also a nonsensical approach that seemingly privileges social justice strategies ahead of actual anti-theft solutions.
San Francisco has been especially hard hit by organized shoplifting.
Without a doubt, the pandemic had a massive economic impact on the city.
But representatives from the nearly 20 businesses that have closed in the city’s Union Square shopping district since 2020 largely reported that staff safety, and a decrease in foot traffic due to crime-related violence, were the main contributors.
Three years after widespread calls to “defund the police,” San Francisco is facing a police officer shortage so severe that it was recently described as “catastrophic” by City Supervisor Matt Dorsey.
Add in the aggressive pro-criminal agenda touted by former DA Chesa Boudin and the current crime spree appears to have no end.
In fact, in 2021 Boudin’s conviction rate for petty crime had dropped to just 7.3 percent — compared to 51.3% in 2016 before he took office according to SF Gate.
Little wonder Boudin was recalled in June of 2022, replaced by the “moderate Democrat” Brooke Jenkins.
The strategy worked — at least initially: Arrest rates surged some 300 percent in Jenkins’ first month as DA, according to missionlocal.org, though actual conviction rates remained at a dismal 22 percent.
By 2023, non-violent crime had dropped 13.3 percent under Jenkins, however, violent crime had increased by 6.1 percent.
Despite Jenkins’ tough messaging and half-hearted crackdown, damage from the years of criminal leniency and neglect now appear to be permanent.
Impossible as it is to believe, the situation in San Francisco has actually gotten worse.
On April 27, a security guard at a Downtown Walgreens shot and killed suspected shoplifter Banko Brown — one of the first such death of its kind in the city.
The guard was initially arrested, but DA Brook Jenkins dropped all charges, stating that his life was at risk after Brown threatened to stab him.
Brown’s death was an absolute tragedy and the punishment for shoplifting shouldn’t be death. But it only underscores what many have long believed is inevitable: That the city’s lenient-on-crime culture would eventually result in a body count.
Brown had a laundry list of prior arrests and convictions, and his criminal career was enabled thanks to a long-term lack of prosecutorial oversight.
Without a return to law and order, additional tragedies like Brown’s are almost fated to continue.
Indeed, much like the subway death of Jordan Williams at the hands of Daniel Penny in New York in May, failures at early intervention are stoking a nascent sense of vigilantism that will only exacerbate urban chaos and decay.
Both Brown and Penny might still be alive had soft-on-crime policies not fueled their paper trails of lawlessness.
As a former professional shoplifter, I was unable to stop until I was finally arrested and sentenced to six months in jail.
There, I was able to detox from heroin and find my way into a treatment center a few months after my release.
Most professional shoplifters are much like I was, thieving to feed their addictions.
Breaking this cycle requires detox and long-term drug treatment — even for those who refuse it.
In tandem, prosecutorial leniency, and no-cash bail must be abolished if we’re to have any chance of returning to a system where products are actually purchased, rather than pilfered.
Sure, booths offering access to social services can help those who seek it.
But no matter how shiny or sophisticated, no electronic kiosk would have prevented me from shoplifting to feed my $ 350-a-day heroin and cocaine habit.
Jared Klickstein’s writing can be found at jaredklickstein.substack.com; he’s currently working on the memoir “Crooked Smile,” which will be published next year.
