Substacks

Target says it’s closing 9 stores due to theft. The crime data tells a different story. Rebecca Crosby

Published

1 year ago

October 5, 2023

On September 26, Target announced it was closing nine stores “because theft and organized retail crime are…contributing to unsustainable business performance.” Target said that before making the decision to close stores, it “invested heavily in strategies to prevent and stop theft and organized retail crime.” But ultimately, the company asserted, those efforts were not enough to make those stores “successful.”

Target’s press release resulted in an avalanche of coverage in virtually every major media outlet.

The overall tone of this coverage — with a few exceptions — was credulous. Many stories do little more than summarize Target’s announcement. Others contextualized Target’s store closures as the result of a larger crime wave. “The big box chain is part of a wave of retailers – both large and small – that say they’re struggling to contain store crimes that have hurt their bottom lines,” CNN reported. “Many have closed stores or made changes to merchandise and layouts.” Notably, CNN did not indicate when this “wave” of store closures started nor indicate how it determined that more stores than usual are closing.

There are certainly other factors that could contribute to closing a handful of Target’s stores. In June, Target CEO Brian Cornell said the company was saddled with large quantities of unwanted merchandise that it was forced to deeply discount, cutting into profit margins. Moreover, Target’s stores include “many fun and impulse-driven items,” but that merchandising mix “has become a liability as consumers focus on needs rather than wants and put discretionary dollars toward vacations and concerts,” CNBC reported in August. Groceries only account for 20% of Target’s sales, compared to 50% at competitors like Walmart.

One thing that is missing from all the stories is data that would substantiate Target’s contention that these stores closed due to theft. Target did not include any specifics on the level of theft at the closing stores or how that compares to stores that will remain open. Popular Information contacted Target for that information but did not receive a response.

Popular Information analyzed publicly available crime data for the stores Target is closing in New York and San Francisco. This data reveals that stores that are being closed have lower levels of theft than nearby stores that have remained open. An analysis of the stores Target is shuttering in the Seattle area follows a similar pattern. This data suggests that factors other than crime are driving Target’s decisions.

The truth about crime at Target in Harlem

One of the stores Target is closing due to claims of increased crime is located in New York City in a shopping plaza in the East Harlem area. An analysis by Popular Information, however, found that the area surrounding the plaza at 517 East 117th Street has had fewer incidents of shoplifting reported this year than other Target locations in Upper Manhattan.

New York Police Department complaint data, which includes “valid felony, misdemeanor, and violation crimes reported to the New York City Police Department,” found that the approximately one-block area that includes Target and a few other retailers had 201 reported incidents of shoplifting in the first six months of 2023. This analysis includes incidents of petit larceny from a store, grand larceny from a store, and robberies that began as shoplifting. Comparatively, the one-block area around the Target located at 150 East 86th Street had 327 reported incidents of shoplifting in the same period. In the first six months of 2023, the area around the 795 Columbus Avenue store had 232 reports of shoplifting. While crime data doesn’t capture all incidents of theft, as some go unreported, it does provide a reliable way to measure relative levels of theft among stores.

According to Gothamist, Target also plans to open another location in Harlem at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, which is “just 1.5 miles from the location it plans to close at the East River Plaza.” The company is additionally planning to open multiple new locations in New York City, including stores in Chelsea, Astoria, Union Square, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

The truth about crime at Target in downtown San Francisco

Target is also closing one store in San Francisco, located at 1690 Folsom Street. A Popular Information analysis of the San Francisco Police Department’s incident reports, which are filed by officers or members of the public, found that in the approximately two-block radius surrounding the Folsom Street location, there were fewer incidents of shoplifting reported than in the same size radius around at least three stores in downtown San Francisco that will remain open.

In the two-block radius around the closing Folsom Street location, there were 23 reports of shoplifting filed this year, compared to 385 reports in the area around the Mission Street store, 155 reports in the area around the Winston Drive location, and 48 reports in the area around the Geary Boulevard location. The data included reports of shoplifting, shoplifting with force used, thefts from buildings, robberies of a chain store, and robberies committed in a street or public place.

Target is also closing one store in Oakland, California, but there are no other Target stores located in the downtown Oakland area to compare. Further, the company is closing a store in Pittsburg, California, but Popular Information was not able to identify reliable data for that store.

The truth about crime at Target in Seattle

A report from the Seattle Times found a similar pattern in Target stores located in the Seattle area. Target is closing its stores in the University District, which had 87 police reports filed this year, and Ballard, which had 41 police reports. Meanwhile, Target will continue to operate nearby stores with more or similar levels of police activity, including in Northgate (172 police reports), downtown (68), and West Seattle (76). Both stores that are closing “went unmentioned in [a] July examination of organized shoplifting in the city.”

The Seattle Times noted that the stores that are closing “are relatively new, opening in 2019 as part of a push by Target to shore up its bottom line by opening smaller, more profitable stores in urban areas.”

Target is also closing three stores in downtown Portland, Oregon, but Popular Information was not able to identify reliable crime data for these stores.

Understanding “shrink”

In September, the National Retail Federation (NRF), a trade association that represents Target and other major retailers, said that retail theft “continue[s] to impact the retail industry at unprecedented levels.” The timing of Target’s press release announcing the closure of nine stores occurred on the same day that the NRF released its annual Retail Security Survey.

In 2022, according to the survey, “shrink” — an industry term for inventory losses from theft, damage, or administrative errors — was 1.57% of total retail sales, up from 1.44% in 2021. This means that an average of $1.57 in inventory was lost for every $100 in sales. The shrink rate in 2022, the NRF reports, is the same as it was in 2020 and 2019. Over the last seven years, shrink has oscillated between 1.3% and 1.6%. Experts note that “the share is largely in line with past years and is considered a normal and healthy level of shrink.” In addition, “when retail sales go up, as they did in 2022, shrink also tends to rise,” the Los Angeles Times reports. Retailers, according to the New York Times, are more likely to talk about shrink “during times of economic distress…when their profits are already being squeezed.”

Moreover, external theft is not the largest cause of shrink — other sources like “process, control failures, and errors” and “employee theft” account for a majority of the loss. Companies may be overemphasizing crime to deflect from internal issues. Retailers, for instance, “have struggled to properly staff stores over the last few years,” one expert told CNBC. “The lack of sufficient staffing remains a major contributor to shrink, as shrink monitoring technologies are only effective insofar as they flag risk,” UBS analysts wrote in a note. “It’s necessary to follow up with human intervention.”

Substacks

October 7, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

41 mins ago

October 8, 2024

Substacks

October 3, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

41 mins ago

October 8, 2024

Former Republican representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming joined Vice President Kamala Harris on a stage hung with red, white, and blue bunting and signs that said “Country Over Party.” As Cheney took the stage, the crowd chanted, “Thank you, Liz!” The two were on the campaign trail today in Ripon, Wisconsin, the town that claims to be the birthplace of the Republican Party. It was in that then-tiny town in 1852 that Alvan E. Bovay, who had recently emigrated from New York, called for a new political party to stand against slavery.

The idea of a new party took off in 1854 when it became clear the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting the westward expansion of human enslavement would become law. When they met in February of that year, people in Ripon were early participants in the movement of people across the North to defend democracy. Rather than standing against slavery alone, those organizing in 1854 stood against an entire political system, opposing the small group of elite enslavers who had taken over the U.S. government in order to establish an oligarchy and were quite clear they rejected the self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal. Instead, they intended to rule over the nation’s majority, whose labor produced the capital that southern leaders believed only elites should control.

In the face of this existential threat to the country, party divisions crumbled.

Pundits have described today’s event as a component of Harris’s ongoing outreach to Republicans, and in part, it is. That outreach, begun under President Joe Biden and continuing even more aggressively under Harris, is bearing fruit as in an open letter today, two dozen Republican former officials and lawmakers in Wisconsin endorsed Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz. “We have plenty of policy disagreements with Vice President Harris,” the Republicans wrote. “But what we do agree upon is more important. We agree that we cannot afford another four years of the broken promises, election denialism, and chaos of Donald Trump’s leadership.”

Lately, there have been indications of what returning Trump to office might mean.

On Tuesday, Trump suggested that the U.S. soldiers who sustained traumatic brain injuries (TBI) when Iran attacked an Iraqi base where they were stationed were not truly injured, but simply had “headaches.” Trump’s statement brought back to light a 2021 CBS report by Catherine Herridge and Michael Kaplan that found the injured soldiers had not been recognized with a Purple Heart, awarded to service members wounded or killed in the line of duty, despite qualifying for it. This slight meant they were denied the medical benefits that come with that military decoration.

The soldiers told Herridge and Kaplan that they were pressured to downplay their injuries to avoid undercutting Trump’s attempt to keep the casualty numbers in that incident low. With the story back in the news, Kaplan posted that after the report, the Army awarded the soldiers the Purple Hearts they deserved.

Journalist Magdi Jacobs recalled the argument of Trump’s lawyers before the Supreme Court that Trump could not prod a SEAL team to assassinate a rival because service members would adhere to the rules of their institutions. The Army officers’ bowing to Trump’s political demands proved that argument was wrong and set off “[m]ajor alarm bells,” Jacobs posted, suggesting that the military would not stand firm against Trump in a second term, especially now that the Supreme Court says a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of official duties.

Scott Waldman and Thomas Frank of Politico’s E&E News covering energy and the environment reported today that two former White House officials said that Trump was “flagrantly partisan” when responding to natural disasters. One said that in 2018 Trump refused to approve disaster aid after wildfires to California, perceiving it as a Democratic state. To get disaster money, the aide showed Trump polling results revealing that Orange County, which had been badly damaged in the fires, “had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.”

Defending the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election, former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters in 2021 gave a security badge to a man associated with MyPillow owner Mike Lindell to enable him to breach the county’s voting systems in an unsuccessful attempt to find evidence of voter fraud. A jury found Peters guilty of four felonies related to the scheme. Today, District Court Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced Peters to nine years in prison.

But there are other stories these days of what the government can accomplish when it is focused on the good of all Americans.

About 45,000 dock workers in the International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike Tuesday when the union could not reach an agreement with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping just as the areas hammered by Hurricane Helene desperately needed supplies. Dockworkers wanted a pay increase of up to 77% over six years and better benefits, as well as an end to the automation that threatens union jobs.

President Joe Biden reiterated his support for collective bargaining despite the threat to an economic slowdown from the strike. The Wall Street Journal editorial board excoriated Biden and the union, saying: “President Biden wants unions to have extortionary bargaining power, and he’s getting a demonstration of it on election eve. Congratulations.”

But today the International Longshoremen’s Association suspended the strike after USMX agreed to wage increases of 62% over six years. The two sides agreed to extend the current contract until January 15 to address the issues of benefits and automation. Administration officials White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, top White House economic advisor Lael Brainard, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg helped broker the temporary agreement.

The government’s power to make things better is also on display amid the rubble and ruin left behind by Hurricane Helene. Yesterday evening, after taking an aerial tour of western North Carolina to survey the damage and receiving a briefing in Raleigh, President Biden thanked both “the Republican governor of South Carolina and the Democratic governor of North Carolina and all of the elected officials who’ve focused on the task at hand. In a moment like this, we put politics aside. At least we should put it all aside, and we have here. There are no Democrats or Republicans; there are only Americans. And our job is to help as many people as we can as quickly as we can and as thoroughly as we can.”

Biden explained that the federal government had 1,000 first responders in place before the storms hit, and that he had approved emergency declarations as soon as he received the requests from the governors. Yesterday he directed the Defense Department to move 1,000 soldiers to reinforce North Carolina’s National Guard to speed up the delivery of supplies like food, water, and medicine to isolated communities, some of which are accessible now only by pack mule.

He has already deployed 50 Starlink satellites for communication, and more are coming.

Teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency are offering free temporary housing, as well as delivering food and water. They are helping people apply for the help that they need.

While Trump and MAGA Republicans insist that Biden is botching the response to Helene, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted that the response has gotten bipartisan praise. Republican governors Henry McMaster of South Carolina and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia both thanked Biden by name for what McMaster called a “superb” response.

So today’s bipartisan event in Ripon suggests far more than Democratic outreach to Republicans. It appears to be a commitment to a government that advances the interests of ordinary people, and protects the right of everyone to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government. Republican Abraham Lincoln articulated this worldview for his fledgling party in 1859 as it took a stand against oligarchs. Believing these principles accurately represented the aspirations of the nation’s founders, Lincoln called them “conservative.” People from all parties rallied to the party that promised to defend those principles.

“The president of the United States must not look at our country through the narrow lens of ideology or petty partisanship or self-interest,” Harris said today. “The president of the United States must not look at our country as an instrument for their own ambitions. Our nation is not some spoil to be won. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised: the nation that inspired the world to believe in the possibility of a representative government. And so in the face of those who would endanger our magnificent experiment, people of every party must stand together.”

“In this election, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration. It is our duty,” Cheney said. “I ask all of you here and everyone listening across this great country to join us. I ask you to meet this moment. I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump.

“And I ask you instead to help us elect Kamala Harris for president. I know…that…a president Harris will be able to unite this nation. I know that she will be a president who will defend the rule of law, and I know that she will be a president who can inspire all of our children—and if I might say so, especially our little girls—to do great things. So help us right the ship of our democracy so that history will say of us, when our time of testing came, we did our duty and we prevailed because we loved our country more.”

—

Notes:

https://wisconsinexaminer.com/briefs/wisconsin-gop-group-launches-pro-harris-campaign-with-open-letter/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-liz-cheney-joins-harris-campaign-rally-in-ripon-wis

https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-cheney-wisconsin-trump-89396853e5521c3870a3c88e04cbfd99

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/02/nx-s1-5137349/kamala-harris-liz-cheney-wisconsin-little-white-schoolhouse

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/10/02/adam-kinzinger-republicans-colin-allred-texas/

https://www.eenews.net/articles/helene-isnt-the-first-time-trump-inserted-politics-into-a-natural-disaster/

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4914462-colorado-county-clerk-sentenced-election-breach/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/purple-heart-us-soldiers-iran-al-assad-air-base-attack-traumatic-brain-injury/

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/international-longshoremens-association-strike-ports-labor-union-president-biden-a586363d

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/03/port-strike-ends-as-workers-agree-to-tentative-deal-on-wages-and-contract-extension.html