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Alarm over bare store shelves deflects attention from complex problems

2023-10-18 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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Chia seeds, milled flax, monk fruit sweetener and fire logs are there for you at the Columbia Heights CVS.

That’s about all that’s left on the open shelves of the drugstore on a busy retail corner of Northwest Washington.

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“Thieves,” said Rodney Demetrius, a disgruntled CVS customer who sells roses at his small stand across the street and stopped shopping at the store about three months ago because there’s little left to buy and items aren’t being restocked. “They took everything.”

Inside, there were just two workers and a row of self-checkout stations, blinking, waiting for customers buying, what — monk fruit sweetener?

“Is it just the two of you here?” I asked them.

“It’s enough,” one of the workers said. Indeed. No real rush on milled flax, as far as I could tell.

There was also a new security guard, a woman with chest tattoos who nodded yes when I asked her if the store is empty because of theft.

Security for whom? Is she there to put her life on the line for that last bag of natural sweetener? And how long until this predicament — wielded as a political cudgel by some as proof of endemic lawlessness — becomes a reason for CVS to reassess its D.C. footprint?

We’ve seen it before. In March, it was the H Street Walmart. Months later, a Giant supermarket in Ward 8 removed the products stolen most — name-brand medications, detergents and toothpaste. And those barren shelves in CVS were used as further evidence in arguments that the city is soft on crime.

This is what corporate America is telling us, that retail theft is sky-high, that smash-and-grab shoplifters are causing huge losses and you, the customer, must suffer. Enjoy the chia seeds, Columbia Heights!

It’s “a national crisis, hurting businesses in every state and the communities they serve,” Neil Bradley, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s chief policy officer, warned in a video message calling on Congress to help end the scourge.

“For every billion dollars in sales,” he said, big retailers lose $700,000 to retail theft.

That means about 0.07 percent of sales are lost to theft, and that’s a 50 percent increase over the past year. It’s still a pretty tiny number — less than one-tenth of 1 percent.

Meanwhile, retail industry layoffs are up almost 950 percent since last year, according to numbers crunched by employment service Challenger, Gray & Christmas. These are the folks who run a store, stock shelves, ring up purchases, unlock the soap they’ve put behind plexiglass and, yes, curb theft with their mere presence.

That’s right. Understanding those now-viral empty shelves is complex.

For starters, tracing retail losses — “shrink” — is tough, and pinning everything on shoplifters is inaccurate. Some of the losses come from employee theft, damage or mistakes.

Even the police have a hard time identifying exactly how much crime is being committed by sticky-fingered shoppers. In D.C., property crimes are up by 26 percent compared with the same time last year, but that number is goosed by the jump in car thefts. There’s no distinction in the simple theft category between shoplifters, porch pirates and pranksters.

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When my colleagues looked into this, the best numbers they found came from a Capital One Shopping analysis of retail data. That said retailers in D.C. lost about $108 million in annual revenue to theft, which is 26.3 percent less than the national average of retail theft per capita.

To be clear, none of this is okay. Not for District residents hoping to buy baby formula or cereal on their way home, and not for the dwindling numbers of workers left helpless and without backup, as was the case in that viral video of garbage-bag bandits loading up at a Bethesda CVS this year.

And while the shocking images from Columbia Heights may fuel outsiders’ views of the District as increasingly troubled, the truth is that a back-alley market has long existed here for coveted goods.

I wrote about it more than a decade ago, when the Tide laundry detergent jugs in my Capitol Hill CVS started sporting anti-theft tags on their handles and manager Randy Nkrumah told me “I’ve never seen it like this before, only in the last few months.”

Thieves turn laundry detergent into 'liquid gold'

It was 2012, and the police said stolen Tide was being sold out of car trunks on the street. “Liquid gold,” they called it.

Over decades of living in D.C., I’ve seen a guy run out of a Giant with two handbaskets full of meat, sat on the Metro next to a guy lugging a tray of pilfered steaks, and been jostled by a man running past the cashier with an armload of diapers, squeezing through the sliding doors.

People struggling to care for, clean and feed their families started swiping goods long before Victor Hugo saw a guy steal bread on a cold Parisian day in 1846 — giving “Les Miserables” audiences something to cry over to this day.

The mercy that French literature conjures for the desperate is gone, however, as corporations call for tougher penalties for shoplifters, and for police to step up. This approach deflects scrutiny from their own performance.

Shoplifters are easier to blame for losses caused by overexpansion, strategy mistakes and the rise in online shopping, said Jonathan Simon, a criminal justice professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.

CVS just finished a huge expansion, buying the 169 urgent-care centers of Oak Street Health for $10.6 billion. Investors cheered as stock prices rose 4.5 percent the afternoon of the sale. Also: CVS laid off 5,000 employees this year and announced plans in 2021 to close about 300 stores by the end of next year.

“What is more concerning than the loss of brick-and-mortar retail, however,” Simon said, “is the perception that we are experiencing an epidemic of lawlessness, which erodes trust in government and reinforces powerful myths favoring punitive solutions to social problems.”

That’s exactly what CVS is doing.

“In recent weeks, we’ve worked closely with the DC Metro Police to identify and dismantle several major shoplifting rings and will continue to do so,” CVS spokesperson Carissa Falzarano said in a statement. “In addition, we’re supporting new initiatives to combat retail theft in partnership with the DC Attorney General’s Office. There are no plans to close this location, or any others in Washington, DC, at this time.”

Those two lonely employees in the empty store might be glad to hear that. And anyone who needs milled flax and monk fruit sweetener.

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