Kind of like how any game developer who says that piracy is the reason that they failed financially, even though some of the greatest games of all time are the ones that get pirated the most.
Don’t worry, people will completely ignore the retraction and continue to blame their fellow poor people (just not themselves) for the outrageous behavior of our corporations.
This turning out to be true is unsurprising, but if it were, follow it to its logical conclusion and you would see large retailers lobbying the government to increase wages. Like, we live in a fucking police state, the problem is not that we’re suddenly an outlaw country, the problem is that people don’t make enough money or have enough safety nets to live. It’s the same with all of the “Americans feel bad about the economy even though the dow is up, why?” Well, because we can’t afford housing and groceries. Simple fucking problem.
Those stock indexes only show how the top corporations are doing. A company gets removed from the index if it performs poorly and is replaced by another company that has increasing stock price. The markets as it is displayed in media only show how corporations are doing. So basically the ruling class is selling economic performance to everyone else to keep people in line and their heads securely on their bodies.
I was looking at Bidens approval rating compared to other presidents on 538 and it’s crazy seeing the last time this really was so bad, aside from Trump, was the Great Depression…which says alot about the disconnect today spouting Dow successes but normal people struggling to stay afloat.
I have a 5 digit UID, and I just checked that I can still log in. Looks like my most recent comment was in November of 2015, which is a lot later than I would have guessed.
I visited a few times right after the reddit blowup, while checking out other options for this sort of thing. I might have to go back more.
I skipped the Digg era. I didn’t join reddit until probably 2015, after I kept coming across extremely useful information there that wasn’t available elsewhere. I think it was the advice on what to do with asbestos that finally tipped it over for me.
I was an early reddit adopter. I preferred its hyper minimalist style, as well as the type of conversations I saw, to Digg at the time. Well before the whole Digg 2.0 debacle.
they’re not paying premiums. there is no “insurance policy” to pay premiums. when a company self insures itself, what that means, is, they keep some capital on hand (or readily availible,) so that they can weather a problem.
because they price the loss into the merchandise they sell, if they expect x% of the pallet to be stolen, and the reality is a bit higher, they dip into that fund to buy the next pallet, which, they then price at y% loss, and a bit more to compensate for the extra they lost on the first pallet. Maybe this time it was a bit low. so they go back to x% on the third.
the costs are passed directly onto consumers with no insurance company meddling. because that would just be inefficient. they might have a clause in a policy against mass-loss if, for example, the entire store gets looted in a mass-theft or if the store somehow goes up in smoke or hit with a hurricane. but as a matter of normal operations, they’re not claiming insurance on every bit of lost product regardless the reason.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for sticking it to big corporations, but we could just be honest about what we’re saying: I don’t care if shoplifting costs retailers money.
You’re 100% right on the second point, though, they anticipate some amount of shrinkage when setting prices.
They are talking about organized retail theft. Individuals stealing still could make up a large amount of loss. Article doesn’t seem clear to me on that point.
They literally closed those stores without actual theft issues. You think they’re gonna reopen them now that they’ve admitted they were lying? Of course not. Sounds like imaginary theft has a ReAl aNd MeSUrAbLe impact on my community too. Fuck 'em.
I never commented about Target closing or reopening stores. My comment was relating to insurance not just being free money that covers bad stuff happening. There’s also such a thing as being uninsurable.
I’m all for bashing corporate greed but claiming theft isn’t a big deal because they have insurance is a bad take.
Let’s take a step back from this pointless argument. Shrink rates have been between 1-2% for arguably forever. Retailers currently are aghast that their shrink losses went from $90 billion to $120 billion! Yikes! That sounds like a big increase!
Yet, that shrink percentage has not significantly increased. It’s been around 1.5% for a few years now. Doesn’t that make you wonder though? If the percentage of shrink loss isn’t increasing, how are the losses increasing 33%? And even more perplexing is, how are these companies posting record profits? Quarter after quarter their profits are increasing as much as 6% even with these record breaking shrinkage losses.
It’s almost as if they have taken advantage of the publics attention of COVID era inflation, and price gouged the retail market. It’s like they priced their products 33% higher than they were, in order to make record profits, and those higher prices can easily be conflated into record shrinkage losses.
Weird. I’m sure that can’t be what’s happening though. My always friendly Walmart has always been set on giving me the cheapest prices possible. They couldn’t be trying to change the narrative to make it seem like customers are thieves. They love their customers, and would never patronize them for something as greedily evil as a drop in their revenue bucket.
Why are so stores spending so much money and labor redoing stores to add locked shelving display units for basic goods?
The cost of the shelving and maintenance increases, and the required labor increases because every customer will need an employee to unlock the displays every time they need an item like video games in the 90s.
Stores don’t want to lock up toothpaste and bottle neck their sales but they’re doing it en masse, why is that?
If you walk into basically any CVS in America, you’ll notice the number of employees working the floor is inversely proportional to the amount of merchandise locked behind plastic cases. It’s far more cost efficient for the corporation to just pay fewer employees and lock up as much of the high-margin merch as possible.
Without a doubt, they lose sales because of this tactic, but they also have less overhead and almost nonexistent theft. I don’t think this trend came as a result of high levels of shoplifting, it was just the inevitable outcome of corporate cost-cutting practices. The companies won’t hesitate to blame these decisions on rising levels of theft and organized crime, though, as if the act of shoplifting isn’t as old as commerce itself. It’s not a new problem, it’s just a new convenient solution that saves the retail giants a ton of money.
Stores like target will charge whatever they can, do you think target is saying well we could charge more but we won’t to be nice but now that shit is getting stolen we’re going to increases prices to make up for it.
It’s factored into profits but that doesn’t mean it’s going to change the price. The reason cost is a factor is because competitors can’t charge lower than what it costs for the product. But when you have online as a competitor then things like cost of stolen items have less of an impact because you need to compete with them or other chains who have figured out how to prevent theft at a cheaper cost than you.
Wait are you telling me insurance is a scam because if you ever need to use it it’ll cost more money? That’s crazy dude, I feel so awful for the massive multimillion dollar companies that are forced to pay for it…
Why wouldn’t I steal petty shit from a large chain store like Walmart? They stole living wages from workers in many communities, they stole the diversity of local businesses that used to be in many communities, most importantly they steal from every single one of us by not paying a genuinely fair share back to the society they profit off of in terms of taxes. Sorry, not gonna feel bad for stealing some toothpaste, especially when it is a store that fired all the cashiers and has one person frantically running around helping people in a sea of obnoxious self checkout machines that all blare the same audio loop out over and over and over again.
At first they thought at first it was greedflation, that it was the 1% siphoning off all the profits from the economy to shareholders, they thought it was massive corporations hedging families out of the housing market, austerity and lack of social safety net… but the whole time it was ME stealing toothpaste from walmart, slowly undercutting the heart of america. They didn’t realize until it was too late, I had become too powerful. I have a whole bathroom full of stolen toothpaste tubes and I am ready.
It literally doesn’t, that is the whole point of this discussion? I am telling you, there is zero mathematical/economic evidence that shoplifting even registers as a problem worth investing time and energy into for massive corporations. They do invest time and energy, but it is because the narrative is useful to them. That is what this is about, it is about a story. Not economics, not math, not hard cold reality, it is about a narrative that emotionally engages you and gets you upset. It is about a story that rationalizes the world for you in a way that directs your anxiety and fear. There is zero scientific grounding in your beliefs about shoplifting, it might as well be a spiritual or religious belief you hold and just the way people will try to take advantage of you by preying upon your spiritual beliefs, so will corporations and politicians try to take advantage of you by preying upon your belief that shoplifting actually matters to economic behemoths that shape and undermine our entire economy.
Literally THE ENTIRE point of being a massive chain is that random noise like shoplifting disappears into the overwhelming roar of economies of scale.
Well, ease of regulatory capture is another bonus but that just strengthens my argument…
Stores invest millions in anti-theft security, in technical, logistical, and physical ways. All of those things cost money.
You are making a clear logical fallacy by acting like this proves shoplifting must actually significantly impact their bottom line. Further there is abundant evidence that corporations invest massive amounts of money into things that don’t actually help them economically. Don’t tell me you also believe the narrative that markets are magically always rational??
You don’t seem to be able to understand this isn’t about numbers, it is about narratives.
You are making a clear logical fallacy by acting like this proves shoplifting m
If they invest the money, the money is spent, thus affecting the bottom line
Not sure why you’re trying to argue this so hard, but there is no percent chance you will be correct here. Costs are indeed passed forward onto customers.
Further there is abundant evidence that corporations invest massive amounts of money into things that don’t actually help them economically.
The efficacy is completely irrelevant. What’s relevant is the costs induced. You are correct that people are irrational. That doesn’t change the fact that the irrationality costs them money, which they make back via pricing.
Also I assure you that Wal-Mart has a very large team whose only goal is to measure the cost/benefit analysis of decisions like these - and those teams also cost money. Even the concept existing at all raises prices.
If they invest the money, the money is spent, thus affecting the bottom line
Not sure why you’re trying to argue this so hard, but there is no percent chance you will be correct here. Costs are indeed passed forward onto customers.
ahahahaha so now you are blaming me for the irrational economic behavior of corporations? I feel so powerful now, thank you.
“Companies say these incidents have led to a spike in merchandise losses, known as shrink. The metric incorporates inventory losses caused by external theft, including organized retail crime, employee theft, human errors, vendor fraud, damaged or mismarked items and other losses.
But the retail industry’s own figures on shrink cast doubt on their claim that the problem is ballooning. Researchers say retailers may be blaming theft for losses when they don’t actually know the cause.
Shrink is an “issue where you’ve got a problem, but there’s no way to know exactly where the losses are coming from,” said Richard Hollinger, a retired professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Florida, who studies retail losses and launched the retail industry’s first annual security survey in the early 1990s.
According to the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) annual survey of around 60 retail member companies, shrink is a “rapidly ballooning issue.” In 2021, retail shrink hit $94.5 billion, up only 4% from 2020 but a 53% jump from 2019.
But, in fact, the average shrink rate as a percentage of sales dropped to 1.4% in 2021 from 1.6% in 2020, according to the latest NRF survey. That number has hovered around 1.4% for more than a decade.“
Ok ok so the concern for shoplifting from Random’s doesn’t even warrant tracking as a separate stat (it is no more important than workers occasionally misplacing boxes in the supply chain??), we are talking about <1% of sales. Sorry not going to lose sleep over that?
How about those organized shoplifting sprees that we keep hearing about? What does the national Retail Foundation, the group that is going to be the most concerned about this out of any?
“The NRF estimates that organized retail crime costs companies an average of just 7 cents for every $100 in sales.”
I mean as you yourself noted they are already locking up stupid shit like toothpaste. Nobody is fuckn stealing enough toothpaste to effect profits. Hell I’m not sure who would even bother stealing toothpaste, it’s not exactly expensive. Saving yourself like a buck at most by not buying the cheap (just as effective) stuff.
And I’m not advocating for theft sheesh. I just think it’s funny that the oh so wonderfully for profit insurance companies fuck over retailers too. I was trying to comment about how insurance is maybe kind of a scam…
I’ll also note that there isn’t actually a widespread theft problem. Stores aren’t locking up toothpaste because people are stealing it more than they used to. There were a few places, notably New York which did some really stupid shit with petty crime essentially just publicly saying they weren’t gonna deal with it that caused a lot of problems but by and large toothpaste isn’t locked up because people are stealing it. The company is just a dick
It’s not that the toothpaste itself is the high theft item, it’s just easier to lock the whole shelf rather than specific items. Notably items like Razor blades have crazy high theft rates and are usually near the toothpaste, causing them both to be locked up.
Check out some metropolitan areas for a preview of what’s coming to a store near you. Denver has been locking stuff up for years already.
That type of knee jerk conjecture is really weak. The data collected on shrinkage, as noted in the linked Reuter’s article, is noisy. You can’t differentiate lose due to theft or shipping mistakes or cliericsl error.
More importantly, and not mentioned directly in the boingboing article, was the cited number of rising organized theft was based upon an analyst from a security firm. The report was created in partnership with that firm. With the recent redaction, there is no mention of that firm.
Boing boing .net has been a reputable site for years. I think it started as a blog for author and journalist Cory Doctorow, but has become a news site of its own. The recent term enshittification was coined by Doctorow.
A pro-gun lawyer was shot by his own weapon while visiting a hospital when a powerful magnetic field from an MRI scanner set the pistol off.
Leandro Mathias de Novaes was taking his mother for a scan at the Laboratorio Cura in Sao Paulo in January and entered the facility with a concealed handgun.
Despite warnings from staff to remove jewellery and metal objects in the MRI room, Mr Mathias kept his weapon on his waistband.
The magnetic field from the machine was so strong that the weapon was pulled from his waist and fired off a round, which hit him in his stomach.
The 40-year-old Brazilian was treated in hospital for more than two weeks before he died from his wounds.
When you go into an MRI room you hear this weird but very distinct sound from the liquid helium pumps keeping the giant superconducting magnets near absolute zero.
Then when it runs, the vibrations from the current being pushed through the gradient coils is significant enough that you need hearing protection.
It’s serious business in there. But it lets us see inside our bodies without incisions or ionizing radiation, so it’s also awesome. But jeez some people and their guns.
I’ve had two and recall an eerie feeling but the only noise I remember was some clanking. Maybe my mind is just shot. Is the noise you are referring to just when they are first starting things up?
The pump sound is always there and never changes. However, maybe you don’t hear it in some facilities with different layouts. I’ve used a few facilities and always heard it.
For the loud noises from the vibration, that happens while they’re actually doing the scans. Different portions of the scan create distinct sounds, though I don’t know which sound goes to which measurements. There’s gotta be a YouTube video about it.
The sounds have a harsh buzz to their tone, like somebody is playing sound effects through a Tesla coil.
I’ve told people that getting an MRI, particularly one where you need to go head-first into the tube, can feel like an alien abduction!
You don’t understand what it’s like for them. They don’t like sacking people for bonuses but they just can’t come up with any other ways to increase profit. What are they supposed to do? Get creative? Build a strong respectful work culture? Not take a bonus? You see. It’s not as easy as you think. Timmy can miss out on his toy train this Christmas. Besides, it’s just business
When little Timmy got a train
"twas put beneath a tree
Christmas day had fin’lly come,
Such fun for all to see
The poor were done, they knew no fun All stolen by some jerk(s)
Their patience done, their time had come
And quickly went to work
Timmy’s dad had been quite bad
He stole, and cheated and lied
When they burned the system down,
Little Timmy fucking died.
Added context: “Little Timmy” is 35, has a cushy VP job in his dad’s company, and is lined up to be the next ceo. It was his suggestion to cut 50,000 jobs so he could collect a finders fee for “finding” unnecessary expenses.
I’ll give Target a bit of lee at here because they were only there first to admit they were wrong, they also shared a bunch of data about how their shrink calculation methodology, which much of the retail sector shares, is flawed.
I have worked for target. Their logistics methodology is incredibly on point. They are highly invested in getting things right, if no other reason, for the sake of their own profitability.So as there are being open, they have some credibility here, I would say, especially given that others here are so closed. This interest certainly serves their profit motive as much as it services our our motive.  There is, at least, for now, no reason to distress them.
No, not really. 2/3rds of the population lives along the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River. The only out of the way centers are Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. But goods coming from Asia are going through those anyways.
Target executives were explicitly told by HBC executives that their logistics weren't up to par, before the company moved up here.
I have friends who worked for Target here who described their logistics as a bad joke. And they work for the government now in logistics.
I worked in logistics for years and ran a decent amount of international (both from ports and into Canada). I’m commenting about why Canadian logistics, not Target specifically, is tougher than it otherwise would be
I’ll take your word on things regarding Target specifically for sure, because it isn’t my forte. Looking at your post, the Canadian gov probably knew their infrastructure wasn’t up to the different challenge from the jump.
Ahhh makes sense. Also makes sense how they’d understand the realities of logistics there to a much greater degree than Target. Here’s hoping their influence helps.
Oh it didn't because it was ignored. Target's expansion into Canada failed roughly 8 months after they launched, mainly on a complete logistical failure and that they tried to charge us more than the exchange rate suggested.
Economies of scale. Canada has a population of 39 million spread across a very large geographic area. Compared to other G-7 countries, retailers don’t benefit from economies of scale in Canada unless they operate across the entire country. A regional operator in the northeast U.S., for example, has a potential market of more than 125 million, while a regional operator in Canada is lucky to have a potential market of 15 million.
Yeah but they’re only closing because they’re not bringing in maximum profits.
They’re still making profits they’re just butthurt they’re not making more and that was my original point.
If you can lose $3b in theft and still make record billions then no, theft does not affect you at all.
With all that said though if the store is legitimately being robbed to the point of affecting profits that much then yeah go ahead and close. But the companies that claim theft as the reason for closing stores are bullshitting you.
No just understanding that they’re making so much money the theft is doing essentially nothing to their profits.
Lemmings really need to stop this whole shtick about not understanding the nuance in word choice. Everyone here acts like a fuckin lawyer when it comes to breaking down and analyzing specific word choice.
It’s clear through the context of everything else I said what I mean by “at all”. It’s such a negligible impact on the company as a whole that it’s not even worth mentioning 90% of the time. Like a guy who just won the lottery dropping a nickel. It’s completely inconsequential.
It’s not nuance to just use the wrong words. Also no, it’s not completely inconsequential either. It does matter when considering what stores to keep and which ones to close. It’s one of the aspects you’d consider.
Aggressive price controls work. Profit forfeitures work. Generous universal social programs work. But no, Joe wants to use the defense production act instead to make meds. Neoliberalism is accelerating fascism and autocracy.
Inflation is like acceleration. Acceleration going down means you are still speeding up, just at a lower rate. For prices to go down, we need DEFLATION!
Inflation has gone down. Doesn’t mean the prices have. In fact they specifically keep going up, because it seems that literally every business has decided the only thing that matters is how much their CEO is worth.
When every industry and consumer goods producer is a monopoly, market competition no longer exists so prices don’t really effect demand. Especially for inelastic goods like gas or food.
Except it hasn’t. Inflation-adjusted prices for commonly-referenced foodstuffs (eggs, milk, bacon, and coffee, for example) are actually steady since 1995.
Things feel expensive in part because human perception over time is a frail thing and we can remember (for example) that when we were younger, gas was $1.20 a gallon. Of course, that was when I was in high school and making minimum wage, which was $3.05. Adjusting both those to inflation (in 2023 dollars), that’s $3.76 for the gas (spot on) and $9.95 for minimum wage (which is a bit short of the current federal of $7.29 $7.25 (typo) , although 29 states have set higher minima, the lowest of which is $9.95)
This isn’t intended to make anyone feel any better. The big problem is the absolute insane record profits and consolidation of wealth into an equally insane number of billionaires. Those are the forces we should be lining up with knives and forks against.
And contrary to the “both sides” argument, there’s one side that wants to take absolutely everything for themselves and create a Christo-fascist theocracy, continuing to hoard their gold like Smaug; and another that, while still upper class and definitely not perfect, does try reduce world suck. Choose wisely.
This article is confusing as fuck. How can you use 2022 dollars “adjusted” and then claim there’s no inflation. That’s literally what that adjustment is for, to normalize prices for inflation over time.
Also it jokes eggs aren’t crazy expensive but they’ve been up to comedy levels of pricey at least twice in 3 years due to avien flu.
There’s no change in the inflation rate, not denying the fact that inflation exists. All he’s saying is that it is not a parabolic increase, but a straight line.
This concept needs to spread. Those record profits and the consolidation of wealth is a real-life exploit (a hack) of capitalism. These types of situations were never intended by the visionaries that designed capitalism. This entire clusterfuck of 1% having 99% of the money was never intended by design, nor seemed like a plausible situation to need to design protections for when the economy started getting destroyed by this situation. As the sickness of greed among policymakers grew, they punched holes in the system in order to exploit the mechanics of the capitalism to collect virtually limitless money while simultaneously denying other less privileged people not “in the know” the chance to do the same.
Does anyone remember the original Super Mario Brothers, where you could get crowns, basically giving you more lives than you could possibly use? These capitalist hackers found a way to get crowns at the expense of the 99%, and nobody has any clue or organized any way to stop this hack/exploit from ruining it for everyone else.
Capitalism has been hacked. If the system administrators don’t manually intervene and redistribute wealth, we are just going to keep circling the drain until it’s all over like a game of Monopoly where everyone except one entity is completely bankrupt.
Ever since they got us to come out of the fields and into the factories, the point has always been about a class war against the poor. To act otherwise is to ignore history.
First of all the comparisons are to 2019, not pre 1983 when those changes are made, so most of this is totally irrelevant to the point I was making. That’s also why all the real wage statistics are anchored to 1982-1984 dollars. Second a forever unchanging fixed basket of goods is not a good way to measure inflation. What people spend their money on changes over time. Cell phones are necessary now, didn’t used to be, shouldn’t they be in the consumer price index? Internet is necessary now, those costs should be in the index. The same things that were necessary in 1975 are not the exact same things people are buying now. Using the exact same basket of goods from 1975 would be ridiculous and not useful. Another frequent criticism is that housing prices aren’t included after 1983. The reasoning being that is an investment, not an expense that you will never get back. However rent is, and the increased housing cost ends up reflected in the rent. So that change doesn’t change the index nearly as much as you might think.
All this is to say, I’m highly suspicious of this sudden narrative across the entire media that the economy is in shambles and everyone is struggling, when almost all measures are to the contrary. I’m expecting migrant caravans and all sorts of other sensationalized non stories with only some kernel of truth on the way. And a headline “prices didn’t increase from September to October” gets nowhere near as many clicks as “inflation was 3.2% in October,” even if technically true, taking advantage of misconceptions about what an annualized rate is.
That’s why we have “real wages” statistic so you can do that comparison. Where you adjust wages for inflation in comparison to a set point in time so they are comparable.
This chart only goes to 2019. Real wages did dip some during the corona virus pandemic as for a time inflation was out pacing wage increases. This has since reversed though, with wage growth outpacing inflation, and real wages are now higher than they were in 2019. Anchored to 1982-1984 dollars, in December 2019 real wages were $10.96 /hr, in October 2023 they were $11.05.
So yes, as of right now inflation that occured during the pandemic has been fully accounted for and then some by the total wage growth that occured during and since. Wage growth continues to out pace inflation, so hopefully things will continue to get better. That’s not to say there hasn’t been a persistent problem over decades of wages getting diluted. Real wages dropped significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, remained flat in the 90s and 00s, and only really began to recover after the financial crisis in 2008. Real wages are just catching up finally to where they used to be way back in the 1970s.
Agree with you, real wages have stagnated, and so have real prices.
However, one thing that bothers me, and that I’d like to know, is what does it mean to “eat the rich”? “Eat” in what sense? Destroy? Take all their money? Because why are people so angry, that someone else is doing better than them? Is it some form of jealousy? Idk. What people should be looking at, IMO, is how they themself are doing. Are they doing ok? If not, then we have a problem. But why do they care whether somebody else has a lot of money? I seriously don’t get it.
Thats what you get, when one party is economic hardcore neoliberalists and otherwise fascists and the other party is neoliberal reactionaries with some gay rights sprinkled in.
There is no political left in American mainstream politics and they get fucked royally for it. But then again Americans want to get fucked over getting evil socialist things like affordable healthcare
But then again Americans want to get fucked over getting evil socialist things like affordable healthcare
As an American, while I do enjoy fucking (I thought that was a universal thing for the most part) I also would really appreciate affordable (or better yet free) healthcare as well.
We should try not to generalize that every member of a population agrees with every choice their government makes.
According to Gallup, most Americans do believe healthcare is the government’s responsibility (57% yes to 40% no, remainder unsure/no opinion). Meanwhile paradoxically, 53% prefer private healthcare over government-run vs 43% that would prefer government-run, so what in the actual fuck…
Republican party made a lot of effort to gut Medicare as much as possible, and they are quite successful when they want to destroy something that helps other people.
As someone who has had something large and expensive break with frequent enough regularity lately that it’s been keeping me from building up almost any savings for almost a year, I feel this. I feel very behind.
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