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The pandemic ushered in a lot of trouble for downtowns across the country, including an explosion in brazen theft from retail outlets. Stores left empty as shoppers stayed home were made especially vulnerable after public officials charged with keeping the peace decided to deliberately ignore small-scale property crimes.
In 2016, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx kicked off her controversial tenure as the Chicago area’s top prosecutor by drastically raising the bar for charging shoplifters with a felony crime. The idea was to reduce the number of petty thieves holed up in Cook County Jail, long a dumping ground for impoverished defendants endlessly awaiting their day in court.
Past studies had found no correlation between the felony threshold and property crime rates. So, in her first major policy move, Foxx felt empowered to open the door for crooks to clean out store shelves without meaningful consequences. Other liberal-minded, big-city prosecutors also decided to look the other way, and the result, predictably, was a surge in lawlessness.
Criminals have taken full advantage, creating well-organized gangs that target high-value items like beauty products, ink cartridges, baby formula and cold medicine. They pose a violent threat to anyone who tries to stop them, and some use the proceeds to fund drug trafficking, gunrunning and other plagues that cause problems of their own.
Faced with gangland-style attacks on their premises, merchants like Walgreens and Target have put more and more goods under lock and key. Some have ordered their employees never to intervene when a robbery is in progress, for safety’s sake. Workers who step in can face termination, which is a sensible policy under the circumstances but hard on retail clerks with integrity, who don’t feel right about standing by during a crime.
The criminals, in short, have been winning, making it increasingly difficult for brick-and-mortar stores to stage a post-pandemic comeback, adding to the surge in inflation and contributing to a belief that urban downtowns are too dangerous for everyday people to work and shop there.
Take, for example, the Walgreens store in Chicago’s South Loop: The crime blog CWBChicago reported in May that the remodeled store has just two traditionally open aisles with low-cost items like groceries. The site said that the shelves are no higher than 5 feet — so staffers can watch customers shopping. The rest of the store’s items are under lock and key. Walgreens’ gentler parlance says “let us do the shopping,” but few customers are fooled as to what is going on here. The lock-it-up policy hurts sales, but Walgreens obviously felt it had no choice in the face of shoplifting gangs’ aggressions.
[ Retailers try to curb theft while not angering shoppers ]
A justifiable backlash has been building, and we’re hoping common sense will prevail again. Foxx, for one, has decided to step down when her current term ends. We’d like to see other lax prosecutors in cities still in recovery mode similarly make way for public officials more dedicated to protecting businesses than thieves.
And while law enforcement at the street level is a local task, we’ve been heartened to see the state and federal government take baby steps in the right direction.
Last year, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law a measure raising penalties for retail theft, essentially reversing Foxx-style policies. “This is how we protect store workers and customers, prevent militarized storefronts and empty commercial corridors, and across the board, make communities safer for all who call them home,” the governor said in a statement. Given how some of Pritzker’s fellow Democrats not so long ago were loudly in favor of loosening the penalties for shoplifting, it’s good to see a belated awakening.
At the federal level, a new law went into effect on June 27 targeting another unintended consequence of letting retail rip-offs run rampant. The INFORM Consumers Act is aimed at cracking down on thieves who steal or counterfeit goods, then sell them via online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and Etsy.
These retail forums have become giant flea markets, like digital versions of Chicago’s old Maxwell Street, hosting millions of third-party sellers who operate with little oversight.
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The new law requires the platforms to verify the identity of larger-scale sellers and to suspend those who don’t cough up valid identification, contact details and bank account information. For the largest sellers, it requires their names, business addresses and contact information to be disclosed to buyers online.
We were skeptical of this bill in its early stages, as we are whenever the government moves to impose red tape on thriving markets. These new rules could prove burdensome, especially for smaller platforms.
But it’s incredible that these marketplaces have gone along for years while knowing so little about their sellers. And there’s no doubt those peddling stolen goods, as well as knockoffs of popular branded items, have had a field day selling anonymously online. Had the megabucks e-commerce industry policed itself more effectively, the law would be unnecessary.
And, unfortunately, more still needs to be done about criminals who steal from stores, as will become obvious when large publicly held retail chains report their quarterly earnings in the weeks ahead, putting a spotlight on this multibillion-dollar problem.
The retail trade uses an array of terms to account for shoplifting, including “shortage,” “shrinkage” or just “shrink.” It’s past time to shrink this problem of organized retail theft, before it gets any bigger.
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