Remember back when retailers were blaming "disappointing" quarterly earnings reports on a massive crime wave of retail thieves swarming throughout the nation's shopping hellholes?
Whoops. Reuters is reporting that might not be exactly true:
The main lobbying group for U.S. retailers retracted its claim that "organized retail crime" accounted for nearly half of all inventory losses in 2021 after finding that incorrect data was used for its analysis.
A spokesperson for the National Retail Federation said Tuesday that the organization had removed the sentence from its report on organized retail crime published in April. It produced the report in collaboration with private security firm K2 Integrity.
According to NRF spokesperson Danielle Inman, the claim that organized crime accounted for nearly half of all inventory losses was based on two-year-old testimony from Ben Dugan, former president of the advocacy group Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail.
So the original data came from a former president of a group called CLEAR, which is a non-profit (yeah) "encouraging" cooperation between retail outlets and police departments.
And their conference this year is sponsored by a whole bunch of, you guessed it, private security firms! With names like ControlTek, Arms Security Corporation, and Raptor Vision! You know, people who might possibly maybe have a few reasons to blow up stories and statistics about retail theft.
But wait there's more from Reuters:
Some law enforcement sources, including a November report from the Council on Criminal Justice, suggest that shoplifting outside major cities like New York has decreased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many retailers, however, say that shoplifting is widely underreported and crime statistics do not accurately reflect the scope of the problem.
Target (TGT.N), DICK’s Sporting Goods (DKS.N) and Walgreens (WBA.O) are among major retailers that have cited rising crime as a significant drag on profitability, though some have since walked back on those concerns. In a January earnings call, Walgreens’ CEO told investors that “maybe we cried too much” when reporting rising shoplifting the previous year.
Yeah, you cried too much, Walgreens CEO, but your tears are nothing compared to the massive wail that rose up from Fox News, who in 2021 suggested in more than one segment that retailers were to blame for the CRIME WAVE in America, because they supported Black Lives Matter.
We can totally expect a retraction of those stories with the same red siren light that accompanied the original stories, right, Fox? Hello?
