Walmart’s Crime Problem

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-walmart-crime/

by jeo1234 • 10 years ago

130 195 10 years ago

lakeborn• 10 years ago

Even up in Northern Michigan, this has been a MAJOR issue. Our local law refuses to admit it, however if you pay attention to the news and radio one can see a trend.

fixermark6• 10 years ago

I would definitely refrain from drawing conclusions on trends gained from news and radio. The positive feedback loops in that ecosystem are large.

digitalsushi• 10 years ago

What are some other ways we can reduce human workforce that obligate extraneous events into the municipal sector? Daycares could stop watching the children - EMTs could definitely pick up the slack if there is a random health event. Restaurants could stop employing wait staff - eventually the UN would be deployed to feed the starving people.

Someone1234• 10 years ago

I cannot believe I am going to defend Walmart right now, but that's how poor this article is.

They say "There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart." and justify that statement by saying that if Walmart: added more greeters, scrap self-checkout, made stores smaller, it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that.

The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways. They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting, so much so that the demographics even at a store like Target are markedly different (middle class-ish).

Walmart seems to have actually extended their reach into the poorest of society, it used to be that stores like Kmart were cheaper than Walmart and the really poor shopped there, now Walmart has been nabbing a lot of their business, it comes with a lot of the problems associated.

What's a solution? Walmart's shoplifting is a symptom of social issues elsewhere: Drug usage, poverty, lacking social safety nets, criminal justice reform, and so on. If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose and that's a bigger challenge than hitting Walmart over the head for having to call the cops too much.

It is very easy to make Walmart a scapegoat, but ultimately you'd just shift the problem to a different location if Walmart stopped serving the customer base they serve.

merpnderp2• 10 years ago

But poverty in the US is better than it has ever been. As a percentage there are fewer people in poverty than quite some time if ever, the social safety nets have never been this generous, crime is relatively low, especially compared to the 1980's and 1990's. As for criminal justice reform, I'm not sure how we could reform it in a way to stop shoplifting without just throwing more people in jail for petty crimes.

Laws can't force people to be civil. Civility is part of culture. And when civil society starts to break down it really can't be fixed by anything other than a cultural change.

ircody• 10 years ago

I don't think the statement that there are fewer people in poverty is true. Especially if you are counting numbers and not percentages. But going by percentage you can see on this chart [1] that we seem to be at levels similar to the mid-90s and that the current trend is upward. Specifically it seems like ages 18-64 in 2011 are fairly close to the highest rates since 1959 (when the chart starts). Another chart that doesn't separate by ages [2] seems to show that we haven't had significant drop in poverty since the 60s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...

Avshalom• 10 years ago

Crime is also the lower than ever so...

antisthenes2• 10 years ago

This mantra gets repeated on HN and elsewhere quite often, but it is factually incorrect if only from the fact that poverty guidelines have definitely not kept up with the cost of housing and healthcare.

You could argue that people in poverty live in places where housing is dirt cheap, but those places have almost no jobs and especially no jobs for people with criminal records.

cookiecaper• 10 years ago

The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways. They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting, so much so that the demographics even at a store like Target are markedly different (middle class-ish).

Note that this is only true in some geographical regions. In much of not-California, Walmart is one of the only convenient places to shop, so everyone shops there.

chriskanan• 10 years ago

This is definitely true in most of rural Oklahoma, where I grew up. There were no other major retail or grocery stores.

phaus• 10 years ago

everyone shops there.

And this is true pretty much everywhere I've ever been that wasn't a large city or very close to one.

Alex3917• 10 years ago

Walmart would also be the largest state in the US by population. They have 1.4 million US employees alone, and over 100 million weekly visitors. Asking why Walmart can't prevent all crime is kind of like asking why California can't prevent all crime.

wpietri8• 10 years ago

I didn't see anybody asking them to "prevent all crime". I see calls for them to return to previous crime levels, to levels similar to other stores.

CyberDildonics• 10 years ago

100 million weekly visitors? The US only has 300 million people total.

euroclydon• 10 years ago

The article also said that Wal-Mart needs more employees and private security present and visible in the stores. They said Target and grocery stores have this. They also said that Target uses computer vision analysis to identity shoppers who linger too long in one area, and other theft patterns.

Walmart can do more. Are the legally obligated to do so? Not unless laws are written in a jurisdiction that says stores of that size need to have some minimum security and anti-theft measures.

fixermark6• 10 years ago

From the article:

He can’t believe, he says, that a multibillion-dollar corporation isn’t doing more to stop crime. Instead, he says, it offloads the job to the police at taxpayers’ expense.

I think citizens should be very concerned about the notion that instead of their taxpayer-supported police doing the policing, an expectation of corporations policing their own territory should exist. That's a little bit Snow Crash, isn't it?

wpietri8• 10 years ago

I'd be super hesitant to see laws written like that; it would be very easy to get them wrong. I'd much rather see some sort of cost recovery system for businesses with excessive crime. That would avoid penalizing the stores doing fine, and wouldn't fix possibly-inappropriate solutions in law.

protomyth2• 10 years ago

I remember when my brother worked for Best Buy (electronics retailer) in the late 90's. Best Buy gave a large bonus if the shoplifting numbers were low (cannot remember the term they used). The Minneapolis store he worked at never got that bonus, as it had all kinds of thievery going on. They even hired cops as security (nice part time gig with the discount they had). The Fargo ND store always got its bonus ($700 per part timer, I think).

Walmart is Best Buy times 100. Blaming Walmart is just plain dumb as its a sign of something wrong with society. I wish we'd get over blaming things and get to being honest and admit the problem is people. People can have all manner of things fixed, and yes, its harder than demanding the victim of the crime pay for it. Charging Walmart more is going to up the prices and hurt a lot more people who really cannot afford another tax.

dec0dedab0de• 10 years ago

I also worked at Best Buy in the late 90s. Every store had a "shrink budget" that was the total number of money they expected to lose do to theft, and errors. If a store came in under it's shrink budget, a percentage of the difference was evenly distributed among the employees. I think the most I got was $400, my 19 year old self was very happy with that.

wpietri8• 10 years ago

I wish we'd get over blaming things and get to being honest and admit the problem is people.

The problem has always been people. That's why we have civilization in the first place: to create a structure where people are reasonably safe from the predations of other people.

People were still people 10 or 20 years ago, but Walmart didn't have the same crime problem. Asking them to return to previous staffing levels so that their stores are safer for customers and the community doesn't sound like a shocking burden to me.

nickpsecurity5• 10 years ago

"Walmart is Best Buy times 100. Blaming Walmart is just plain dumb as its a sign of something wrong with society. I wish we'd get over blaming things and get to being honest and admit the problem is people."

How is it just plain dumb to call Walmart greedy and apathetic when it's greedy and apathetic? The measures cited in the article always reduce crime wherever they're implemented. Best Buy, Target, Kroger, etc use them over here in high-crime areas. Even our Walmart does. The Walmart in article that started them back up had a big decline in calls. We can't blame them for the rest but it was clear they weren't doing their part before. All for some extra $$$.

Note: All these retailers have a risk management team that knows about effects of above practices. You can bet they voiced opposition to the changes since their headaches would go up. They were then ignored to see those numbers go up on the balance sheet.

DanielBMarkham• 10 years ago

Yeah I was unhappy with the article as well.

No board member agreed to be interviewed for this story, but the company disputes that it puts profit before people.

That's the thesis of the article -- that there's a forced choice: either people or profits. And WalMart is choosing the wrong option. It's hackneyed, it's cliche, and if you want to run with it you'd better have something more than just a bunch of opinionated interviews. By choosing the right 20 people, you can get them to say just about anything you'd like.

Where there's such a high-volume movement of people, especially involving at-risk populations, there's going to be crime.

There are about 6,000 WalMarts in the United States. Worldwide, Walmart serves 260 million people at 12,000 stores every week, employing about 2.5 million people -- 1.5 million people in the U.S. alone. In 2013, the FBI reports 367 violent crimes per 100,000 people/years.

I found this out in one minute of searching the internet. All of this is relevant context for a story like this.

I'm not a statistician, but doing some simple math, assuming those 260 million people served every week just stayed at the store year-round, every year there would be 954,000 violent crimes committed at WalMarts worldwide.

Of course that's just funny numbers, but even back-of-the-napkin math shows that 1) whatever number we get for estimated violent crimes at WalMart, it's going to be a big number, and 2) with a dataset that large, it's far too easy to cherry-pick individual crimes to make a case where none may exist.

There still may be a story here. Beats me. Why am I digging around for stats online when some schmuck who wrote this was supposed to be doing all of that before he wrote it? And including it in the article?

ADD: You know, if you know a few cops who think the crime down at WalMart is just out-of-control? That's a great story. Write it that way.

will_brown3• 10 years ago

The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways.

I agree to some extent. There is a term Walmart scale, and it is defined as things that have a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of happening happen 10 times a day at Walmart.

Walmart is targeted, for example, there might be 2x as many Walgreens or CVS locations, but while their revenues are $100-$150B Walmart is closer to $500B and they have 100,000,000 customers enter their stores every week and that is attractive to criminals. Also, I want to note, Walmart shoppers are a much larger cross section than just the poorest of society, in fact you can easily find stores where the average income of their shopper is $80k/year.

Walmart is a target for all kinds of crimes, from their parking lot to shop lifting to cons. I was recently in Bentonville pitching one of my side projects at their HQ, and this topic came up, one ongoing scheme currently taking place consists of a group going into stores with fake documentation from HQ (complete with fake Bentonville phone numbers and fake voicemail) and they literally set up a photo portrait store inside the Walmart in-store leasing locations. Walmart customers are going in and getting portraits done and the group just closes up shop and disappears (the irony, not a single Walmart customer has complained about their experience).

Retric2• 10 years ago

you can easily find stores where the average income of their shopper is $80k/year.

[Citation needed]

I find Walmarts do best in areas with minimal competition. Arlington VA is an expensive area and only the 'poor' go to Walmart which looks grungy and sit's further south. However, if you go to southern VA you can find some Walmart superstores that don't have a lot of completion stock better goods and flat out look cleaner.

ssharp3• 10 years ago

It's almost absurd not to shop at Walmart or other stores that are "extremely successful in attracting" the poor.

If I buy groceries at Walmart or another discount grocer, my bill is nearly half of what it would be if I shopped at a "nicer" supermarket and well over half of what it would be if I shopped at a place like Whole Foods. And I actually find the experience of shopping at Walmart to be better than the experience of shopping somewhere like Trader Joe's because Walmart's large size makes things far less congested than Trader Joe's, where it seems like everyone is constantly in the way of each other.

And this is all for essentially the same produce and meats. In many cases, the discount grocer's produce is actually better quality than the supermarket's.

ruffrey• 10 years ago

I get what you're saying, but will also note that this is probably subjective based on where you live. In my city, most of the walmarts are crowded, loud, and dirty. A lot of merchandise somehow ends up on the floor. The lines are long. The produce quality varies greatly but is not very good.

I once saw a Walmart in another state with a live lobster aquarium. My local friends almost didn't believe me. (I live in California)

joe007• 10 years ago

I can't speak for all Walmart stores, but the store in Mountain View is always understaffed with checkout lines 10+ people deep. The Target that is literally across the street has short lines all the time and people will actually help you find stuff. I shop at Target because I value my time, but I would consider Walmart if they improved their customer experience.

ihsw• 10 years ago

I have found the opposite -- Walmart is understaffed to the point of absurdity and their produce is substandard. Not only that but it is very difficult to find someone that knows where something else, especially when most people don't have any knowledge beyond their aisle.

Just another anecdote.

michael_h• 10 years ago

If you find someone with access to Nielsen sales data, it's enlightening. Walmart is very rarely the cheapest retailer. It's been a few years, but I believe the rock bottom, cheapest grocer was Aldi, by a huge margin.

tzs• 10 years ago

If I buy groceries at Walmart or another discount grocer, my bill is nearly half of what it would be if I shopped at a "nicer" supermarket and well over half of what it would be if I shopped at a place like Whole Foods.

I like to do both.

We don't have a Whole Foods, but there is a small regional chain here that has organic local produce and grass fed antibiotic free hormone free meats and such.

I use Walmart for things like 2 liter soda bottles, frozen vegetables, lunch meats, bread, condiments, paper goods, and the like, and so save money compared to places like Safeway or Fred Meyer. I can then justify going to that small regional chain when I want a steak or fresh produce and buy their expensive grass fed beef and the locally grown organic produce.

fweespeech• 10 years ago

I cannot believe I am going to defend Walmart right now, but that's how poor this article is.

I know how you feel. Its completely absurd to blame a corporation that tries to provide very cheap goods for crimes committed against it.

It isn't like they are leaving bottles of prescription painkillers near the exits with no one to watch them. Or anything else that is clearly negligent.

What's a solution? Walmart's shoplifting is a symptom of social issues elsewhere: Drug usage, poverty, lacking social safety nets, criminal justice reform, and so on. If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose and that's a bigger challenge than hitting Walmart over the head for having to call the cops too much.

Yeah but that requires work and blaming corporations is in vogue.

losteverything• 10 years ago

Everyone is wrong about Wal-Mart's customer mix.

Income. US stores. Walmart us stores

0-20. 16. 16

20-49k. 32. 33

50-99. 30. 31

100k plus 23. 21

This chart was from Doug's 10 14 15 22nd investors meeting. Page 24 slide of his presentation. ( AC Nielsen is the source credited on the slide)

This shouldn't surprise anybody: poor middle class or Rich everybody tries to save money

davidf189• 10 years ago

Very informative, thank you.

But still, 1 in 6 < 20K and 1 in 2 < 50K

Thus, for half of their customers, and especially 1 in 6 lowest income, Wal-mart does a tremendous service in helping people to stretch their incomes.

If you've been reading the news recently for the past two decades working class people in these wage groups have not seen income growth. Wal-Mart has helped them to still live.

jellicle• 10 years ago

The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways.

Well, and a victim of the policies they and their shareholders advocate that put more people in poverty. Arkansas is about the third poorest state. Maybe a little less trickledown economics would result in a little less shoplifting.

jessaustin6• 10 years ago

You can't blame Arkansas on Wal-Mart. While in many ways it's a charming state, if you took away Wal-Mart what would replace it? Not everyone can work on a chicken-processing line at Tyson.

LyndsySimon2• 10 years ago

I grew up in Arkansas - WalMart has been nothing but a blessing to the state, particularly in the NW corner.

DanBC• 10 years ago

scrap self-checkout,
[...] it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that.

There a bit of evidence that self-checkout systems increse rates of crime.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p043gmxh

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/08/02/self-service-c...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/03/checkout-serpent/

gozur884• 10 years ago

Seems like common sense to me. If I were going to have a second career in shoplifting you'd find me in baggy pants at the self-checkout line.

nickpsecurity5• 10 years ago

"They say "There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart." and justify that statement by saying that if Walmart: added more greeters, scrap self-checkout, made stores smaller, it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that."

You should do some research before rejecting it as nonsensical. It's well-known in security and retail industries that those things reduce crime. They're textbook practices. It's because most criminals are opportunists and chicken-shit. The thought that people are paying attention gets in their head. That item they want is worth some risk but not that much. Plus, these practices are what the Walmart declared as a public nuisance instituted and calls declined sharply. These practices are also what Target does given they're very serious about security. They had a fraction of the calls.

"They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting"

That's also true. It's why the crime will only get lower, not disappear.

"If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose"

That's true for the ones that remain after the above methods. In my area, the old timers say they didn't used to have many problems with shoplifting. The reason: the employees took turns beating the crap out of anyone they caught threatening their jobs. Employees are more apathetic these days plus cameras mean they'd go to jail for stuff like that. So, the same places get robbed regularly. Thieves also usually get off easy in court. That's already low to moderate risk for high-reward items. Walmart eliminating the remaining methods of crime reduction, externalizing things to taxpayers, knocks the risk down to very low. Crime will stay up in such places.

Lagged2Death• 10 years ago

The article doesn't make this explicit connection you're making, and it does justify expert recommendations by pointing out that other stores that follow such recommendations (including Wal-Mart itself in times past) reap real benefits.

...ultimately you'd just shift the problem to a different location...

So there's a constant level of crime that can never be changed? That's elitist, maybe racist suburban thinking. It's also very much in opposition to modern crime-prevention philosophy. It's a pretty huge generalization to throw out when you're complaining that other people aren't justifying their claims.

brianmurphy• 10 years ago

Do you have examples to counter this "racist suburban thinking?" Chicago, Baltimore, New York, DC are famous examples but I've not heard of one crime free major metropolitan area. And I don't think that's due to lack of trying or suburban racists.

stickfigure• 10 years ago

Blaming Walmart for shoplifting is like blaming women for getting raped. It's just wrong.

wutbrodo5• 10 years ago

These were exactly my thoughts. The section contrasting Target is particularly ridiculous:

Police departments inevitably compare their local Walmarts with Target stores. Target, Walmart’s largest competitor, is a different kind of retail business, with mostly smaller stores that tend to be located in somewhat more affluent neighborhoods. But there are other reasons Targets have less crime. Unlike most Walmarts, they’re not open 24 hours a day. Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots, as Walmarts do. ike Walmart, Target relies heavily on video surveillance, but it employs sophisticated software that can alert the store security office when shoppers spend too much time in front of merchandise or linger for long periods outside after closing time. The biggest difference, police say, is simply that Targets have more staff visible in stores.

More than half the paragraph is concrete reasons that Target would be expected to have much less crime: smaller stores, more affluent clientele/location, not open 24 hours. All of those aren't arbitrary tweaks that Walmart is refusing to make to cut down on crime; they're parts of the actual service niche that Walmart is providing.

I've got no particular love for Walmart (I've never even been to one), but somehow conversations around it seem to make people completely shut their brain off, as in garbage articles like this one. One of the most pernicious threads running through coverage of Walmart seems to be the idea that you have to prove yourself worthy to receive government services: serving poorer neighborhoods and having flexible hours means that you're asking for crime and are somehow abusing the legal system, just like paying the legal minimum wage gets twisted into "the government is subsidizing Walmart shareholders"[1].

post_break2• 10 years ago

The walmart in kemah had the police called 364 days out of the year last year. Sometimes twice a day. They are costing the PD a fortune for it. They even had a bomb threat made there.

edit my comment was poorly worded. The seabrook PD is constantly at this walmart instead of doing other things and the revenue isn't offset to hire more officers.

ones_and_zeros2• 10 years ago

Is your argument that Walmart causes crime?

post_break2• 10 years ago

I worded my comment poorly. The seabrook PD is tiny and basically all the calls to walmart were causing other places to be policed less. The revenue brought in from the walmart isn't enough to offset the cost of hiring more officers.

colechristensen3• 10 years ago

This is the argument the article is making too.

WalMart markets itself to a demographic most likely to commit crime and doesn't adequately set up it's own security to prevent crime in and around it's stores.

That is, instead of spending money on internal security resources it offloads it's security problems on the local police. Crime is being punished instead of prevented.

It should be put into law that businesses with lax security share a greater portion of the public cost of the crime which results as well as punitive measures for the irresponsible situation they created.

nawtacawp• 10 years ago

Wouldn't they be the victim when placing these calls to the PD? Sounds more like it is the people committing the crimes who are costing the PD money.

sschueller• 10 years ago

Doesn't Walmart pay local taxes to support the PD?

mason2403• 10 years ago

Are you suggesting we start charging people for police protection?

maxerickson5• 10 years ago

There's a Walmart in the article that was declared a public nuisance and charged $2500 for each police call.

JetSpiegel• 10 years ago

Corporations are people, my friend.

zeveb• 10 years ago

They are costing the PD a fortune for it.

Seems to me that the criminals who commit crimes at Walmart are costing the PD a fortune. Although — surely it's easier for the police to patrol the Walmart and catch criminals there than troll through the entire city hoping to catch them?

ryandrake• 10 years ago

A police officer in a small town once told me, "90% of my calls either start or end at Walmart". The places are lightning rods for crime. To the point where "distance from Walmart" correlates with home values. Maybe local police departments should locate their headquarters nearby Walmarts so they can at least use our tax dollars more efficiently.

meira• 10 years ago

It is not recent anymore, but I don't think that this flood of "mainstream media" links in hackernews suits well with past demographics. Maybe this forum is changing, but I think it is toward a bad direction.

EDIT: And the downvotes proves that the demographics changed a lot. Why come here if I can browse CNN, Bloomberg and WSJ by myself? There is a lot of comments there too.

modiho• 10 years ago

Semi recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11676928

0xbadf00d2• 10 years ago

It seems as though this is following a familiar pattern (as in the UK) of:

"Privatise the profit, push the risk/cost to the local community"

tomp3• 10 years ago

Isn't the point of the police to have a monopoly on violence?! I mean, I'm sure Walmart could create its own army if they had to, but ... do we, as a society, really want that?

0xbadf00d2• 10 years ago

Not sure about an army, but I think the point is that they are actively consuming a public service more often because they have cut their own costs, instead of paying for a deterrent themselves.

wpietri8• 10 years ago

I don't believe that anybody has suggested that. What people have suggested is having more staff present, like Walmart used to have. Police aren't the only way to stop crime. They aren't even the best way.

golergka2• 10 years ago

Taxes.

flowersoldier• 10 years ago

I read a great article describing how Walmart does this. Companies who pay a living wage, like Costco, essentially subsidize Walmart by allowing them to pay low wages. Government Safety Nets like food stamps, medi-cal, etc., make up for the low wages. Thing is, these are paid for by tax dollars from employees at Costco who actually pay into the state treasury. Many Walmart employees are actually a drain on tax dollars. I'm at work and shouldn't be commenting on HN so here's the link to "Confronting the Parasite Economy. Actually read it here on HN, but it seems pertinent to the discussion. http://prospect.org/article/confronting-parasite-economy

kauffj• 10 years ago

One should never blame the victim for sexual assault; victims should be able to dress/act how they please without fear.

vs.

One should blame the victim for theft; victims bear responsibility for securing their possessions.

fixermark6• 10 years ago

They are two different categories of crime, yes. That's why we don't throw people in prison for a decade for petty theft, or put petty thieves on the Petty Theft Offender national registry and require them to notify their neighbors when they move into town.

saint_fiasco4• 10 years ago

I get that more severe crimes get more punishment, but why would the severity of the crime change where the blame is placed?

marknutter8• 10 years ago

"I they don't want low income people to shoplift at their stores they should stop setting such skimpy prices!"

yummyfajitas6• 10 years ago

I think that we should crack down on walmart and other large companies who service poor people, blacks, and other population groups that disproportionately commit crime. We should force walmart to behave more like target, catering towards higher income people, with higher prices and better service. And if poor people need to pay higher prices at a non-centralized location, that's the breaks.

Similarly, walmart should be prevented from doing things like allowing the homeless to camp in the parking lots. Target is the pioneer here - they force the homeless to illegally park on the streets where the cops can harass them until they leave town.

In short, rather than having all the crime in one spot, we can spread it around the community! This won't help things, but at least we won't have a single unsympathetic scapegoat to blame.

(Also blame walmart when it does try and stop crime and the inevitable results occur, namely criminals being hurt/killed as part of the law enforcement process.)

I can't think of a better illustration of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics than this article. Poor people steal and hurt people but we can't blame them. Walmart is nearby so blame Walmart!

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

tomp3• 10 years ago

I like this comment, but it's a bit hard to tell where the sarcasm stops...

bluehazed• 10 years ago

Judging by this person's comment history, it doesn't start.

maxerickson5• 10 years ago

Yes, it's obviously a binary issue and there is no possibility whatsoever that Walmart could do things to prevent crime that have a lower net cost for society than calling the police.

yummyfajitas6• 10 years ago

What exactly should walmart do?

Run a private police force that inevitably harms criminals during the law enforcement process? (The article criticizes them for doing this.)

Maybe walmart can run it's own on-site jail that way the cops only need to come once/day? I'm sure a private walmart run jail won't attract the same criticism, particularly when the inevitable bad things happen in it.

Or maybe they can hire more security guards to follow around suspicious people in the store. I'm sure that will help stop the criticism, even if the demographics of suspicious people don't correspond to population demographics.

From what I can tell, the problem isn't walmart but the people who shop there. But this is obviously a politically unacceptable conclusion, so walmart makes a convenient scapegoat. And they'll remain one no matter what they do.

marknutter8• 10 years ago

It is simply not Walmart's job to prevent crime. All businesses should be allowed to operate under the assumption that in return for their tax dollars crime prevention will be handled by the state.

wpietri8• 10 years ago

To me this is a great example of why Lean focuses on cutting waste, not cutting costs.

I don't expect execs to learn a lesson, though. Cost-cutting fits in much better with our managerialist culture. Decreasing waste mostly has to happen when employees doing or very close to the work spot opportunities for improvement. But any fool can look at a corporate budget, pick out the biggest expense, and say, "Well, let's cut that by a lot."

rlpb2• 10 years ago

I said this the last time this came up, and I feel the same journalistic failure is present in this article:

Could the troublemakers simply be attracted to Walmart and would go elsewhere if things were different? Walmart might even be doing the police a favor by concentrating them all in one place.

randcraw• 10 years ago

Walmart has created a retail model that does not work -- unless a disproportionate number of police implement their security for them. Their stores are unmanageably big. They're understaffed and undermonitored, and they even do stupid things like not routing people with merchandise returns to approach the return counter strictly from outside the store, so the trivial hack mentioned in the article can't occur.

Walmart has a 30 year history of offloading the healthcare and social costs of its employees onto local hospitals and county agencies. Of course they offload their security. In perhaps 50% of their market (geographically) they're a retail monopoly. They rig the game because they can.

davidf189• 10 years ago

The high healthcare costs are systems issues and the reasons they are so high are because of politics which can be fixed at the state and sometimes city level.

The high health care costs are externalities created by state and city policy (and sometimes federal policy) that create an additional burden for employers such as Walmart which creates an additional burden for customers and employees. The higher health care costs result in lower wages for employees while resulting in higher prices for customers than in Wal-Marts case, many can ill-afford.

For example, most of health care costs are from those with serious chronic disease (the highest category is the 9 million "dual eligibles" -- people with disability that are on both Medicaid and Medicare).

These chronic diseases are from smoking, obesity, lack of exercise, air pollution for starters.

The fixes are raising the cost of tobacco through taxes, banning smoking in public places, hard hitting anti-smoking TV ads, ....), taxing sugar added beverages as Philadelphia has just done, lowering air pollution by getting the highest polluting coal-powered electric plants shut down, and in the Northeast and Midwest, converting buildings burning #6 and #4 fuel oils to less polluting #2 or natural gas.

The more of the healthcare cost externalities that are borne by private firms that are a result of government policy that government must pay for, the better for all of us. Only when the costs to government are high enough, will they implement policies that will reduce the high costs of health care.

rlpb2• 10 years ago

You've essentially repeated what the article said, but without addressing my point. If you want to claim that Walmart is the problem, then you need to measure the causal link I'm suggesting and demonstrate it to be negligible.

mcguire• 10 years ago

"[Walmart] said it would skip calling the cops for first-time offenders shoplifting merchandise valued below $50 if the shoplifter completes the company’s theft-prevention program."

The response to having too many petty crimes is to not call the police? This whole situation is bizarre.

maxerickson5• 10 years ago

Presumably the data shows that petty shop lifting is a fact of business for big box stores and that the level of petty shop lifting goes up and down with staffing levels on the store floor.

The shoplifters are still the ones to blame for the shoplifting, but it's not entirely unreasonable for the town to demand some level of performance from the store rather than happily providing expensive police to deal with a problem the store could handle with cheap employees.

VLM2• 10 years ago

"Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots"

They're refusing to look at the demographics. The criminals have nothing to do with my Dad in his fancy RV. The article is close to understanding the problem is socioeconomic class but for political reasons can't say the real problem, so, um, it must be the campers, yeah they must be the problem.

Another peculiar logical and demographic problem is the article implies corporate spending on employees will magically reduce crime, much as hospitals hiring more ER nurses will reduce shootings.

LyndsySimon2• 10 years ago

Not only that, but WalMart allows overnight camping specifically because their studies have shown that the ongoing presence of trucks and RVs lowers crime in their parking lots.

blackrose• 10 years ago

Heh, one of the few times I shoplifted as a teenager was from a Walmart. It was from one of the more run-down ones, and it did seem easy.

Not many stores I would've dreamed of doing that in ('twas only teenage hijinks anyway), but it's true when you have a big crappy commercial space where crap is just laying around (Walmart, kmart, Ross, etc.), it really gives the impression that the purveyor doesn't give a crap about their crap.

toast0• 10 years ago

Isn't it more efficient for more crime to be in one place? They can send a van to take arrestees to jail instead of individual trips; the Walmart employees are likely more effective at implementing proper procedure than a store that has one or two incidents a year, etc.

PaulHoule• 10 years ago

I worked in retail when I was a teenager and something I was taught was that keeping your store in good condition (i.e. fronting and facing the shelves) inhibits shoplifting and other crimes. If you see that the people who work there take pride in their store you might think they are watching and will catch you if you try to shoplift.

On a good day, the Wal*Mart in my area looks OK but on a bad day it looks like the aftermath of a frat party. On a day like that it looks like a ghetto store and just doesn't feel like a safe place. The local Target on the other hand could use more people at the checkout lines, but has a lot of staff on the floor to keep the store looking good and help out if you need to find something.

werber• 10 years ago

The article didn't touch on this, but Walmart is held in such low regard that there is, for many people, zero stigma attached to shoplifting from an "evil empire", even compared to "friendlier" competitors like Target.

ewood• 10 years ago

I live close to a UK Premier League football stadium. Every match day requires a police riot squad being deployed for crowd control. Given that these teams are privately owned I do wonder about who should ultimately pay the bill for what are public events held for profit.

London Met police costs - http://www.met.police.uk/foi/pdfs/disclosure_2014/august_201...

geodel• 10 years ago

Best it would be paid by public who would not even be watching or interested in that event. I think it is just a variant of 'You may not be interested in politics but it does not mean politics is not interested in you.

makomk• 10 years ago

In the UK, the football clubs themselves foot the bill for the large police presence required at their stadiums. Have done for decades. Same with other large-scale commercial events I think.

jessaustin6• 10 years ago

In July, three Walmart employees in Florida were charged with manslaughter after a shoplifter they chased and pinned down died of asphyxia.

No wonder they call the police when they want shoplifters choked out: police don't get prosecuted for that.

This is much ado about nothing. All big companies run periodic "let's take a shit on society to save some money" programs. They find something that costs a little money (e.g. a modicum of private security), the absence of which won't cause them to go out of business immediately, and they stop doing it. Even if they eventually have to restart in most locations, they still save money over the interim. If society really wanted to end this practice, society would stop bending over backwards to coddle large corporations, or even to allow them to exist in the first place.

TFA describes problems in lower-income urban and suburban settings. Maybe these are the Wal-Mart stereotype, but Wal-Mart has stores in many other communities that don't fit that mold, and which may not have seen the crime wave described here. The mayor in TFA had the right idea: declare problem stores a public nuisance to force Wal-Mart to do something. What Wal-Mart will do, was also identified in TFA: hire a bunch of off-duty cops. It kills three birds: security will actually improve with cops on the premises, police chiefs won't publicly criticize a business that's paying their subordinates lots of money, and the cops they hire will use the resources of the whole department anyway. Again, however, this expenditure will only be required in those special communities that have lots of potential criminals.

egocodedinsol• 10 years ago

I'm curious: does a new Walmart increase crime, or merely concentrate and redistribute it?

Kind of a tough question, because to define concentration you need some notion of area, and you might just redistribute it across the boundaries you draw. Still, this is probably possible at least for smaller towns.

davidf189• 10 years ago

While blaming Walmart for the crime problems may be emotionally satisfying, the crime is a manifestation of a systems problem which ultimately cannot be solved by Walmart, but must be solved by the government. Adding more staff will simply result in an increase in prices for customers who can not afford increased prices and it doesn't solve the crime problems, simply move it somewhere else.

The state needs to spend money understanding the structural issues of crime in their state and implement interventions with tax money.

Here is a plan: In NY City where I live there is a state cigarette tax of $4.35 and a city tax of an additional $1.50 for a total of $5.85 per pack of cigarettes.

Oklahoma, the state first mentioned in the article, just rejected a cigarette tax increase to $1.50 http://kfor.com/2016/05/19/democrats-republicans-clash-over-...

Raise the cigarette taxes to $3 or $4 per pack, the smoking rate declines and healthcare costs from tobacco declines.

The cigarette tax revenues can be put into plans that help to solve the structural problems of crime (unemployment, law enforcement, whatever). The State of Oklahoma should study the crime problem and use the additional revenues from an increased cigarette tax to help solve the problem.

TheBeardKing• 10 years ago

Here's a similar article in the Tampa Bay Times published earlier this year. The graphics department had a fun time with it. http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2016/public-safety/walmart-...

tantalor2• 10 years ago

Article only uses the word "tax" once, in a quote from a police officer: "[Walmart] offloads the job to the police at taxpayers’ expense".

But isn't the taxpayer in this case the store itself? If the store isn't paying enough taxes to support the PD, how is that the store's fault?

anonbanker2• 10 years ago

If the economy wasn't in a massive slump, this article wouldn't have been written. It acts as an apology for predatory business practices, and the exploitation of a working class.

gozur884• 10 years ago

Employing people at market rates isn't "exploitation".

anonbanker2• 10 years ago

It isn't hard to google examples of Walmart encouraging their employees onto social assistance programs in order to ensure they get a living wage. This has been happening for over a decade now.

Also, I could direct you towards the average market rate in Nepal or Shenzhen Province in China, and we could have a fun conversation about Walmart's exploitation of the third world, but we'll stick to the goalposts we have.

jrs235• 10 years ago

Many keep pointing out the Walmart theft numbers and his they correlate to the local crime stats. I wonder if there is a correlation to theft numbers and distance to nearest bus stop.

Walmart’s Crime Problem

Related Stories