Comment on Remember when Target blamed theft for closing stores? It's all lies.
draneceusrex@lemmy.world 8 months agoI have a friend that is a DM of a rapidly expanding gas station/restaurant chain here in southeast. They just opened self-checkout lanes in their stores. I asked about theft/shrink and he said it’s a tiny part of their bottom line at this point in a GAS STATION, and with the traffic they are getting, the convenience/cost of labor makes up for it in spades. Target, Walmart and the like are full of shit.
MrZee@lemm.ee 8 months ago
And the “organized retail theft” claim they were making was a clear red herring. I can’t remember the number Target claimed off the top of my head, but their claim was something like “organized retail theft has grown 200%”. Yes, a 200% increase makes it sound like a huge problem, but is meaningless without the context of how big it was before the increase. If it had gone from 2% of sales to 6% of sales, yes that is a really big and impactful 200% increase. But evidence shows it didn’t. It appears to have gone from an insignificant portion of sales to a number 3x as big that is also insignificant.
So Target took the approach of (1) find a topic that sounds big and scary: “organized retail theft”, and (2) find a way to spin the stats related to that topic to make them sound big and scary: 200% increase (or whatever it was).