I don't personally steal at self-checkout, but if saw anyone stealing I'd just ignore it. As far I'm concerned, they deserve to be stolen from. Zero interest in hearing the crocodile tears of those who were complicit in price gouging.
Yeah, there was this weird moment shortly after the pandemic where people were throwing darts at food staples and then raising their prices into the stratosphere, just to see how much they could charge. Pretty detestable behavior, especially when the average American already has so little money to spare.
Yes it is, the pricing is set by retailers competing against each other, all of which are having theft problems. They will all simply pass along the costs associated with theft because purchasers can’t get the same or substitute products anywhere else cheaper.
Good? It’s not like it’s the only game in town. They raise the prices then that will just open a window for lower priced competitors who don’t have the same issues.
How are lower priced competitors not having the same issues? If those competitors use labour to checkout, they’re going to be more expensive. If they’re using self-checkout, they would have the same theft issues.
ALDIs in my area is a great example. No self check out, lower prices and they know their market, always placing stores within sight of a Walmart. Winn-Dixie somehow still exist where I live and they do have shelf check out but it’s not like Walmart. And like Publix they always have people at other check out lanes. So it definitely seems like a choice to be only self check out that Walmart chooses.
I hear what you're saying, but we're not talking about a single-mother sneaking diapers out because she needs them or a Jean Valjean-type taking bread because they're hungry...
This is OCR (Organized Retail Theft) where a team of 3+ people coordinate with phones, distractions, and a driver, to quickly get as many high-dollar, shelf-stable items out of a store as possible to resell on Facebook marketplace/eBay/etc. It's typically at least $1000 per store.
If you hate large organizations, you should hate the greed of criminal rings like this, because we all absolutely pay more because of it...
EDIT: I'm just talking about what the article is referring to. I'm not saying companies don't pass the costs on to consumers, and I'm not casting moral judgement.
If it's actually a problem and that organized, then it's either a problem for law enforcement (lol) or for the retailer's internal security department. Anything else is just incompetence.
Did you read the articles above? There's no source for this, that's not even remotely true. From some of the articles posted above, there's no real data to support these claims, and the term is widely overused and abused in many states across the US. From this The dishonest blame game of retail store closures and crime
Then there’s the warning of “organized retail crime,” or ORC in industry parlance. The term sounds ominous, evoking a network of thieves operating a sophisticated enterprise. But state laws and the retail industry use it broadly to describe coordinated theft of almost any kind, and in some cases theft involving just a single person. The National Retail Federation, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of retail businesses, releases an annual survey on “organized retail crime” and “ORC gangs” that doesn’t define either term and is based entirely on a survey of retailers (a total of 61 in 2020). The group then uses that survey to make claims like organized retail crime “affects 9 out of 10 retailers,” and “among ORC victims, three in four report an increase in the past year,” and to demand federal organized retail theft legislation.
Also, what is OCR? Your explanation of the acronym doesn't even line up with the initials from the acronym. Secondly, do you have any sources or data to back up this claim of teams of criminals, besides "trust me bro"?
That last one is more of a problem. Grocery margins are usually very slim. In most cases, a grocery store can't reduce their prices by any significant amount and still remain profitable.
All grocery store margins are tight. Historically, grocery stores are not enormously profitable. Most of the price gouging that you've seen in food lately has been at the manufacturer level, not the retailer level. That's why you don't see a lot of price difference between substantially identical items at different stores in the same region; the same size box of Cheerios is going to have roughly identical pricing at both Piggly Wiggly and Kroger. You start seeing price differences when you go to an upscale store like Amazon's Whole Foods (prices go up sharply), or when you're buying in bulk at Costco or restaurant supply stores (such as Gordon Food Service). That's also why you see self-checkouts everywhere now; once one company cuts their labor costs by introducing them, everyone has to, because otherwise they can't remain competitive. ...And then prices stabilize across the industry at roughly the same very slim margins. The company that cuts costs first sees a slight initial uptick in profit, and then competition forces them to cut their margins back again.
At the store level, there's not a helluva lot that can be done. The obscene profits are farther upstream.
See this as an example. Grocery stores are making profit in volume, but not a lot of profit per item. Typical margins are 1-3% per item. That means that, if you cut off every single bit of profit that a grocery store makes, your $200 worth of groceries would cost you... $198. Maybe as little as $194. Saving you a whopping $2-6. But when you have hundreds of transactions each day, that 1-3% per transaction adds up to profitability for the store.
I was thinking of the supermarket duopoly we have here in New Zealand were the two major players own 85% of the total market. So it might not be comparible to this type of store? Margins here are around 20% so that’s coloured my read of this story. The obcene profits here are at the retailer and they pressure the wholesellers to reduce prices to where they can even exceed a 20% margin. We’re definitly in a “It would be a shame if your product couldn’t be found on our shelves” situation. They own everything from small country town stores to large city supermarkets.
...Ah. That's super shitty. I'm in a pretty small town--about 5000 people--but we still have three large grocery stores (if you count the WalMart as a grocery store), and a small, higher-end health food store. There's heavy competition, which keeps prices down, but also leads to wage stagnation for workers, and means that poor people get fucked by rising food prices.
I understand the corporate hate, but a lot of these comments are really short sighted. The complaint is against organized stealing, not poor Steve that can’t afford bread. If organized crime is swiping groceries at a large scale then things are going to go bad for the people that really need that location to sell them food. Dollar general is just waiting to take over where larger chains move out.
All of the local grocery stores in my area have been bought by Kroger, they have tossed most of the normal checkouts for self checkouts. This wouldn’t be a problem but they only ever staff one “group” of checkouts with one gormless teenager regardless of how long the lines are. Meaning every time sombody has to get an ID checked for beer whatever dumb dumb is running the checkouts has to notice, put down their phone, and then shuffle over to you to just hammer 9/9/99 into the age prompt. I walk out of the store now if the lines are long and go somwhere else. Fuck them.
I'm torn on this one. On one hand, fuck the money grubbing corporations that got themselves into this mess. On the other these closures are creating food deserts.
The closures are intended to create scarcity, which precedes artificial inflation to increase profit margins.
Corporate is choosing to close the stores to increase their margins, not to combat their imaginary boogie man. They are lying to increase their profits while harming innocent people.
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