Anyone else miss this?

This year you couldn't turn on your television or scroll Twitter without seeing video of "brazen shoplifters, including images of masked groups smashing windows and grabbing high-end purses and cellphones."

Turns out the claims that nearly half of the retail industry’s $94.5 billion in missing merchandise was the result of organized theft was a lie. The National Retail Federation quietly edited that claim earlier this month from a widely cited report issued back in April after the trade publication Retail Dive revealed that faulty data had been used to arrive at the inaccurate figure.

The claims have been fueled by widely shared videos of a few instances of brazen shoplifters, including images of masked groups smashing windows and grabbing high-end purses and cellphones. But the data show this impression of rampant criminality was a mirage.

In fact, retail theft has been lower this year in most of the country than it was a few years ago, according to police data. Some exceptions, including New York City, exist. But in most major cities, shoplifting incidents have fallen 7 percent since 2019.

Umm, remind me: who was president in 2019?

Anyway, Walgreens, which figured prominently in a video seen millions of times that showed a man, garbage bag in hand, openly stealing products from a Walgreens as others watched, said it would close five stores in San Francisco, citing repeated instances of organized shoplifting.

After the San Francisco Chronicle showed that Police Department data on shoplifting did not support Walgreen’s explanation for the store closings, Walgreens admitted it overstated its claims: "Maybe we cried too much last year."

In the end it turned out that retailers used the false data to lobby Congress to pass bills that would regulate online retailers, which they claim is where much of the stolen product ends up. And it worked, as governors from California to Florida cracked down on retail theft and passed bills aimed at retail theft.

Not to be overshadowed, Orange Jesus called for the police to shoot shoplifters as they are leaving a store.

Bottom line: all the hue and cry was based on incorrect data and shoplifting has gone down, not up.

nytimes.com - Organized shoplifting retail crime theft retraction