Target blamed theft and violence when it closed 9 stores in New York, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland, but crime is worse at locations it kept open nearby.
Obligatory fuck Target on virtue of being another shitty megacorp but two different points are being disingenuously conflated into one in this article.
Yes, it’s probably true that Target keeps stores open in higher-crime areas and yes, it’s probably also true that Target has blamed the closure of certain stores on theft in comparatively less-criminal areas, but those two facts don’t conflict with each other and are really only tangently related.
Yep, “Organized Retail Crime” is a straight-up moral panic. As are most of these modern crime stories about how everything is getting more dangerous and blah blah blah. It’s just conservatives and capitalists lying to achieve conservative and capitalist goals.
The real objective here, as far as retailers are concerned, is to force communities to spend more of their limited policing budget on providing security services for their stores so that they don’t have to. And, of course, to have a convenient excuse to close down a poorly-performing store without as much of a PR headache from the community left behind.
Shop local. These national chains exist to funnel money out of communities. That’s their purpose. That’s the only reason they exist. And if your city council doesn’t make it just as easy for a local to open a business as a megacorp, hold your city council to task.
You’re not wrong but you’re missing the larger context of what many know to be true, and that is that Target is lying.
Target has reasons to lie and will not provide evidence to support it’s claim, which is just hard to believe. You’d have to steal a lot of stuff beyond what they expect to be stolen each year to cut into the profit margin of a Target store, let alone cut in enough to permanently close down a location…like almost an unbelievable amount.
This article provides yet another piece of circumstantial evidence that Target is lying.
Agree. While it’s on a lower crime area, it’s also possible that sales were also lower at those stores, so crime took a larger chunk of revenue. Or a million other things. Correlation does not equal causation.
Obligatory fuck Target on virtue of being another shitty megacorp but two different points are being disingenuously conflated into one in this article.
Yes, it’s probably true that Target keeps stores open in higher-crime areas and yes, it’s probably also true that Target has blamed the closure of certain stores on theft in comparatively less-criminal areas, but those two facts don’t conflict with each other and are really only tangently related.
The whole retail industry was lying, not just Target.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shoplifting-retail-crime-theft-retraction.html
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/07/retail-theft-losses-inventory-nrf
Yep, “Organized Retail Crime” is a straight-up moral panic. As are most of these modern crime stories about how everything is getting more dangerous and blah blah blah. It’s just conservatives and capitalists lying to achieve conservative and capitalist goals.
The real objective here, as far as retailers are concerned, is to force communities to spend more of their limited policing budget on providing security services for their stores so that they don’t have to. And, of course, to have a convenient excuse to close down a poorly-performing store without as much of a PR headache from the community left behind.
Shop local. These national chains exist to funnel money out of communities. That’s their purpose. That’s the only reason they exist. And if your city council doesn’t make it just as easy for a local to open a business as a megacorp, hold your city council to task.
You’re not wrong but you’re missing the larger context of what many know to be true, and that is that Target is lying.
Target has reasons to lie and will not provide evidence to support it’s claim, which is just hard to believe. You’d have to steal a lot of stuff beyond what they expect to be stolen each year to cut into the profit margin of a Target store, let alone cut in enough to permanently close down a location…like almost an unbelievable amount.
This article provides yet another piece of circumstantial evidence that Target is lying.
Agree. While it’s on a lower crime area, it’s also possible that sales were also lower at those stores, so crime took a larger chunk of revenue. Or a million other things. Correlation does not equal causation.