Scott Alexander

We need an equivalent of the NCVS, reports coming from the victims themselves.

Our best bet is the National Retail Survey, from a retail organisation which asks stores what percent of their inventory they believe they lose to various causes, including shoplifting.

Here's a graph, estimated external theft or shoplifting portion of shrink as percentage of sales.

External theft has historically been around 33% to 36% of total shrink.

This chart multiplies total shrink by the reported external theft share.

It goes from 2004 to 2022.

It's showing a modest increase.

It starts at around 0.5% and it increases up to about 0.57%.

Scott writes, only about a 20% increase during the 2004 to 2022 period.

The NRS is sponsored by a retail trade industry group which really wants to find shoplifting so they can lobby for better anti-shoplifting measures.

In 2024, they were so embarrassed by their failure to do so that they stopped the survey entirely and sold the survey brand to an anti-shoplifting security tech company.

No bias there.

The company replaced it with a survey of vibes among store owners and dutifully reported that the vibes about shoplifting had never been worse and you needed to buy their product right away.

Now what?

The survey doesn't disaggregate by city, so maybe national shoplifting is stable, but San Francisco really is worse and just isn't reporting it to the police?

Might this be because there are fewer stores, everyone is buying through Amazon, and therefore even if all existing stores are crammed with shoplifters all the time, it shows up as less shoplifting?

This isn't trivially true.

The number of stores has declined less than I would expect, maybe not at all.

But there's been a shift in types of stores, from big box to local.

If these types have different shoplifting or reporting patterns, that might matter.