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USA: Shoplifting Has Increased 93% Since 2019; 45 % of Shoplifters are Stealing Food (medium.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/progressivepolitics@lemmy.world
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[–] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Here is the actual report.

I started reading it but am out of time for now. I'm fairly sure that the 93% number is number of known shoplifting incidents and is unrelated to the value of the items. I'd need to read more to be sure.

I do wonder whether the dollar numbers are inflation adjusted or not. I'm sure that info is in the report.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    An increase in the number of known shoplifting incidents would be conflated with increasing surveillance. It would be hard to distinguish observability vs actual increases.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I feel like they would still know about it when doing inventory, no?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Inventory would measure $ worth of goods missing, but wouldn't ascertain the number of incidents that caused those losses. So the $/incident and incident count figures should be treated as if they have high uncertainty even if the $ figure is accurate.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Thanks, I continued looking further into it as well and found another article on it, which states:

    Retailers reported a 93% increase in annual shoplifting incidents in 2023 compared to 2019.

    So I believe you are right. Guess op proves that often you can have either interesting text with poorly supported numbers, or boring text with well supported facts. Too bad though, cause i did actually enjoy reading the article (so extra shout-out to op for sharing).

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