One of America’s largest retailers said Wednesday that the surge in crime is inflicting deep losses.
Target said its stores are getting looted at a massive scale. The damage to the bottom line has amounted to $400 million so far this year, the company said on a call with reporters on Wednesday.
The company is not the only retailer to point to a rise in theft recently. A spokesman for CVS said earlier this year that it has experienced a 300 percent increase in theft. Rite Aid said in October it suffered $5 million in losses due to theft in NYC in the most recent quarter alone. Home Depot said it has been locking up more products during the past 12 months in an attempt to stem theft.
“There’s a handful of things that can drive shrink in our business and theft is certainly a key driver,” said Target CFO Michael Fiddelk. “We know we’re not alone across retail in seeing a trend that I think has gotten increasingly worse over the last 12 to 18 months. So we’re taking the right actions in our stores to help curb that trend where we can, but that becomes an increasing headwind on our business and we know the business of others.”
The looting losses are especially harmful now because the major retailers are seeing sales soften as consumers grapple with inflation and the looming recession most economists expect to begin within the next 12 months.
There is mounting evidence that the U.S. has become increasingly criminogenic since the summer of 2020 and that this trend toward more crime has accelerated since the start of 2021.
“Americans are more likely now than at any time over the past five decades to say there is more crime in their local area than there was a year ago. The 56 percent of U.S. adults who report an increase in crime where they live marks a five-percentage-point uptick since last year and is the highest by two points in Gallup’s trend dating back to 1972,” Gallup reported last month.
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