'The facts didn’t add up': Retailers blasted after admitting most losses not due to shoplifting

The National Retail Federation (NRF) — the top lobbying group for retail corporations in Washington, DC — recently admitted that its data about "organized retail crime" causing huge losses was significantly off base.

In 2021, the group initially stated that out of the approximately $94.5 billion in store merchandise losses that year, roughly half was attributed to "organized" shoplifting campaigns. NRF head of asset protection and retail operations David Johnston told CNN in November that retail chains were "seeing unprecedented levels of theft coupled with rampant crime in their stores, and the situation is only becoming more dire."

However, the New York Times reported Friday that the NRF's figure of 50% of losses attributed to organized shoplifting was actually closer to 5%.

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"It would be a bit like the census claiming that nearly half of the U.S. population lives in the state of Rhode Island," Trevor Wagener, the chief economist at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, told the Times.

Retailers themselves admitted that they overestimated losses to shoplifting. In January of 2022, drugstore chain Walgreens said its closure of five stores in the San Francisco area in 2021 was due to a spike in organized shoplifting. But then-Chief Financial Officer James Kehoe said in January of 2023 that its shrink rate (losses attributed to shoplifting, theft and fraud) was just 2.5% in the first fourth quarter.

"Maybe we cried too much last year," Kehoe said.

Civil rights attorney and media critic Alec Karakatsanis told the Times that media outlets failed to critically examine retailers' claims about shoplifting, and were "used as a tool by certain vested interests to gin up a lot of fear about this issue."

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"In fact, it was pretty clear all along that the facts didn’t add up," Karakatsanis said.

Karakatsanis asserted that retail chains used the media panic over organized shoplifting — in which groups of shoppers allegedly steal items from brick-and-mortar stores and sell items online for higher prices — to lobby for tighter regulations on their competitors in the e-commerce industry.

The panic resulted in concrete policy changes from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Californa Governor Gavin Newsom (D) called for stricter prosecution of shoplifters in 2021, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill into law that same year imposing stricter penalties on retail theft.