this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Shoplifting happens 93% more often now or is the statistic that the value of stolen goods increased by 93% in total? I feel like that matters a lot.
Edit: the article quite well written if you ask me, but lacks sources. There is a graph, but that doesn't show the numbers mentioned. It shows losses of 31.1B in 2019 and an estimated 47.8B in 2025, which is a rise of ~54% not 93%. It presents itself as investigative journalism, but feels more like a op-ed instead.
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.
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.
I feel like they would still know about it when doing inventory, no?
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.