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More Americans are shoplifting everything. Crime is up across the board this year.

In my locale, it's an open secret that most retailers will not detain you if you shoplift. And it's widely known that you wouldn't be prosecuted if they did anyway.

So yeah. Shoplifting is up.

I weirdly found the micellar water under lock and key a few weeks ago at CVS. They lock the deodorant and tide detergent because those are highly shoplifted items. Didn't know makeup remover is now also included in that subset!
This is not just your locale. Retailers do not detain shoplifters because of liabilities. This has always been the case across the United States.
As an American, I'm furious that we (American people) failed these people. I want to help - I've been blessed with a great job and I want find a way to help these people. The food bank in my region is distributing 2x the food they did last year. The director of the site mentioned how important it is to find ways to reach those who are food insecure in dignified ways.

Find me more groups that want to/are helping with this problem - let's go help our fellow Americans.

Donate cash to your food bank.

Mortgages, rent and utilities are all suspended almost everywhere, so are student loan payments. So hopefully people won’t be evicted and not have to worry about bills right now.

But I wonder if an instacart app for food bank delivery would be a good idea. Kind of like meals on wheels. Dunno.. it would beat queuing in cars for miles.

Maybe there’s a way to do crowd funded UBI... it could start around grocery stores maybe with grocery store gift cards..

Food deserts are a big thing though. It makes me think that there should be way to instacart deliver food to people.

You have not failed these people; capitalism has. The solution here is to organize working people to exert the political power that is rightfully theirs as those whose blood, sweat, and tears built our society. This isn’t a matter of cruelty; it’s a matter of exploitation.
BeWelcome is a volunteer-run, open-source hospitality exchange network like CouchSurfing.

I'm very interested in getting the BeWelcome community involved in helping out with food, as well as shelter.

How can we reach the people who need it most?

This is both heartbreaking and terrifying. Mass food insecurity can be a precursor to increased violence. Where is the leadership??

I have an idea: everyone with over $20 million liquid splits the cost between them of expanding food banks and keeping them stocked. Call it a temporary COVID-19 tax and let them deduct it from their next IRS bill. [I know, I'm dreaming.]

The US can just print money, with much better effect. It actually does that.
So throwaway account here for obvious reasons. I shoplift quite a bit of food from my local Walmart, not necessarily out of need, but simply because it is very very easy.

This Walmart has at least 10-15 checkout lanes that are always empty and instead have a handful of people "Keep watch" of the self checkout lanes in an effort to keep the bare minimum amount of people employed.

Most of the time they are too busy authorizing Alcohol and helping people to actually notice if anyone isn't scanning sometihng. In fact one time one commented to me that "They don't pay me enough to care about shoplifting" after I "accidentally" forgot to scan something.

I don't really feel any pity for Walmart though, they have a bad system and have taken into account that the amount of money lost through shoplifting is less than it would cost to employ more people.

I hope they choose to steal from publicly traded corporate owned stores where the threat of violence or prosecution is far less.
The US is probably inches away from a serious catastrophy caused be the extreme inequality that's only gotten worse this year.

Inequality is one thing, but when you're forced out on to the street to starve to death and there's nothing you can do to improve your situation that's totally different.

In the Bay Area there has been a big uptick in thefts and break-ins. My sources are local people and first-hand knowledge (such as seeing broken glass everywhere on the street). I'm in the Oakland area, but friends in other places have experienced and witnessed some crazy things this year.

It just blows me away that (part of) Congress has stonewalled any attempts to get people money, given the lockdowns. Reportedly there are millions of people going on public assistance soon. This could get really, really ugly after that.

What would you do if you didn't have money for food and couldn't get food stamps or some form of charity or welfare?

Starve to death?

I've been there, decades ago, and that's not how it went down for me.

It’s the pandemic that is tripping the scale and Congress refusing to do anything.
Nobody is starving to death in the US. Food stamps and food bank help with that.

The situation may be bad, but not as dramatic as you paint it.

More and more cities and even states are adopting laws that essentially decriminalize shoplifting below $500 or $1000 worth of merchandise. Open air shoplifted-products markets now exist in major American cities. This is purely a political decision, not some pressing economic need. This is the result of the agenda of these DAs elected on aggressively progressive platforms.
That sounds extremely unlikely to me - do you have any references? Looking through gNews for 'shoplifiting' I see things like [1] which average around $100 or less and those were arrests.

1: https://www.cleveland.com/community/2020/12/lorain-woman-wit...

Many people are starving because they are locked down and not able to work, but I think that the grocery self scan that so many stores are moving towards, enables food theft; or at the very least it makes it easier. It would be interesting to see exactly how much shrinkage occurs due to the self scan.
Might still be a net win for the store if the theft is less than the cost of employing a human cashier.
They also save a lot of money in cashier hourly labor. At least the ones that don't keep launching into "Please wait for assistance." mode every time you accidentally scan a fruit instead of entering its PLU code.
Agreed. Self check is such an obviously dumb approach, especially with high value stuff like meat. People do stuff like swap tags or enter invalid PLUs all of the time.

Was that a cherry (11/lb) or a potato (0.69/lb)?

On a more productive note

Stigler diet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16524061

Subreddit on eating healthy on a cheap budget

https://old.reddit.com/r/EatCheapAndHealthy/

For anyone who put themselves through college, this is much more a shrug than a clarion call for revolution. You can eat cheaply and well with a little effort and creativity. Good training for starting out with a young family, if any of you ever get to that point.

If you haven’t learned to cook, now is a good time. Electric pressure cooker, slow cooker, etc.. Learn to manage your time to make time for meal prep and cooking. Lots of folks take it as a challenge and love to share tips. Shop carefully, share car trips to the cheaper stores, share a Costco membership. The sharing economy isn’t just about obscene IPOs.

As an extreme anchor point for calibration,

.5 kg/day of dried corn to meet RDA calories for adult

http://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/calories-in-corn.php

->

200 kg/yr to meet RDA calories for year

Corn is 4.30/bu spot price US

A bushel of corn is 25 kg.

So $40/yr to meet caloric requirements for an adult for a year with a car trunk full of dried corn. Some of us have heritages that basically did that.

[Not recommended as a strict diet unless you are a fan of diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia and death. Limewater is your friend. Webpage not for the squeamish...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra]

Now add/substitute soybeans, cabbage, carrots, bulk spices, vitamins. Beans 27 kg for 11.50 nowadays. You are in the

$100-200/yr

range without adverse health effects...maybe healthier than what you are eating now. There were times your ancestors would, and did, kill for the chance at such a diet.

(And the CCP couldn’t even manage that...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine )

Unsheltered? The problem is shelter...basic food for a year is less than three months of utilities, much less rent.

I was struck earlier this year when my local pharmacy started locking up bar soap. This isn't some expensive item to resell, like razor blades. It's a basic necessity that people are struggling to acquire.
This isn't what you assume. Inexpensive commodity goods like soap are frequently stolen because they are much easier to fence than expensive goods, since everyone needs them including poor people. Poor people can't afford to buy expensive stolen goods, and non-poor people don't buy fenced goods generally. Non-perishable household commodities are among the most liquid stolen goods to sell, so that is what people steal.

I've seen (obviously stolen) soap being peddled by apparently homeless addicts on multiple occasions. In some locales, they've been locking up the soap for a long time.

yeah but the stock market is doing great and isn't that really what matters?
*expropriating
I can tell you that in Seattle shoplifting, vandalism, burglaries, car thefts, and other crimes take place all the time and it is not because someone is down on their luck and actually in need of basics like food. The increased crime has been induced for the following reasons:

1. Drug addicted vagrants are ubiquitous because the city doesn't enforce laws and instead enables this lifestyle by looking the other way. These addicts very often steal things like food that are easy to fence and barter for drugs.

2. Our city and county prosecutors don't actually bring charges/accountability against criminals.

3. The police department has far fewer officers per capita than comparable cities, and simply cannot spend time on investigating and catching suspects.

The revolving door of people committing low-level crimes is so bad that Seattle businesses have released reports on this problem (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5752913-SYSTEM-FAILU...) and written letters to politicians asking for help (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5752914-Prolific-Off...) only to be ignored. Unfortunately the growing problem of low-level crimes with no consequence for criminals has also jaded residents to the point that they don't even bother reporting most property crimes - after all, if criminals don't face consequences and insurance requires a deductible, there is simply no benefit to spending time on reporting things.

I don't doubt that some number of people who are shoplifting food are trying to be productive members of society, displaying personal responsibility, and just need some support to get back on their feet. For them, I hope we can improve programs like SNAP (https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/supplemental-nutrition-assista...) to provide more benefits (higher spending limits for healthier food) with less red tape (less stringent eligibility requirements).

But around me and in other West coast cities I've been to, those committing these crimes are very often not deserving of sympathy and are willfully not being good citizens. To bring the constituency on board, we need to address both sides of this equation. We need to start enforcing laws and holding criminals accountable, while helping those who are deserving and in need. Otherwise, the rest of us are not going to be onboard with simply allowing criminals to commit crime.

>“People will say, ‘I was just hungry.’ And then what do you do?”

People stealing food to survive while the super wealthy and rich becoming richer and richer[1]. What a great time to be alive.

[1](https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/11/18/elon...)

EDIT: I don't particularly dislike Elon (the man has done alot of good), but he was the easiest example I could think of. Stock market is a better indicator of rich people's wealth.

Not that Elon Musk doesn't have plenty of flaws that people online will be happy to spill much ink about, but what does that have to do with widespread poverty on a national level?

Does the US not have a government and state-level and federal-level representatives whose job it is to take care of their citizens and keep them out of starvation? Elon Musk and his pals seem like a convenient distraction from holding accountable people whose job it is to protect their constituents.

I never understood this because a Bezos, Musk or Gates aren’t gonna spend hundreds of millions a year buying up all the food and toilet paper. Their wealth buys them political power and influence but it shouldn’t really effect the supply chain as far as everyday basic goods are concerned.

So has our productive capacity fallen to where we can no longer feed everyone? Or are we producing enough food and then just trashing the excess when people cannot be afford it? It just doesn’t all add up for me. I am a novice at economics though.

Could be worse, e.g., any prior point in time on average ...
This is a pretty recurring theme in history. Read any Charles Dickins story for example.
> Meanwhile, an estimated 54 million Americans will struggle with hunger this year, a 45 percent increase from 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With food aid programs like SNAP and WIC being reduced, and other federal assistance on the brink of expiration, food banks and pantries are being inundated, reporting hours-long waits and lines that stretch into the thousands.

And meanwhile, in the other America:

> When Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump start building their new home on the 1.8-acre lot at 4 Indian Creek Island Road that they purchased for $30 million, they’ll have plenty of equally famous neighbors to get to know.

> Indian Creek Island, sometimes called “Miami’s Billionaire Bunker,” is home to an eclectic group of some of the world’s wealthiest, from singers to hedge fund managers, inventors to developers — even the founder of a company dedicated to collecting blood donations.

> Just how pricey is Indian Creek Island? According to the village’s tax rolls, the median assessed value of homes on the island in 2019 was $13.6 million. Taxes from real estate jumped 6.4% in 2019 to $87,234, along with a city property tax of $63,000.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article247709685.h...

No people are not stealing food to survive. US have food banks and food stamps. People steal because they can.

I don’t say people are wealthy or eat enough. I’m saying your statement about survival is untrue, and as any false statement does not help to resolve the issue.

Another thing that might be playing into the increased shoplifting is that a number of district attorneys are not prosecuting property crimes, especially things like shoplifting. Thus police have no incentive to do anything about that. Thus people know that they can get away with shoplifting so it is likely to go up.
Thats what you get when business are being shutdown / not allowed to open at their full capacity.
I once lived in a neigh orhood where you learned to avlid the grocery stores on certain days (especially evenings when fewer police worked), as you would be harassed by people trying to sell you their food stamps.

I am sympathetic to people who don't have enough; I know several for whom food stamps and the local food shelf / food banks were thr only ways they got by, either as children or adults.

However, the persistent theme running through the comments here that people are dying in the streets of starvation and noone is doing anything about it is just a myth. Blaming rich people for it just makes it worse, as if the world were so simple, black and white.

One may infer which Americans are shoplifting by noting the geographic distribution of urban food deserts and the surrounding gradient of obstructive retail security.

Food insecurity implies potential for violence, and urban food deserts are practically unprecedented. One may call it a unique American achievement in urban planning.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0276146715612550

This promises interesting times when just-in-time delivery inevitably arrives a day late and a dollar short.

Just kidding, the USD is the first forever currency of the USG, the first forever empire. What's the worst that could happen?

Cities such as Baltimore and Detroit have already seen the process play out. It makes for interesting reading, from a safe distance.

Like a slow-motion forest fire, as the conflagration spreads outwards, new growth sprouts defiantly from the charred center. I wouldn't call it a natural process, but it resembles one.

Do the inner cities of other countries lie in ruins for decades, or is that an American thing?

At the same time, personal savings rate is through the roof:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

and household debt service costs are lowest in recent history:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP

People have received thousands of dollars in stimulus checks. Thanks to extra $600/$300 that the feds have added to federal unemployment, those that lost their jobs received in many cases significantly more that they were originally making, especially those making around minimum wage. At the same time, there are fewer avenues to actually spend that money, and the result of all of this is increased personal savings.

No, shoplifting is not increasing because people lack cash. Rather, people do it because they can, as the justice system declines to prosecute and punish people for it. Crime rate is significantly up, and for property crime it's even worse than stats imply, because people don't bother reporting, as there's no point -- you can see that by comparing car theft rate to other property crime. Car theft is much higher, because people report most of them, as they need police report for insurance claim.

All of this is, of course, entirely unsurprising.

> At the same time, personal savings rate is through the roof:

Yes, people that can afford to save are saving more. The people that can't afford to save are still not saving, but the people who had a surplus now have a bigger one.

> People have received thousands of dollars in stimulus checks.

No, people have (per person) received a maximum of either $500 (to their parent, for children under 17) or $1,200 (for adults) in stimulus checks.

> Thanks to extra $600/$300 that the feds have added to federal unemployment, those that lost their jobs received in many cases significantly more that they were originally making

Yes, when the $600 boost was active, that was true mostly for people making below the average state minimum wage because they live in low-CoL, low-minimum-wage states, because the additional amount was designed to move the average unemployment check nationally approximately up to full replacement. That’s true of even fewer people with the $300 boost which replaced it months ago.

> No, shoplifting is not increasing because people lack cash. Rather, people do it because they can, as the justice system declines to prosecute and punish people for it.

If people had equal or better ability to afford food but were just taking advantage of a law enforcement withdrawal to shoplift more food, you’d expect surveys of food insecurity, charity food lines, and other indicia of actual hunger to be unmoved and the food shoplifting to stand alone. And you would not have expected a spike when the $600 unemployment boost ended, since available money is not the issue. But those expectations would all be wrong, suggesting that money actually is the issue:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/25/long-food-lines-signal-need-...

So you're saying that even though people have a ton of money in the bank, they are going to grocery stores to steal food?

If they were stealing clothes or laptops, your argument makes sense. People with money in the bank do not steal food.