I cannot believe I am going to defend Walmart right now, but that's how poor this article is.
They say "There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart." and justify that statement by saying that if Walmart: added more greeters, scrap self-checkout, made stores smaller, it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that.
The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways. They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting, so much so that the demographics even at a store like Target are markedly different (middle class-ish).
Walmart seems to have actually extended their reach into the poorest of society, it used to be that stores like Kmart were cheaper than Walmart and the really poor shopped there, now Walmart has been nabbing a lot of their business, it comes with a lot of the problems associated.
What's a solution? Walmart's shoplifting is a symptom of social issues elsewhere: Drug usage, poverty, lacking social safety nets, criminal justice reform, and so on. If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose and that's a bigger challenge than hitting Walmart over the head for having to call the cops too much.
It is very easy to make Walmart a scapegoat, but ultimately you'd just shift the problem to a different location if Walmart stopped serving the customer base they serve.
I remember when my brother worked for Best Buy (electronics retailer) in the late 90's. Best Buy gave a large bonus if the shoplifting numbers were low (cannot remember the term they used). The Minneapolis store he worked at never got that bonus, as it had all kinds of thievery going on. They even hired cops as security (nice part time gig with the discount they had). The Fargo ND store always got its bonus ($700 per part timer, I think).
Walmart is Best Buy times 100. Blaming Walmart is just plain dumb as its a sign of something wrong with society. I wish we'd get over blaming things and get to being honest and admit the problem is people. People can have all manner of things fixed, and yes, its harder than demanding the victim of the crime pay for it. Charging Walmart more is going to up the prices and hurt a lot more people who really cannot afford another tax.
I also worked at Best Buy in the late 90s. Every store had a "shrink budget" that was the total number of money they expected to lose do to theft, and errors. If a store came in under it's shrink budget, a percentage of the difference was evenly distributed among the employees. I think the most I got was $400, my 19 year old self was very happy with that.
"Walmart is Best Buy times 100. Blaming Walmart is just plain dumb as its a sign of something wrong with society. I wish we'd get over blaming things and get to being honest and admit the problem is people."
How is it just plain dumb to call Walmart greedy and apathetic when it's greedy and apathetic? The measures cited in the article always reduce crime wherever they're implemented. Best Buy, Target, Kroger, etc use them over here in high-crime areas. Even our Walmart does. The Walmart in article that started them back up had a big decline in calls. We can't blame them for the rest but it was clear they weren't doing their part before. All for some extra $$$.
Note: All these retailers have a risk management team that knows about effects of above practices. You can bet they voiced opposition to the changes since their headaches would go up. They were then ignored to see those numbers go up on the balance sheet.
What you're saying is that because of Walmart's business practices, that they somehow deserve to be robbed on a consistent basis. That's not how things work, this isn't an eye for an eye civilization.
No, that's the strawman point you're making then knocking down. What I said is that Walmart was facing high amounts of crime against it and its customers. It had two ways to respond to that:
1. A set of practices that cost some money but reduce amount of damagd to it and its customers. This is the baseline response it originally had plus what many competitors are currently doing.
2. Get rid of all of those, let crime increase dramatically, pocket the money, and foot the expenses to taxpayers.
I think eliminating 1 for 2 is unethical and damaging to locals, including customers victims of resulting crime. I support allowing them to do it but encourage police departments to make it cost them as in the article. That they did a 180 after that shows this is entirely motivated by profit.
Who is the victim of the crime? You are blaming the victim for behavior of other people. If it wasn't obvious from my two city examples, quite a lot of Walmarts don't have this problem.
The victim is the public because they bear the cost of constant police engagement in Walmart, costs that Wallmart is trying to offload to balloon their bottom line even more
Exactly what Im saying. Plus robberies, rapes, and/or murders if violent thugs see Walmart as a free for all with low risk of conviction due to corporate apathy. Article indicated it was already happening. Does in worst parts of our larger city when security investments are weak.
The "victim" increased the crime intentionally to make more money. The cost of dealing with the increase was shouldered to taxpayers. They also were put at increased risk of physical harm. I think that means there's two victims: Walmart and taxpayers. That's why the one city declared Walmart a nuisance. They weren't allowed to externalize their problem onto others for free anymore. Once economics changed, suddenly Walmart decided it knew how to reduce crime. Which it did.
> I wish we'd get over blaming things and get to being honest and admit the problem is people.
The problem has always been people. That's why we have civilization in the first place: to create a structure where people are reasonably safe from the predations of other people.
People were still people 10 or 20 years ago, but Walmart didn't have the same crime problem. Asking them to return to previous staffing levels so that their stores are safer for customers and the community doesn't sound like a shocking burden to me.
There's a lot less crime in general in the rural/suburban areas that Walmart was primarily serving 10-20 years ago. And a lot of even those areas have more poverty and petty crime than they did 10-20 years ago, with the local industries and economy taking a huge punch in the face, and meth and opiate abuse spiraling.
You could blame Walmart for some of the economic woes, but they aren't the ones shuttering the auto plant, or the steel mill, or the shoe shop, or automating the old labor-intensive, natural-resource sectors so they require vastly fewer, more highly skilled people.
> People were still people 10 or 20 years ago, but Walmart didn't have the same crime problem
But is that actually a problem of Walmart's creation, or is it that the pressures that encourage shoplifting became higher among those that Walmart attracts and in the areas Walmart builds in the past 10-20 years.
Increasing staffing would probably benefit the people shopping there more than it would prevent shoplifting. And the greeters? They hired 60+ year olds for that, no one was dissuaded from shoplifting because of them.
The crime at Wal-Mart is a manifestation of a systems problem that was not of Wal-Mart's making but rather the export of jobs to China and Mexico and the substantial increase in immigrants from 9 million in 1970 to 43 million today (not counting the 11 million illegal immigrants). The immigrants generally are uneducated and complete for jobs and drive down income for America's poorest citizens.
Diagnose and solve the problem, don't treat the symptom of the problem.
Exporting jobs to China allows poor to buy cheap goods. Without moving production to countries with cheap labor American poor will earn more, but able to buy less.
>The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways.
I agree to some extent. There is a term Walmart scale, and it is defined as things that have a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of happening happen 10 times a day at Walmart.
Walmart is targeted, for example, there might be 2x as many Walgreens or CVS locations, but while their revenues are $100-$150B Walmart is closer to $500B and they have 100,000,000 customers enter their stores every week and that is attractive to criminals. Also, I want to note, Walmart shoppers are a much larger cross section than just the poorest of society, in fact you can easily find stores where the average income of their shopper is $80k/year.
Walmart is a target for all kinds of crimes, from their parking lot to shop lifting to cons. I was recently in Bentonville pitching one of my side projects at their HQ, and this topic came up, one ongoing scheme currently taking place consists of a group going into stores with fake documentation from HQ (complete with fake Bentonville phone numbers and fake voicemail) and they literally set up a photo portrait store inside the Walmart in-store leasing locations. Walmart customers are going in and getting portraits done and the group just closes up shop and disappears (the irony, not a single Walmart customer has complained about their experience).
> you can easily find stores where the average income of their shopper is $80k/year.
[Citation needed]
I find Walmarts do best in areas with minimal competition. Arlington VA is an expensive area and only the 'poor' go to Walmart which looks grungy and sit's further south. However, if you go to southern VA you can find some Walmart superstores that don't have a lot of completion stock better goods and flat out look cleaner.
As I stated I am working with them, so I have some non-public information regarding specific store numbers which I can't disclose under NDA, sorry.
However, here is some public data, the average WM shopper is a 50 year old white women with a household income of $53,125. [1] Another article showing 10% of WM shoppers make $75k-$99k and 15% of WM shoppers making $100K+, though this is based on a survey of 4,000 shoppers, so I don't know how accurate this data really is. [2] You can find other odd facts about their demographics floating around, such as a greater percentage of $100k-$150k households shop at WM than percentage of <$15k households. [3]
100,000,000 customers/week is obviously a ridiculous amount of people and reflects a giant cross section of society. Annually 80% of American shoppers will shop at WM at least once this year, see [3].
Anecdotally, I would say the newer model Walmart Neighborhood Markets are nice and clean, and I would say on par with groceries such as Publix, Meijer and Kroger.
Ahh ok, household income is different. Fairfax VA has an average household income of 110k and has a Walmart. So, that's reasonable even if they are down market. Anyway, I would be real careful of using survey's for this stuff, people lie.
PS: Average income of their shopper != average household income.
Can't speak to the statistic claimed, which does sound a little out there, but I can certainly testify that multiple millionaires shop at this Wal-Mart: http://www.walmart.com/store/59
Store 59 is also sort of a special case, in that when they leased their first building for it in the '70s, it was at least twice the size of anything they'd leased before, and became the proving ground for their Supercenters. And they made a point of rebuilding and reopening the second building on the site within 6 months after it got destroyed by the 2011 tornado (granted, that was easier since they didn't lose much of their employee pool (no one was killed in that Wal-Mart, but I'm sure some moved away because of the housing shortage), they were all very busy at the 2 other Wal-Marts in the area in the interim).
To provide a personal anecdote, one of those multimillionaires was my father, who in the early '60s was a low level manager at a Ben Franklin "Five and Dime" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_(company) ) in Joplin when Sam Walton, who owned a set of them down in Arkansas, would regularly drive up to Joplin for airplane trips. He'd always stop by and talk to the owner and managers of this (set of?) Joplin (area?) Ben Franklins, getting a feel for what was going on here. Very smart guy (certainly smarter than the Joplin owner, who declined the offer to invest in Walton's new venture...).
Stepping back to the general question, the crime patterns in Joplin area's four Wal-Marts pretty much match the neighborhoods they're in. Before anyone can claim Wal-Mart is doing a bad job here, they've got to correct for that.
Although I can't speak to the stories people are telling of poorly managed ones, only that I've never seen or heard of such here, the stores are well run and to my observation, pretty much all the employees but some of the cashiers are reasonably happy/satisfied with their jobs/whatever.
It is mind blowing how many Walmarts there are in Bentonville, it honestly just doesn't make sense, but they are a good reflection of well kept WM stores.
Coincidentally I went to the Joplin store too while visiting Bentonville. Coming from Miami I have to admit I had zero interest in Bentonville aside from the business opportunity, but I was actually in awe of Bentonville, in particular the downtown area and Crystal Bridges Museum were exceptionally charming, and I was surprised to find locals actually had a tremendous amount of gratitude for WM and the Walton family (in my experience such wealth and influence can generate resentment). For what it is worth, I even decided I would return just to run the Bentonville half marathon.
Anecdotally, when our ~40K population town got a Walmart, the police department needed to add a full-time officer position to handle the increase in crime.
Was that because it was attracting a lot more people/visits from out of town? Also, not that it matters for your city's residents, but did anyone check for displacement effects, is the same amount of crime (with the usual adjustments) happening in the region serviced by it?
It's likely many of those people will also be spending additional money elsewhere in town on their additional visits (at least, that happens in Joplin a lot, although the #1 component of that is almost certainly our 2 hospital/healthcare centers), so did anyone try to figure out if the city financially benefited at net?
Not that that matters all that much if additional crime outside the Wal-Mart is hurting its residents. Or if that politician was lying, as far too many city council members seem wont to do :-(.
I live in Hampton, VA. I make a bit over $80k/yr and I shop Walmart for groceries, in spite of having a nicer Target a mile close to home on the same road.
I agree on location of Walmarts making the difference. There's at least one in Virginia Beach that feels more like a Target store, better lighting, with much nicer things and less cramped aisles. A couple of the closest ones to me in Hampton are crowded and dingy, generally much less pleasant to shop at.
It's almost absurd not to shop at Walmart or other stores that are "extremely successful in attracting" the poor.
If I buy groceries at Walmart or another discount grocer, my bill is nearly half of what it would be if I shopped at a "nicer" supermarket and well over half of what it would be if I shopped at a place like Whole Foods. And I actually find the experience of shopping at Walmart to be better than the experience of shopping somewhere like Trader Joe's because Walmart's large size makes things far less congested than Trader Joe's, where it seems like everyone is constantly in the way of each other.
And this is all for essentially the same produce and meats. In many cases, the discount grocer's produce is actually better quality than the supermarket's.
I get what you're saying, but will also note that this is probably subjective based on where you live. In my city, most of the walmarts are crowded, loud, and dirty. A lot of merchandise somehow ends up on the floor. The lines are long. The produce quality varies greatly but is not very good.
I once saw a Walmart in another state with a live lobster aquarium. My local friends almost didn't believe me. (I live in California)
If you want to see a really nice WalMart, then visit store 100, in Bentonville Arkansas. Curiously, this store is across the street from one of the main home office buildings.
Snark aside, the amount of central control tends to cause some unexpected kinds of 'drift' across the various stores. That central control, combined with absolutely amazing, state of the art technology in the late 90s and early 2000s led to much of WalMart's success. I heard from a lot of managers back then that sang high praise for the big computer system in Bentonville. Indeed, in late August 2005, the normal things arriving at the stores along the gulf coast disappeared in lieu of batteries, water, and other such supplies. A store manager told me, a few months later, that he knew shit was getting real when the big computer in Bentonville stopped sending regular stuff.
Unfortunately, that technology has not kept up, and actually grew in many non-useful ways to become the over-bearing beast that it is now.
So the whole concept of 'store of the community' was and is a thing. But in the past, it was a good thing. Now, not so much.
And yes, the ever spiraling expectations put on store managers to keep their comp (1 up, quarter after quarter, for decades, could only end up as we see it now. Serious understaffing, and other related problems.
I've certainly seen stores that are in just terrible shape. They all tend to be understaffed. They have 30 checkouts available and most times it seems like 5 are open. I never understood the idea behind that, though I went in one time around Christmas and they had a ton of lines available.
I think the best mix between prices and not being over-congested and dirty are the warehouse stores like Sam's Club and Costco. Those places require larger volumes, so they aren't really great options if you aren't buying for an entire household.
My local Walmart had a lobster aquarium for a while. Lobster was 2-3x the price at the local supermarket and it was just sitting in the middle of the food section. Not sure who one would have had to grab to actually buy a lobster. Very odd. It disappeared after a while.
I can't say I'm much of a fan of shopping at Walmart. It's convenient for me and the prices are good to very good. (Though my overall perception is that apples-to-apples it's not spectacularly cheaper than my local supermarket.) But I find that I have trouble doing a full grocery shopping there because of a combination of selection and quality.
For groceries (the one thing I can't really outsource to internet shopping), I find that Walmart's Neighborhood Market stores to be far nicer than the superstores. I shop at mine all the time and it's a clean, quiet, pleasant experience.
There's a standard superstore Walmart 2 miles from my Neighborhood Market, and I avoid it at all costs for the reasons you state.
I have found the opposite -- Walmart is understaffed to the point of absurdity and their produce is substandard. Not only that but it is very difficult to find someone that knows where something else, especially when most people don't have any knowledge beyond their aisle.
If you find someone with access to Nielsen sales data, it's enlightening. Walmart is very rarely the cheapest retailer. It's been a few years, but I believe the rock bottom, cheapest grocer was Aldi, by a huge margin.
That wouldn't surprise me since they are selling almost entirely store brand / generic items. When I first got out of college, I largely shopped at Aldi's and it was certainly the cheapest way to buy food. I ultimately stopped because they sold very little fresh food. I think they're starting to sell a lot more now but I'm not sure how those prices compare.
> If I buy groceries at Walmart or another discount grocer, my bill is nearly half of what it would be if I shopped at a "nicer" supermarket and well over half of what it would be if I shopped at a place like Whole Foods.
I like to do both.
We don't have a Whole Foods, but there is a small regional chain here that has organic local produce and grass fed antibiotic free hormone free meats and such.
I use Walmart for things like 2 liter soda bottles, frozen vegetables, lunch meats, bread, condiments, paper goods, and the like, and so save money compared to places like Safeway or Fred Meyer. I can then justify going to that small regional chain when I want a steak or fresh produce and buy their expensive grass fed beef and the locally grown organic produce.
I can't speak for all Walmart stores, but the store in Mountain View is always understaffed with checkout lines 10+ people deep. The Target that is literally across the street has short lines all the time and people will actually help you find stuff. I shop at Target because I value my time, but I would consider Walmart if they improved their customer experience.
It could be that at least some of those waiting in those long lines at Wal-mart might value their time as much as you do but lack the spare income to trade for time that you have.
Walmart would also be the largest state in the US by population. They have 1.4 million US employees alone, and over 100 million weekly visitors. Asking why Walmart can't prevent all crime is kind of like asking why California can't prevent all crime.
According to Wal-Mart, they get 260 million visitors to their stores each week. I assume the 260 million figure includes stores outside of the United States.
According to statista[1], walmart.com does 91.6 million unique visitors per month.
According to statisticbrain[2], Wal-Mart stores (location not specified) have 100 million customers (not visits) per week.
The 260 million dollar figure isn't for store visitors, it's for stores + websites. From walmart.com:
> Today, nearly 260 million customers visit our more than 11,500 stores under 63 banners in 28 countries and e-commerce sites in 11 countries each week.
> According to statisticbrain[2], Wal-Mart stores (location not specified) have 100 million customers (not visits) per week.
The source you cited looks like the location they're referring to is worldwide. They cite "Total Wal-mart sales annually" and that lines up with their total global revenue, so I think it's a fair assumption that their "Total numbers of customer per week" would likewise be globally.
In high school, my friends and I would visit Walmart just to walk around the store and talk. This town did not have much else to do, in the way of social activities.
Everyone does groceries probably once a week. It would at least 30% of the population goes to walmart so its not hard to imagine 100 million weekly visitors.
Walmart stores are also convenient to a lot of people. I'm not their target demographic and don't really like grocery shopping there in general. However, one is nearby and it's pretty common that I'll pop in to pick up something even though I don't generally do a "weekly grocery shopping" there.
This isn't true by a longshot. The 300m figure is every man, woman, teenager, child, and infant in America, and you only need one person per family going for a weekly grocery trip. And that's of course ignoring the people who don't do weekly groceries. On top of THAT, the 30% number doesn't seem particularly reasonable either (though that one is at least the only remotely plausible thing you've said).
I think the word you're looking for is "basic arithmetic literacy". This should be obvious by the fact that it turns out the 100 million figure is for worldwide visits to stores, and only something like 40% of Walmart stores are even in the US. For those of us who aren't hobbled by a desperate need to be offended, little arithmetic spot-checks like the GP comment's are actually useful (in this case, revealing that his assumption of US-only visitors was flawed).
The article also said that Wal-Mart needs more employees and private security present and visible in the stores. They said Target and grocery stores have this. They also said that Target uses computer vision analysis to identity shoppers who linger too long in one area, and other theft patterns.
Walmart can do more. Are the legally obligated to do so? Not unless laws are written in a jurisdiction that says stores of that size need to have some minimum security and anti-theft measures.
> He can’t believe, he says, that a multibillion-dollar corporation isn’t doing more to stop crime. Instead, he says, it offloads the job to the police at taxpayers’ expense.
I think citizens should be very concerned about the notion that instead of their taxpayer-supported police doing the policing, an expectation of corporations policing their own territory should exist. That's a little bit Snow Crash, isn't it?
According to laws in every state in the U.S., Walmart has a duty to protect its customers from violent crime while they’re on store property. Under an area of the law known as premise liability, victims and their lawyers have argued in hundreds of lawsuits that Walmart failed to provide enough security.
Is it? I think there's a long-standing expectation that you take care of your own space, that emergency services are there for emergencies. In any case, the asked-for remedy is basically to return to their staffing levels of a decade ago, which doesn't sound like a corporate dystopia to me.
So you are perfectly happy with walmart branded cops roaming their property, using force against people and putting them in a walmart branded jail until the real cops come to pick them up?
Note that in reality this option inevitably includes walmart cops accidentally beating up an innocent black person, a sympathetic sick mother dying in walmart jail of some pre-existing medical issues, and similar things. (All I'm assuming here is that walmart cops/jails are identical to US Govt cops/jails.)
You'll have no problem with walmart when these things occur? You're sure that the media won't criticize them for this as well?
The problem here isn't the expectation of Walmart having a corporate police force, it's the expectation of some Walmart stores to be prioritized in the case of an understaffed police district without paying their fair share for a public service.
I see this argument a lot and there are never numbers to back it up.
If Walmart isn't paying the taxes it legally owes, then they should be fined and there should be charges brought. If they are, then they are already paying their fair share as determined by the law and implying otherwise is at best extremely disingenuous.
Let he who voluntarily donates additional money to the US Treasury cast the first snarky HN comment, or something.
I'd be super hesitant to see laws written like that; it would be very easy to get them wrong. I'd much rather see some sort of cost recovery system for businesses with excessive crime. That would avoid penalizing the stores doing fine, and wouldn't fix possibly-inappropriate solutions in law.
But do you really want to penalize companies for opening stores in bad neighborhoods? Fewer companies competing for business means higher prices for (presumably poor) people in those neighborhoods.
I'd be happy with a definition of "excessive" that's sensitive to that.
A couple of times I've lived near corner/liquor stores that were obviously more problematic than their competitors, for example. If those stores exerted downward pricing pressure then it might be to a level that was problematic. I don't want all stores to become poorly run crime magnets because they can't afford to stay in business.
>The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways. They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting, so much so that the demographics even at a store like Target are markedly different (middle class-ish).
Note that this is only true in some geographical regions. In much of not-California, Walmart is one of the only convenient places to shop, so everyone shops there.
Note that the demographic data can be argued but the core message of victim of their own success remains.
A world without walmart would have the police called to 3 of 20 small mom and pop shops and no individual shop would be considered the bad actor. A monopoly retail provider exists and 100% of retail police calls, 3 per day, will be at the monopoly provider and therefore the monopoly provider is causing crime or something. There's 3 police calls either way...
The police can't be called to Mom and Pop's shoe store for shoplifting because Walmart closed them down. And people who gotta steal shoes, have to do it at a store that's still open. So, walmart.
I live in the suburbs of Austin and the Walmart here just closed. It's a middle class and upper-middle class suburb and they said the store performed poorly because people in this neighborhood shop at Target and Amazon.
These were exactly my thoughts. The section contrasting Target is particularly ridiculous:
> Police departments inevitably compare their local Walmarts with Target stores. Target, Walmart’s largest competitor, is a different kind of retail business, with mostly smaller stores that tend to be located in somewhat more affluent neighborhoods. But there are other reasons Targets have less crime. Unlike most Walmarts, they’re not open 24 hours a day. Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots, as Walmarts do. ike Walmart, Target relies heavily on video surveillance, but it employs sophisticated software that can alert the store security office when shoppers spend too much time in front of merchandise or linger for long periods outside after closing time. The biggest difference, police say, is simply that Targets have more staff visible in stores.
More than half the paragraph is concrete reasons that Target would be expected to have much less crime: smaller stores, more affluent clientele/location, not open 24 hours. All of those aren't arbitrary tweaks that Walmart is refusing to make to cut down on crime; they're parts of the actual service niche that Walmart is providing.
I've got no particular love for Walmart (I've never even been to one), but somehow conversations around it seem to make people completely shut their brain off, as in garbage articles like this one. One of the most pernicious threads running through coverage of Walmart seems to be the idea that you have to prove yourself worthy to receive government services: serving poorer neighborhoods and having flexible hours means that you're asking for crime and are somehow abusing the legal system, just like paying the legal minimum wage gets twisted into "the government is subsidizing Walmart shareholders"[1].
But poverty in the US is better than it has ever been. As a percentage there are fewer people in poverty than quite some time if ever, the social safety nets have never been this generous, crime is relatively low, especially compared to the 1980's and 1990's. As for criminal justice reform, I'm not sure how we could reform it in a way to stop shoplifting without just throwing more people in jail for petty crimes.
Laws can't force people to be civil. Civility is part of culture. And when civil society starts to break down it really can't be fixed by anything other than a cultural change.
I don't think the statement that there are fewer people in poverty is true. Especially if you are counting numbers and not percentages. But going by percentage you can see on this chart [1] that we seem to be at levels similar to the mid-90s and that the current trend is upward. Specifically it seems like ages 18-64 in 2011 are fairly close to the highest rates since 1959 (when the chart starts). Another chart that doesn't separate by ages [2] seems to show that we haven't had significant drop in poverty since the 60s.
This mantra gets repeated on HN and elsewhere quite often, but it is factually incorrect if only from the fact that poverty guidelines have definitely not kept up with the cost of housing and healthcare.
You could argue that people in poverty live in places where housing is dirt cheap, but those places have almost no jobs and especially no jobs for people with criminal records.
"They say "There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart." and justify that statement by saying that if Walmart: added more greeters, scrap self-checkout, made stores smaller, it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that."
You should do some research before rejecting it as nonsensical. It's well-known in security and retail industries that those things reduce crime. They're textbook practices. It's because most criminals are opportunists and chicken-shit. The thought that people are paying attention gets in their head. That item they want is worth some risk but not that much. Plus, these practices are what the Walmart declared as a public nuisance instituted and calls declined sharply. These practices are also what Target does given they're very serious about security. They had a fraction of the calls.
"They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting"
That's also true. It's why the crime will only get lower, not disappear.
"If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose"
That's true for the ones that remain after the above methods. In my area, the old timers say they didn't used to have many problems with shoplifting. The reason: the employees took turns beating the crap out of anyone they caught threatening their jobs. Employees are more apathetic these days plus cameras mean they'd go to jail for stuff like that. So, the same places get robbed regularly. Thieves also usually get off easy in court. That's already low to moderate risk for high-reward items. Walmart eliminating the remaining methods of crime reduction, externalizing things to taxpayers, knocks the risk down to very low. Crime will stay up in such places.
They say "There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart." and justify that statement by saying that if Walmart: added more greeters, scrap self-checkout, made stores smaller, it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that.
The article doesn't make this explicit connection you're making, and it does justify expert recommendations by pointing out that other stores that follow such recommendations (including Wal-Mart itself in times past) reap real benefits.
...ultimately you'd just shift the problem to a different location...
So there's a constant level of crime that can never be changed? That's elitist, maybe racist suburban thinking. It's also very much in opposition to modern crime-prevention philosophy. It's a pretty huge generalization to throw out when you're complaining that other people aren't justifying their claims.
Do you have examples to counter this "racist suburban thinking?" Chicago, Baltimore, New York, DC are famous examples but I've not heard of one crime free major metropolitan area. And I don't think that's due to lack of trying or suburban racists.
Thus, for half of their customers, and especially 1 in 6 lowest income, Wal-mart does a tremendous service in helping people to stretch their incomes.
If you've been reading the news recently for the past two decades working class people in these wage groups have not seen income growth. Wal-Mart has helped them to still live.
No board member agreed to be interviewed for this story, but the company disputes that it puts profit before people.
That's the thesis of the article -- that there's a forced choice: either people or profits. And WalMart is choosing the wrong option. It's hackneyed, it's cliche, and if you want to run with it you'd better have something more than just a bunch of opinionated interviews. By choosing the right 20 people, you can get them to say just about anything you'd like.
Where there's such a high-volume movement of people, especially involving at-risk populations, there's going to be crime.
There are about 6,000 WalMarts in the United States. Worldwide, Walmart serves 260 million people at 12,000 stores every week, employing about 2.5 million people -- 1.5 million people in the U.S. alone. In 2013, the FBI reports 367 violent crimes per 100,000 people/years.
I found this out in one minute of searching the internet. All of this is relevant context for a story like this.
I'm not a statistician, but doing some simple math, assuming those 260 million people served every week just stayed at the store year-round, every year there would be 954,000 violent crimes committed at WalMarts worldwide.
Of course that's just funny numbers, but even back-of-the-napkin math shows that 1) whatever number we get for estimated violent crimes at WalMart, it's going to be a big number, and 2) with a dataset that large, it's far too easy to cherry-pick individual crimes to make a case where none may exist.
There still may be a story here. Beats me. Why am I digging around for stats online when some schmuck who wrote this was supposed to be doing all of that before he wrote it? And including it in the article?
ADD: You know, if you know a few cops who think the crime down at WalMart is just out-of-control? That's a great story. Write it that way.
> The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways.
Well, and a victim of the policies they and their shareholders advocate that put more people in poverty. Arkansas is about the third poorest state. Maybe a little less trickledown economics would result in a little less shoplifting.
You can't blame Arkansas on Wal-Mart. While in many ways it's a charming state, if you took away Wal-Mart what would replace it? Not everyone can work on a chicken-processing line at Tyson.
> I cannot believe I am going to defend Walmart right now, but that's how poor this article is.
I know how you feel. Its completely absurd to blame a corporation that tries to provide very cheap goods for crimes committed against it.
It isn't like they are leaving bottles of prescription painkillers near the exits with no one to watch them. Or anything else that is clearly negligent.
> What's a solution? Walmart's shoplifting is a symptom of social issues elsewhere: Drug usage, poverty, lacking social safety nets, criminal justice reform, and so on. If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose and that's a bigger challenge than hitting Walmart over the head for having to call the cops too much.
Yeah but that requires work and blaming corporations is in vogue.
I think that we should crack down on walmart and other large companies who service poor people, blacks, and other population groups that disproportionately commit crime. We should force walmart to behave more like target, catering towards higher income people, with higher prices and better service. And if poor people need to pay higher prices at a non-centralized location, that's the breaks.
Similarly, walmart should be prevented from doing things like allowing the homeless to camp in the parking lots. Target is the pioneer here - they force the homeless to illegally park on the streets where the cops can harass them until they leave town.
In short, rather than having all the crime in one spot, we can spread it around the community! This won't help things, but at least we won't have a single unsympathetic scapegoat to blame.
(Also blame walmart when it does try and stop crime and the inevitable results occur, namely criminals being hurt/killed as part of the law enforcement process.)
I can't think of a better illustration of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics than this article. Poor people steal and hurt people but we can't blame them. Walmart is nearby so blame Walmart!
Yes, it's obviously a binary issue and there is no possibility whatsoever that Walmart could do things to prevent crime that have a lower net cost for society than calling the police.
Run a private police force that inevitably harms criminals during the law enforcement process? (The article criticizes them for doing this.)
Maybe walmart can run it's own on-site jail that way the cops only need to come once/day? I'm sure a private walmart run jail won't attract the same criticism, particularly when the inevitable bad things happen in it.
Or maybe they can hire more security guards to follow around suspicious people in the store. I'm sure that will help stop the criticism, even if the demographics of suspicious people don't correspond to population demographics.
From what I can tell, the problem isn't walmart but the people who shop there. But this is obviously a politically unacceptable conclusion, so walmart makes a convenient scapegoat. And they'll remain one no matter what they do.
But say having someone present at an entrance for much of the day clearly cuts the number of shoplifting incidents. It's pretty reasonable for the police and town to push for that staffing if it is less costly than handling the displaced incidents.
A friend of mine was a Target store manager. According to him, Target had a more symbiotic relationship with LE, vs Walmart which just seems to suck resources dry.
It is simply not Walmart's job to prevent crime. All businesses should be allowed to operate under the assumption that in return for their tax dollars crime prevention will be handled by the state.
Police do more crime cleanup than crime prevention.
I expect the police to protect my home but I know they can only do so much. If I leave the key in my front door and people come in and steal my stuff, that's still stealing. But the police would be right to complain if I routinely leave my key in the door.
Of course it's my fault if I leave my key in my door and I get stolen from, but I am in no way obligated to protect myself from criminals, just like women are in no way obligated to dress conservatively in order to avoid rape or sexual abuse.
So are you suggesting that you should be able to leave your key in the door as much as you want beacuse you're under no obligation to protect yourself?
The argument here is that perhaps Walmart, as a large retailer, should take security measures, just as a homeowner should not leave his key in the lock. Yes they don't have to have security, but then it may not be reasonable for them to demand immediate police response, just like I might not expect the cops to help me every day if I leave my key in the lock.
The clause you added about rape is just wrong in so many ways.
No, and Walmart isn't expecting the police to station themselves at their stores. I would, however, expect the police to do their job and arrest repeat offenders so they can be locked up and potentially reformed.
Isn't the point of the police to have a monopoly on violence?! I mean, I'm sure Walmart could create its own army if they had to, but ... do we, as a society, really want that?
Not sure about an army, but I think the point is that they are actively consuming a public service more often because they have cut their own costs, instead of paying for a deterrent themselves.
I don't believe that anybody has suggested that. What people have suggested is having more staff present, like Walmart used to have. Police aren't the only way to stop crime. They aren't even the best way.
I read a great article describing how Walmart does this. Companies who pay a living wage, like Costco, essentially subsidize Walmart by allowing them to pay low wages. Government Safety Nets like food stamps, medi-cal, etc., make up for the low wages. Thing is, these are paid for by tax dollars from employees at Costco who actually pay into the state treasury. Many Walmart employees are actually a drain on tax dollars. I'm at work and shouldn't be commenting on HN so here's the link to "Confronting the Parasite Economy. Actually read it here on HN, but it seems pertinent to the discussion.
http://prospect.org/article/confronting-parasite-economy
While blaming Walmart for the crime problems may be emotionally satisfying, the crime is a manifestation of a systems problem which ultimately cannot be solved by Walmart, but must be solved by the government. Adding more staff will simply result in an increase in prices for customers who can not afford increased prices and it doesn't solve the crime
problems, simply move it somewhere else.
The state needs to spend money understanding the structural issues of crime in their state and implement interventions with tax money.
Here is a plan:
In NY City where I live there is a state cigarette tax of $4.35 and a city tax of an additional $1.50 for a total of $5.85 per pack of cigarettes.
Raise the cigarette taxes to $3 or $4 per pack, the smoking rate declines and healthcare costs from tobacco declines.
The cigarette tax revenues can be put into plans that help to solve the structural problems of crime (unemployment, law enforcement, whatever). The State of Oklahoma should study the crime problem and use the additional revenues from an increased cigarette tax to help solve the problem.
The article didn't touch on this, but Walmart is held in such low regard that there is, for many people, zero stigma attached to shoplifting from an "evil empire", even compared to "friendlier" competitors like Target.
I live close to a UK Premier League football stadium. Every match day requires a police riot squad being deployed for crowd control. Given that these teams are privately owned I do wonder about who should ultimately pay the bill for what are public events held for profit.
Best it would be paid by public who would not even be watching or interested in that event. I think it is just a variant of 'You may not be interested in politics but it does not mean politics is not interested in you.
In the UK, the football clubs themselves foot the bill for the large police presence required at their stadiums. Have done for decades. Same with other large-scale commercial events I think.
They are two different categories of crime, yes. That's why we don't throw people in prison for a decade for petty theft, or put petty thieves on the Petty Theft Offender national registry and require them to notify their neighbors when they move into town.
Hard to say, but it is. When a person leaves their door unlocked and people walk in and rob the place, the thieves are responsible and guilty but the neighbors will cluck their tongues and wonder why someone with perfectly-functioning locks doesn't use them.
That's why a person leaving their house unlocked and getting robbed is used as an (unacceptable) analogy to a person getting sexually assaulted when they walk down the street at night in skimpy clothing. The "Victim could easily have done something more and chose not to" aspect is already taken as a given in the unlocked-door scenario.
I think I see what is going on. Could you be seeing both wearing skimpy clothing and leaving your door unlocked as very minor crimes?
From that point of view, getting robbed would be a minor punishment fit for such a minor crime, while getting raped would be a major punishment, disproportionate for such a minor crime.
Neither is a crime. But responsibility and crime are divorced concepts---you can be partially responsible for being in a situation (getting in a car and driving on the road during rush-hour with a friend in the car) without being culpable for the consequences (drunk driver hits you and your passenger is severely injured). Drivers still feel responsible in situations like that, even if they're not guilty of committing a crime.
And if you're talking about my personal opinions: I think the two states (leaving your door unlocked and wearing skimply clothing) are completely separate, and the arguments that unify them are flawed because they move the responsibility to not get raped from the rapist to the victim.
But the sharing of responsibility for petty theft between the thief and the person who fails to take basic measures to secure property (like locking doors) is already culturally-accepted for reasons I don't know, which is why the argument that "wearing skimpy clothing is the same thing" is even made. I think it's possible to argue that people who leave doors unlocked shouldn't be considered to have done something wrong, but I hear almost nobody making that argument.
I said this the last time this came up, and I feel the same journalistic failure is present in this article:
Could the troublemakers simply be attracted to Walmart and would go elsewhere if things were different? Walmart might even be doing the police a favor by concentrating them all in one place.
Walmart has created a retail model that does not work -- unless a disproportionate number of police implement their security for them. Their stores are unmanageably big. They're understaffed and undermonitored, and they even do stupid things like not routing people with merchandise returns to approach the return counter strictly from outside the store, so the trivial hack mentioned in the article can't occur.
Walmart has a 30 year history of offloading the healthcare and social costs of its employees onto local hospitals and county agencies. Of course they offload their security. In perhaps 50% of their market (geographically) they're a retail monopoly. They rig the game because they can.
The high healthcare costs are systems issues and the reasons they are so high are because of politics which can be fixed at the state and sometimes city level.
The high health care costs are externalities created by state and city policy (and sometimes federal policy) that create an additional burden for employers such as Walmart which creates an additional burden for customers and employees. The higher health care costs result in lower wages for employees while resulting in higher prices for customers than in Wal-Marts case, many can ill-afford.
For example, most of health care costs are from those with serious chronic disease (the highest category is the 9 million "dual eligibles" -- people with disability that are on both Medicaid and Medicare).
These chronic diseases are from smoking, obesity, lack of exercise, air pollution for starters.
The fixes are raising the cost of tobacco through taxes, banning smoking in public places, hard hitting anti-smoking TV ads, ....), taxing sugar added beverages as Philadelphia has just done, lowering air pollution by getting the highest polluting coal-powered electric plants shut down, and in the Northeast and Midwest, converting buildings burning #6 and #4 fuel oils to less polluting #2 or natural gas.
The more of the healthcare cost externalities that are borne by private firms that are a result of government policy that government must pay for, the better for all of us. Only when the costs to government are high enough, will they implement policies that will reduce the high costs of health care.
You've essentially repeated what the article said, but without addressing my point. If you want to claim that Walmart is the problem, then you need to measure the causal link I'm suggesting and demonstrate it to be negligible.
Heh, one of the few times I shoplifted as a teenager was from a Walmart. It was from one of the more run-down ones, and it did seem easy.
Not many stores I would've dreamed of doing that in ('twas only teenage hijinks anyway), but it's true when you have a big crappy commercial space where crap is just laying around (Walmart, kmart, Ross, etc.), it really gives the impression that the purveyor doesn't give a crap about their crap.
Isn't it more efficient for more crime to be in one place? They can send a van to take arrestees to jail instead of individual trips; the Walmart employees are likely more effective at implementing proper procedure than a store that has one or two incidents a year, etc.
I worked in retail when I was a teenager and something I was taught was that keeping your store in good condition (i.e. fronting and facing the shelves) inhibits shoplifting and other crimes. If you see that the people who work there take pride in their store you might think they are watching and will catch you if you try to shoplift.
On a good day, the Wal*Mart in my area looks OK but on a bad day it looks like the aftermath of a frat party. On a day like that it looks like a ghetto store and just doesn't feel like a safe place. The local Target on the other hand could use more people at the checkout lines, but has a lot of staff on the floor to keep the store looking good and help out if you need to find something.
In July, three Walmart employees in Florida were charged with manslaughter after a shoplifter they chased and pinned down died of asphyxia.
No wonder they call the police when they want shoplifters choked out: police don't get prosecuted for that.
This is much ado about nothing. All big companies run periodic "let's take a shit on society to save some money" programs. They find something that costs a little money (e.g. a modicum of private security), the absence of which won't cause them to go out of business immediately, and they stop doing it. Even if they eventually have to restart in most locations, they still save money over the interim. If society really wanted to end this practice, society would stop bending over backwards to coddle large corporations, or even to allow them to exist in the first place.
TFA describes problems in lower-income urban and suburban settings. Maybe these are the Wal-Mart stereotype, but Wal-Mart has stores in many other communities that don't fit that mold, and which may not have seen the crime wave described here. The mayor in TFA had the right idea: declare problem stores a public nuisance to force Wal-Mart to do something. What Wal-Mart will do, was also identified in TFA: hire a bunch of off-duty cops. It kills three birds: security will actually improve with cops on the premises, police chiefs won't publicly criticize a business that's paying their subordinates lots of money, and the cops they hire will use the resources of the whole department anyway. Again, however, this expenditure will only be required in those special communities that have lots of potential criminals.
The walmart in kemah had the police called 364 days out of the year last year. Sometimes twice a day. They are costing the PD a fortune for it. They even had a bomb threat made there.
edit my comment was poorly worded. The seabrook PD is constantly at this walmart instead of doing other things and the revenue isn't offset to hire more officers.
Seems to me that the criminals who commit crimes at Walmart are costing the PD a fortune. Although — surely it's easier for the police to patrol the Walmart and catch criminals there than troll through the entire city hoping to catch them?
I worded my comment poorly. The seabrook PD is tiny and basically all the calls to walmart were causing other places to be policed less. The revenue brought in from the walmart isn't enough to offset the cost of hiring more officers.
What's a reasonable solution? If there's more crime than the Seabrook PD can handle, then hard decisions have to be made. It seems they either need to increase taxes to hire more police or start deciding what laws won't be enforced when police are not available.
There have been several reports from the justice department indicating that over policing and a judicial system that penalizes being poor are widespread and ultimately exacerbate the problem.
If you have any say when your community does have revenue, it might be worthwhile to support solutions that don't amount to more police making more criminals.
That in a nutshell is one of the real problems with crime in the US. It's unpopular to expect people to behave in a civil manner. Instead we tolerate their uncivil behavior by blaming schools, parents, churches, and now police for making them criminals. Forget personal responsibility, that's for suckers.
WalMart markets itself to a demographic most likely to commit crime and doesn't adequately set up it's own security to prevent crime in and around it's stores.
That is, instead of spending money on internal security resources it offloads it's security problems on the local police. Crime is being punished instead of prevented.
It should be put into law that businesses with lax security share a greater portion of the public cost of the crime which results as well as punitive measures for the irresponsible situation they created.
> It should be put into law that businesses with lax security share a greater portion of the public cost of the crime which results as well as punitive measures for the irresponsible situation they created.
That sounds like a fantastic way to disincentivize any company from providing goods and services to the poor.
WalMart is #1 in revenue and #15 in market cap, I don't think there are any problems with incentives there.
Giving the population most vulnerable to falling into crime an easy opportunity to steal is bad for the poor.
Providing goods and services to the poor but not ensuring a crime-free environment is bad for the poor.
If not enforced, companies that _do_ take the responsibility for crime prevention will be at a competitive disadvantage.
You're not helping the poor by allowing slums and shitholes to exist on the false premise that the small apparent savings to them is worth the degraded conditions. You're just allowing profiteering from the poor because poor customers are much less able to demand better conditions.
No, they will simply stop serving low-income areas if it becomes unprofitable for them to do so. What then? Pass laws to force Walmart to sell to the poor? They're a company, their singular goal is profit (as it should be). They pay their taxes and follow all the regulations set out by the government and in return they expect that the government will protect them from criminals.
> WalMart is #1 in revenue and #15 in market cap, I don't think there are any problems with incentives there.
This is because we haven't passed ridiculous laws like the one you are proposing.
The issue is private security can be a large liability, since they do not have the same legal protection as police. At the wages Wal-Mart pays, you would have poor training, and all the police academy dropouts who still want to have some authority. Should they offer better wages? Probably, but it won't happen.
It seems like paying off-duty cops would be the best solution. Lots of businesses with security gates already do this.
Errr, they did, back in January, at some majors costs in hours people are allowed to work, their bottom line, but not their absolute stock price (weasel words because I didn't check to see how they're doing compared to the general market).
We can be sure this also came at a cost in their anti-shrinkage and general anti-crime efforts.
A police officer in a small town once told me, "90% of my calls either start or end at Walmart". The places are lightning rods for crime. To the point where "distance from Walmart" correlates with home values. Maybe local police departments should locate their headquarters nearby Walmarts so they can at least use our tax dollars more efficiently.
I'm curious: does a new Walmart increase crime, or merely concentrate and redistribute it?
Kind of a tough question, because to define concentration you need some notion of area, and you might just redistribute it across the boundaries you draw. Still, this is probably possible at least for smaller towns.
"[Walmart] said it would skip calling the cops for first-time offenders shoplifting merchandise valued below $50 if the shoplifter completes the company’s theft-prevention program."
The response to having too many petty crimes is to not call the police? This whole situation is bizarre.
Presumably the data shows that petty shop lifting is a fact of business for big box stores and that the level of petty shop lifting goes up and down with staffing levels on the store floor.
The shoplifters are still the ones to blame for the shoplifting, but it's not entirely unreasonable for the town to demand some level of performance from the store rather than happily providing expensive police to deal with a problem the store could handle with cheap employees.
"Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots"
They're refusing to look at the demographics. The criminals have nothing to do with my Dad in his fancy RV. The article is close to understanding the problem is socioeconomic class but for political reasons can't say the real problem, so, um, it must be the campers, yeah they must be the problem.
Another peculiar logical and demographic problem is the article implies corporate spending on employees will magically reduce crime, much as hospitals hiring more ER nurses will reduce shootings.
Not only that, but WalMart allows overnight camping specifically because their studies have shown that the ongoing presence of trucks and RVs lowers crime in their parking lots.
Even up in Northern Michigan, this has been a MAJOR issue. Our local law refuses to admit it, however if you pay attention to the news and radio one can see a trend.
If the economy wasn't in a massive slump, this article wouldn't have been written. It acts as an apology for predatory business practices, and the exploitation of a working class.
It isn't hard to google examples of Walmart encouraging their employees onto social assistance programs in order to ensure they get a living wage. This has been happening for over a decade now.
Also, I could direct you towards the average market rate in Nepal or Shenzhen Province in China, and we could have a fun conversation about Walmart's exploitation of the third world, but we'll stick to the goalposts we have.
Many keep pointing out the Walmart theft numbers and his they correlate to the local crime stats. I wonder if there is a correlation to theft numbers and distance to nearest bus stop.
To me this is a great example of why Lean focuses on cutting waste, not cutting costs.
I don't expect execs to learn a lesson, though. Cost-cutting fits in much better with our managerialist culture. Decreasing waste mostly has to happen when employees doing or very close to the work spot opportunities for improvement. But any fool can look at a corporate budget, pick out the biggest expense, and say, "Well, let's cut that by a lot."
What are some other ways we can reduce human workforce that obligate extraneous events into the municipal sector? Daycares could stop watching the children - EMTs could definitely pick up the slack if there is a random health event. Restaurants could stop employing wait staff - eventually the UN would be deployed to feed the starving people.
It is not recent anymore, but I don't think that this flood of "mainstream media" links in hackernews suits well with past demographics. Maybe this forum is changing, but I think it is toward a bad direction.
EDIT: And the downvotes proves that the demographics changed a lot. Why come here if I can browse CNN, Bloomberg and WSJ by myself? There is a lot of comments there too.
They say "There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart." and justify that statement by saying that if Walmart: added more greeters, scrap self-checkout, made stores smaller, it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that.
The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways. They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting, so much so that the demographics even at a store like Target are markedly different (middle class-ish).
Walmart seems to have actually extended their reach into the poorest of society, it used to be that stores like Kmart were cheaper than Walmart and the really poor shopped there, now Walmart has been nabbing a lot of their business, it comes with a lot of the problems associated.
What's a solution? Walmart's shoplifting is a symptom of social issues elsewhere: Drug usage, poverty, lacking social safety nets, criminal justice reform, and so on. If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose and that's a bigger challenge than hitting Walmart over the head for having to call the cops too much.
It is very easy to make Walmart a scapegoat, but ultimately you'd just shift the problem to a different location if Walmart stopped serving the customer base they serve.