[Someone1234]

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.

[protomyth]

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.

[dec0dedab0de]

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.

[nickpsecurity]

"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.

[overcast]

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.

[nickpsecurity]

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.

[protomyth]

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.

[emp_zealoth]

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

[nickpsecurity]

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.

[nickpsecurity]

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.

[wpietri]

> 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.

[douche]

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.

[mhurron]

> 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.

[davidf18]

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.

[citrin_ru]

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.

[davidf18]

I'm glad you mentioned this. Some people have lost their jobs to workers overseas. People can't always be "retrained" and so for these people, since they are now unemployed they are not able to buy more.

In addition, lack of employment correlates (and presumably causes) and increase in crime, in drug use, in depression. These are all externalities that are borne not only by the former worker and their families but by taxpayers and society at large. Someone has to pay for the increased crime and protection, someone has to pay for the additional health care costs, and so on.

These negative externalities of exporting jobs to China, to Mexico, and soon possibly to other Asian nations through TPP are never part of the economic equation.

In order to address a problem, it must be fully analyzed. In this case, there is much finger pointing at the victims of a broken system.

So, when a company exports a worker's job overseas, who is supposed to pay the additional healthcare costs cost by the unemployment? Should us the taxpayers or should those that caused the problem in the first place? Someone has to pay and we shouldn't just let events decide but rather make a conscious choice.

[menlo75]

Trump 2016: Blame the immigrants

[davidf18]

Blame economics. An increased supply of uneducated labor drives creates more competition for jobs performed by the poor, uneducated and also drives down wage rates. Illegal immigrants, since they can't complain, will work in illegal conditions and even lower wage rates.

H1-B visa abuse is used by firms (see Disney World in Florida and Abbott Pharmacueticals in Illinois for example) to drive down IT and STEM labor rates.

You might dislike Trump, but he is against H1-B Visa Abuse and H2-A and H2-B (blue collar) Visa abuse. Meanwhile Hilary has used H1-B Visas in the Clinton Foundation (I love patriotism :-) ).

So, instead of being emotional about an issue, be analytical. I assume that most of the people reading HN are analytical and just don't emotionally lash out.

[mason240]

Walmart didn't have large presence in urban areas 20 years ago.

[will_brown]

>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).

[Retric]

> 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.

[will_brown]

>[Citation needed]

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.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-average-wal-mart-sho... [2] http://www.businesspundit.com/heres-a-breakdown-of-walmart-s... [3] http://brandongaille.com/41-interesting-walmart-shopper-demo...

[Retric]

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.

[hga]

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.

[will_brown]

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.

[kbutler]

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.

(per city council member, many disclaimers apply)

[hga]

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 :-(.

[gozur88]

How much additional tax revenue did they get?

[msisk6]

My dad was targeted in a fake parking lot accident con at the Walmart in Joplin on west 7th.

As you say, the crime patterns pretty much match the neighborhoods the stores are in and that ain't in a good one.

[fizgig]

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.

[ssharp]

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.

[ruffrey]

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)

[Diederich]

The 'quality' of WalMarts vary enormously.

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.

1) 'comp' means 'comparable sales': http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparable-store-sales.a...

[ssharp]

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.

[ams6110]

Sams (and I assume also Costco) also require a membership, the cost of which keeps the really poor folks out.

[ghaff]

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.

[fizgig]

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.

[ihsw]

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.

Just another anecdote.

[michael_h]

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.

[ssharp]

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.

[tzs]

> 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.

[joe007]

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.

[davidf18]

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.

[Alex3917]

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.

[wpietri]

I didn't see anybody asking them to "prevent all crime". I see calls for them to return to previous crime levels, to levels similar to other stores.

[CyberDildonics]

100 million weekly visitors? The US only has 300 million people total.

[bmelton]

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.

[1] - http://www.statista.com/statistics/271450/monthly-unique-vis...

[2] - http://www.statisticbrain.com/wal-mart-company-statistics/

[wutbrodo]

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.

[back_beyond]

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.

[samfisher83]

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.

[ghaff]

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.

[wutbrodo]

> Everyone does groceries probably once a week.

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).

[elliotec]

Maybe some people go 100 times per week?

[golergka]

It says visitors, not visitations.

[DINKDINK]

There are more international Walmarts than US Walmarts[1]. ~6k vs 4k

[1]http://www.statista.com/statistics/269405/number-of-stores-o...

[jessaustin]

The word that best describes this incredulity is "privilege".

[wutbrodo]

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).

[jessaustin]

If one were looking for that, the word would be "numeracy".

[wutbrodo]

I'm aware of the word numeracy, but writing is more art than science and "arithmetic numeracy" didn't strike the ear well (and leaving out the arithmetic qualifier would de-emphasize just how basic a numeracy I was referring to).

If all you can contribute to the conversation is pretending that stylistic choices are errors, it's probably better to contribute nothing at all.

[euroclydon]

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.

[fixermark]

From the article:

> 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?

[adrianparsons]

From the article:

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.

[wpietri]

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.

[yummyfajitas]

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?

[douche]

College campuses across the country are setup exactly this way already. Similarly with large shopping malls and their rent-a-cops.

[yummyfajitas]

Clearly you think that if a model works well in a high trust community full of high intelligence high conscientiousness people who've spent $20k/year to be there, it'll work for Walmart.

I know of a hippy commune (upper middle class, mid 50's, entirely white/asian, yoga/meditation/etc types) that lets you operate the store cash register yourself. Admittedly the store is not as extensive at walmart, it mostly just sells organic vegan flax seed cookies. If you don't have enough cash you can just pay them tomorrow. So why can't walmart just adopt that model?

(I know, I'm hinting at the naughty and unspeakable idea that walmart shoppers are bad people who steal and commit other crimes.)

[justinlardinois]

> College campuses across the country are setup exactly this way already.

Really? I suppose that depends on where you are and whether it's a public or private college. Public universities in California have their own police departments, but they're run by the state government.

[jbooth]

The premise here is that Wal-mart spends much less on security than other shopping centers like malls and Target.

I haven't seen a lot of news stories about civil rights violations by Target's security guards. Maybe they're under the radar?

[yummyfajitas]

Most likely Target simply has fewer criminals in their customer base.

The simple fact is that any law enforcement will result in some civil rights violations. It's just a statistical inevitability. This is one of the reasons I'm extremely cautious about new regulations; part of the price of a new law is one or two more Eric Garners.

[wpietri]

If you'd read all the way to my third sentence, you'd know that I am not suggesting anything like that.

[antisthenes]

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.

[pc86]

> without paying their fair share

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.

[wpietri]

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.

[gozur88]

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.

[wpietri]

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.

[cookiecaper]

>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.

[chriskanan]

This is definitely true in most of rural Oklahoma, where I grew up. There were no other major retail or grocery stores.

[VLM]

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.

[phaus]

>everyone shops there.

And this is true pretty much everywhere I've ever been that wasn't a large city or very close to one.

[criddell]

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.

[wutbrodo]

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].

[merpnderp]

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.

[ircody]

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...

[antisthenes]

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.

[merpnderp]

So your complaint is with the definition of poverty as a percentage of the medium income?

[duncan_bayne]

I don't know about the OP but I certainly have a problem with it myself.

It's a definition of poverty that a) means you can 'fix' poverty by making rich people poorer, and b) morally legitimises envy.

[Avshalom]

Crime is also the lower than ever so...

[nickpsecurity]

"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.

[Lagged2Death]

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.

[brianmurphy]

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.

[losteverything]

Everyone is wrong about Wal-Mart's customer mix.

Income. US stores. Walmart us stores

0-20. 16. 16

20-49k. 32. 33

50-99. 30. 31

100k plus 23. 21

This chart was from Doug's 10 14 15 22nd investors meeting. Page 24 slide of his presentation. ( AC Nielsen is the source credited on the slide)

This shouldn't surprise anybody: poor middle class or Rich everybody tries to save money

[davidf18]

Very informative, thank you.

But still, 1 in 6 < 20K and 1 in 2 < 50K

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.

[DanielBMarkham]

Yeah I was unhappy with the article as well.

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.

[stickfigure]

Blaming Walmart for shoplifting is like blaming women for getting raped. It's just wrong.

[jellicle]

> 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.

[jessaustin]

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.

[LyndsySimon]

I grew up in Arkansas - WalMart has been nothing but a blessing to the state, particularly in the NW corner.

[fweespeech]

> 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.

[DanBC]

> scrap self-checkout,

> [...] it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that.

There a bit of evidence that self-checkout systems increse rates of crime.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p043gmxh

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/08/02/self-service-c...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/03/checkout-serpent/

[gozur88]

Seems like common sense to me. If I were going to have a second career in shoplifting you'd find me in baggy pants at the self-checkout line.