Podcast
Welcome to The Backroom, a window into what goes on behind the scenes as the Retail Dive team covers the stories and trends reshaping retail. You can check out all our podcast episodes (past and present) here and listen on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio and Spotify.
All kinds of news outlets cover retail crime, especially the alarming videos of smash-and-grab robberies, but not many dig into the industry’s attempts to pinpoint what is going on. Both the National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association in recent years have attempted to quantify the impact of shrink and theft on retail; both have emphasized the problem of organized retail crime in particular.
Anyone taking a close look at retail shrink and crime soon finds a complex, layered set of issues that haven’t been well illuminated by the available research, not even by the specialized knowledge from the industry groups. After months of coverage, Retail Dive uncovered a faulty claim in a 2023 special report on crime from the NRF, along with other weaknesses in the numbers and terminology employed by both major groups.
The NRF ultimately walked back the number in question — that half of all shrink was due to organized retail crime. That retraction went viral at the end of the year, was picked up by several news organizations and led policy makers and others to demand better data. In this month’s episode of The Backroom, Senior Editor Kaarin Vembar and Senior Reporter Daphne Howland, who worked closely on these stories for much of 2023, talk about what went into the coverage, what the fallout was like and what stories they are working on to shed further light on these important topics.
Resource links:
- Retailers have a crime problem. It’s in the numbers.
- 7 reasons why everyone’s confused about shrink and theft
- Most shoplifting is not organized retail crime: report
- RFID has been around for decades. Now it’s becoming retailers’ best crime-fighting tool.
Editor’s note: This episode was produced and edited by Caroline Jansen.
