You raise some good points about the data and analysis here, but it seems curious you’re willing to accept Target’s claims without any data or analysis at all.

Certainly retail theft is a big problem, and Target is strongly incentivized to put pressure on government to do something. So I would expect them to blame theft for any store closure, even if was for orthogonal reasons like low sales, problems with building systems, demographic trends, whatever.

The Seattle Times compared stores closing with stores remaining open and found that (1) the stores closing had fewer calls to the police than the stores remaining open, and (2) the stores closing just happen to be Target's new smaller-format stores, which have been seriously underperforming nationally.

Retail "shrink" includes inventory losses from all causes -- breakage, spoilage, customer theft, employee theft, paperwork theft from fake invoices and receiving errors, and even unknown causes. It's the difference between the inventory they pay for, and the inventory they sell and physically count.

Total shrink as a percentage of sales hasn't changed much over the years, so a skeptical mind might wonder why there's suddenly this coordinated, nationwide, nonstop, pervasive hyperventilating over retail theft. A skeptical mind might wonder if there's a hidden agenda driving this messaging.

Total shrink data in the article was taken from national average not specific stores. There is no specific shrink data from these stores, so while total shrink on a national level hasn't changed much in years, they have no evidence that total shrink at these specific stores has or hasn't changed.

I'm not really for or against Target. I just feel that the quality of using some tangentially associated data while interesting really isn't enough to make assertions that "the data tells a different story" or that Target is covering up internal problems. It's bad journalism to just do some analysis on some data you happen to have and then claim someone who has the data's assertion is totally false.

Other potential obvious flaws in methodology: 1. Analyzing the quantity of reported theft calls probably only means thefts where the police were able to make an arrest. Not th 2. Different thefts might result in different dollar amounts and quantity of thefts is probably less important to target than total value of theft. 3. Smaller stores may experience less quantity or value of theft, but have higher levels of overall theft, because they are smaller and have less sales and less traffic.

If total shrink hasn't changed, then total shrink hasn't changed. The end.

If total shrink hasn't changed, then neither has any of it's components, of if any has, then something else got better by the same amount, and so what's the problem? If theft losses went up but something else got better by the same amount, then npthing changed, and so why are they closing again?

Target is specifically being targetted? Suffering theft no one else is suffering? Walmart did something new to protect itself better and drove all the theft to Target? There is no reasonable way to have a stable total and yet Taget has some new drastically increased problem.

Total shrinkage not changing means there is no new or increased theft problem.

Shrink is not evenly distributed throughout a chain or evenly across all inventory. Some stores experience sub-1% shrink. The stores that get closed are more like >5% for multiple years.

> Suffering theft no one else is suffering?

Other major retailers are experiencing the same problem and have closed stores for the same reasons.

And yet the average has not increased, and so you must be suggesting that Target and 'other major retailers' have had increased theft, and some equal number of others have apparently been gifted with negative theft.

I'm saying that Target closes stores with high shrink and thus total shrink hasn't changed, because when shrink increases companies take action and close the stores with high shrink. I'm suggesting that a store with above average shrink in a portfolio of many stores will not meaningfully move the overall average in a statistic of all the stores in the entire country or target's entire portfolio.

But I'm not trying to write a defense of Target. You may be correct. You may be incorrect. There simply isn't enough data to accurately draw a conclusion and I'm just offended that journalists inflate stories that give extreme results but very weak foundations instead of you know... doing journalism correctly based on actual real data not suppositions based on a bunch of national averages as though they are accurately depicting actual shrink in a specific store in a specific market.

But then there is no new increased theft problem, there is a bad store or a store in a bad area (which other commenters have said both are the case here). The criticism is exactly that they tried to make business as usual look like some new general problem they suddenly have that they didn't have yesterday.

If total shrink as a percentage of sales has remained within a narrow band for many years, then it's natural to wonder why there's suddenly wall-to-wall coverage of the ostensible crisis of retail theft.

From the panicked noises made by this CEO and his media amplifiers, you'd think losses must be up by a factor of ten.

The fact that total losses are relatively constant gives the lie to the entire narrative.

Also, as a share of shrinkage, across retail, external theft isn't increasing. Its media driven hysteria.

> so I don’t see how it has any bearing on stores which were closed because they are outliers.

So we have flawed data and a corporate press release with no data and motivation to avoid any conversation about closing stores for any reason that could reflect poorly on the company's fundamentals.

(hard to take a comment seriously when it doesn’t even acknowledge this possible flaw in their premise?)

Is there any reason to believe that the degree of unreported theft in one store is any different than unreported theft at another? If unreported theft is similar across stores then it would seem to be essentially noise in the statistics.

It's odd that by closing their brick and mortar stores they're essentially rolling up their business and conceding Amazon all those customers.

Are you asking if shrink varies store to store?

Yes. I grew up in a grocery store basically, shrink could vary 30% or more between stores. Stores with liquor in the back corners could easily be 10% more.

Theft is only reported if you caught somebody, which you basically don’t try to do anymore

You could be right — about uneven distribution of theft (shrink?).

Nonetheless, with the aggressive inventory practices of retailers these days, whether a theft is reported or not should be of little issue — Target already knows how much stuff is missing.

Why is it odd? The goal isn’t revenue, it’s profit.

That may have been forgotten during central banks’ long experiment with zirp but we are no longer in that.

From where I've been sitting, big box retailers have been running on the zeal of expansionism for decades now.

No profit? Then by all means they can sit back and let Dollar General come in and capture the retail of a town.

In the past this has generally been bad news for an entrenched retailer and the first signs of fracturing. It's hard for me to care too much though what happens to these big chains.

I think you are mixing up cause and effect. It might be a bad sign for a retailer if it has unprofitable stores, but that doesn’t mean keeping them open is going to help.

Social phenomena (such as crime) are not distributed evenly.

From the article:

> While crime data doesn't capture all incidents of theft, as some go unreported, it does provide a reliable way to measure relative levels of theft among stores.

On what basis do you make the assumption that a multinational retailer, specifically one with some of the most aggressive loss prevention policies in the first world, would not keep track of theft in some stores?

I don't think they're making that assumption. I think they're saying that not all theft is reported to the police.

That's the same assumption. Why would Target not report theft as a matter of course?

It's not the same assumption. Target might not know theft has occurred at the time. It will show up later when doing inventory as a discrepancy and be recorded as shrinkage. Target in such a case has nothing to report to the police.

There may also be reasons not to report known cases of theft. Lack of evidence, uncooperative police and/or prosecutor, or small enough value so that the effort isn't worth it, for example.

The same assumption applies to all Target locations. There’s no reason for these locations to be any more underreported.

And again, Target has one of the most aggressive loss prevention departments in the entire first world.