Rampant shoplifting is having a debilitating effect on stores and neighborhoods. How did we get here?
One of my sons sent me a video of a shoplifting event at an Apple Store in the Downtown Summerlin mall near Las Vegas. As my late parents retired to Summerlin/Las Vegas in 2000, we spent a lot of time at that mall and about half of our Apple inventory was purchased in that very store. The store was robbed twice on the same day, February 10th, the same day Tim Cook visited this branch of his empire. The video shows one of the thieves simply stealing Apple devices arranged neatly on wooden tables in the store. Nobody makes any effort to stop the bad guy, who exits the store with a pile of MacBooks and iPads in his hands. His coat reads, “The Anti-Social Social Club.”
That short video shows much of what is wrong in the United States today. Firstly, let’s talk about the thief. He seems to have some pretty nice clothes, and the theft cannot be chalked up to the progressive shibboleth of shoplifting representing poor people stealing toilet paper and food from Walgreens in order to live. Nobody has to have an iPad or a late-model iPhone. This fellow and many like him are engaged in commerce. He is stealing in order to resell later. The fact that he steals in order to make a living shows the moral degeneracy of our time. I remember seeing a program decades ago in which a young man told how he came home one day with a huge wad of bills. His dad asked where he got it and learned that his very young son was a lookout for drug deals going on in an abandoned house in front of which he was stationed. His father gave him a slap that spun his head around and the program ended with the young man working at McDonald’s for minimum wage, believing that he was making a smaller but much more honest living.
In the video, one can see all of the Apple employees standing around and pretty much doing nothing. Apple putting its devices out where one can use them is a brilliant sales tool. Other stores like Walmart and Best Buy tend to have the expensive Apple products locked away, but at Apple you can hold and play with computers, phones, and tablets. My kids used to switch the language to Hebrew on the iPads they used in that store. I would not expect a salaried employee to try to stop the thief. The latter may be armed, and when the worker accepted the job he/she did not sign up to either be killed or sent to jail for protecting Apple. There are enough stories of brave employees either being harmed, fired, or even arrested for trying to do the right thing.
One person who seems absent is a security guard. On our visits, especially during Covid, there was a guard outside of the store. A guard might have made a difference, but again, guards have either been killed or arrested for engaging with thieves. They also have no interest in spending their remaining days in jail for a low-level paycheck and do not want the store named after them posthumously if they get killed while trying to stop a criminal.
So, at every level you have disincentivized the good guys from doing the right thing. The guard, the workers or even an armed customer sees a wall of potentially negative outcomes versus stopping a rotund thief with a pile of advanced high-tech in his hand. And while one might argue that the value of lost products for a $3 trillion company is nothing or that insurance will make Apple whole, this event—which is repeated at stores throughout the country, mainly in big blue cities—is a microcosm of much of what is wrong today in the US.
In several places in the Torah, after a description for capital punishment (which no longer exists in Judaism, obviously), it is written, “So that the people will hear and fear.” Part of punishment is for the specific criminal but part is also to strongly discourage others from doing the same thing. In California, they have effectively legalized stealing goods worth up to $900 per store per day. Instead of a poor person just taking what he needs, they have created a cottage industry of people who steal with impunity, making pure profit on goods on which they paid nothing. Stores in San Francisco either close, put everything behind glass or require each customer to have a worker accompany him during shopping. All of these solutions are awful.
The obvious solution is to make the penalties for property theft stiff, empower store guards to use whatever necessary force to protect store property and indemnify anyone acting in good faith to stop a shoplifting event. It would not take too many events of would-be robbers being shot or sent away for a few years to change the calculus of the thieves. Not far from the Summerlin Apple Store is the Red Rock Casino. Obviously, the thieves correctly understood that their luck would be better in a commercial store where everyone is afraid to act rather than gambling in a casino where they might actually lose their money. This thinking must be changed and it can only be changed with greater protections for property rights and those who act to protect stores from theft.
One may say, “Who cares? Let them steal. It’s no biggie.” But that is simply not true. Many stores close, to the point where mayors in Chicago and Washington complain that there are no more food stores or pharmacies in poor areas. These officials blame the stores and call them racist, while the franchises harmed realize that they are in a serious losing proposition staying open where so much is stolen that they are incurring serious, repetitive losses. Starbucks closed branches in Philadelphia not only due to losses but also for physical danger to customers and employees. All of this could be stopped but when the mayors, their DAs, and police chiefs buy into the nonsense that this is some type of social justice, reparations, or being fair, then the companies do what all good companies do: maximize profits and minimize losses. Half of the stores in downtown San Francisco are for rent or simply closed. Portland has been gutted, with some stores closing after decades of serving the locals. The simple act of stealing a product with no likely punishment can destroy a city. That state of affairs must end if the US is to be a cohesive, safe country.
The same set of conditions exist with respect to the border. The US certainly has the capabilities to build a functioning border barrier and deploy machine guns to discourage illegal entry. Just shooting over the heads of potential border crossers would be enough to significantly reduce mass illegal entry. That which is lacking is the will, and without the will of the voters and their elected representatives, nothing will improve. If Apple were a normal company, it would demand action from Summerlin and Nevada officials; instead, Apple is part of the problem. They would rather lose money and products and not be called racists than protect their stores from such brazen thefts. And the thieves know this and take their freedom to steal all the way to the bank.
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