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Michael Rapaport knew exactly what was going on. “Hey! This damn dude just filled his two bags with everything in Rite Aid,” the actor said from his local pharmacy on the Upper East Side chain when he filmed a man leaving the store late last month. “Walking down the street like shit is Gucci… My husband just went Christmas shopping in January. He had the condoms, the shampoo.” He added that someone (he didn’t say who) told him the Rite Aid in question would be closing in mid-February due to shoplifting.
The tabloids were full of Rapaport’s claims that runaway theft killed our local drugstores. (This particular store saw many more thefts in 2021 than in previous years: 249 petty thefts, compared to 48 in 2019.) After In the following days alone, there were at least five related articles, pushing the crime-and-chaos story and asking Manhattan’s new district attorney Alvin Bragg about some of the policy changes he promised in his “day one” memo. The After also reported that another Rite Aid — this one in Hell’s Kitchen — would also close, presumably also due to shoplifting, according to ambiguously attributed “store sources.” Almost immediately, Bragg announced the creation of the Manhattan Small Business Alliance with a mission to reduce shoplifting. And last week, he reversed some of his criminal justice reform policies in response to the associated backlash. Yet this week, MSNBCs Tomorrow Joe devoted a five-member panel to shoplifting. “You go to a local pharmacy, Duane Reade or Rite Aid, one of them, and you have to have someone to help you,” Al Sharpton said during the segment. “What did I miss that we have to lock up toothpaste now?”
Never mind that an Upper East Side Rite Aid employee told Fox 5 that the store is closing due to “shipping issues” — a reference to the pandemic-related supply chain disruptions affecting businesses of all kinds and having nothing to do with theft. When the After Similar claims made in the fall about shoplifting that supposedly left city pharmacies half empty, a CVS spokesperson emphasized that “product delivery challenges currently affect most of the retail industry.”
In fact, the two reported closures of Manhattan Rite Aid appear to be part of a nationwide contraction. In December, Rite Aid said it would close 63 stores “to reduce costs, improve profitability and ensure we have a healthy foundation to grow from, with the right stores in the right locations, for the communities that need it.” we serve and for our business.” Shoplifting was not a stated reason. Asked about Manhattan store closures — and whether shoplifting has played a role — a Rite Aid spokesperson only says the decisions are “based on a variety of factors that retail companies consider, such as overarching business strategy, leasing and rental considerations, local business conditions.” and viability, and store performance.” Again, no mention of shoplifting.
This general contraction is also an industry-wide trend: Last month, CVS said it would close about 10 percent of its stores — some 900 locations — over the next three years in response to “evolving consumer needs.” A CVS spokesperson tells me that the company has not closed any stores for shoplifting. Walgreens says that when it closes stores, its reasoning is rooted in “the dynamics of the local market and the changing buying habits of our customers.”
“Rite Aid’s main profit margin comes from non-pharmaceutical consumer goods,” explains Mahmud Hassan, an economics professor who leads Rutgers’ Lerner Center for the Study of Pharmaceutical Management Issues. “If you look at a bottle of Tylenol or other over-the-counter drugs, they make a fortune on those and other consumer goods, like milk.” He says pharmacies are responding to the effects of the pandemic on in-store sales and the continued growth of online shopping and prescription home delivery. “If people don’t come into the store, they don’t sell as much because people use drive-throughs to get prescriptions from the pharmacy and order things on the Internet.” (The drive-through effect doesn’t apply to Manhattan, of course, but online fast-delivery pharmacies like Capsule certainly do.) Walgreens is definitely working on online merchants: A spokesperson says it’s currently lobbying for a bill that would include online marketplaces” responsible for the activity on their platforms” and help “ensure that only legitimate goods are sold by verified sellers.”
“The reality is we have too many pharmacies in the United States,” Adam Fein, CEO of Drug Channels Institute, which studies the economics of the pharmaceutical industry, told WHYY when the Rite Aid and CVS closures were announced. Fein later wrote a lengthy blog post detailing the “10 industry trends driving the retail shakeout”. Neither shoplifting nor any other form of theft was listed. Hassan says the same, adding that companies are struggling to restructure in response to industry pressures that have plagued them for years — not because of shoplifting. Because there is a lot of remote work, he says, these financial problems are not temporary. “I think this is just the beginning,” he says, “of a restructuring of the entire retail outlet industry.” He thinks another major merger attempt is likely to come, noting that Walgreens bought nearly 2,000 Rite Aid stores in 2018. [the pharmacies] don’t close for shoplifting,” said Christopher Herrmann, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Regardless of the real reasons for the closures, has there been a recent increase in shoplifting in New York’s chain pharmacies? We don’t really know. “I’ve reached out to my friends at NYPD — I’m a recovering crime analyst at NYPD headquarters — and there’s no easy or good way to do this analysis with current data,” Herrmann says. “The data shared with the public on the NYC Open Data Portal does include shoplifting information, but it is only shared quarterly,” meaning the most recent data is not yet available. In general, however, he says that information about shoplifting is often unreliable because the reporting is variable and arbitrary. There is no national database, and in all jurisdictions, shoplifting data is classified in many different ways that do not match. This makes it very difficult to figure out what’s going on at any given moment, let alone compare between times and places.
“Let’s put it this way because you want proof: Right now it’s generally anecdotal,” said Read Hayes, a researcher at the University of Florida Technical College and director of the Loss Prevention Research Council, who analyzes and models data for companies about product loss due to things like floods, storms and theft. (Hayes describes the politics of his work as “alt-middle.”) “Unfortunately, shoplifting is not well reported by the victims or the police,” Hermann says.
According to data shared by the NYPD, shoplifting complaints are across the city — including not just shoplifting, but all “petty thefts, grand thefts, and robberies.” [sic] which initially started as shoplifting,” a DCPI spokesperson clarified — rose to slightly above 2019 levels in 2021 after a dip in pandemic-braked 2020. Last year there were 43,864 complaints, up from 32,358 in 2020 and 37,918 in 2019. It was unclear what percentage of those theft complaints were simply cases of shoplifting. The NYPD has not provided numbers specific to chain stores or pharmacies. While some recent coverage has cited an increase in year-over-year reports of petty theft, Hermann says the changes in pandemic life between time periods render the comparison useless.
Unlike the Upper East Side store that Michael Rapaport filmed, Hell’s Kitchen Rite Aid, which was slated to close, had reported only 39 petty thefts in 2021, barely changed from 35 in 2019. A CVS spokesperson tells me that nationwide “the number of retail thefts has increased significantly during the pandemic, but we do not share this information by specific markets.” Hayes says some of his clients have reported similar experiences.
Let’s say one would choose somewhere to shoplift, perhaps from a combination of need and boredom. A large anonymous corporate pharmacy chain with very few employees on the floor or items left on the shelves — stores with, as investors have noted, “poor lighting, depressing interiors, cluttered merchandising and a weak product range” — would be an unsurprising target. Still, Herrmann says that while unemployment increases have sometimes been linked to increases in certain types of property crime, “that certainly wasn’t the case with COVID,” perhaps due to an unusually widespread social safety net of temporary pandemic benefits.
However, a major obstacle in trying to understand what happens to shoplifting is that many of the people who ponder the question are police, people with vested interests in police advocacy, people who work or consult for chain stores, and people who say they study things like “What’s a good day for a bad guy?” like the Hayes of the LPRC did to me. Retailers, including Rite Aid and CVS, have reportedly supported tougher penalties for shoplifting, contributing to high incarceration rates, according to a 2020 report from the nonprofit consumer organization Public Citizen.
“This restructuring of the company is not the result of shoplifting. This is economic,” Hassan says resolutely, adding that most stores are insured, allowing them to recover a significant portion of any product losses. Shoplifting “gives them a good excuse,” he says, “so they don’t have to say, ‘Hey, my profits are down’.” Yes, there is looting. But the real thief is probably Amazon.