US Retail Theft is About $95 Billion and California Leads With $7.8 Billion

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Capital One reports that US Stores lost an estimated $86.6 billion to retail theft in 2022 and projections indicate that in 2025, retail theft may cost stores over $115 billion.

* Retailers lost as much as $94.5 billion in gross revenue to theft in 2021, up 4.07% year-over-year (YoY).
* 58% of organized retail crime is cargo theft.
* The average shoplifting incident costs retailers $461.86 in 2020.
* Stores catch shoplifters roughly 2.0% of the time; the average shoplifter is arrested once out of every 100 incidents.

At 37%, external theft (shoplifting, organized retail crime) represents the largest share of losses from retail theft.
9.09% of Americans shoplift.
74.1% of retailers report increases in external theft over 5 years (2016 – 2021).
28.5% of retail theft is internal or employee theft.
56.9% of retailers report increased internal theft over 5 years.
25.7% of retail theft results from process and control failures.
8.9% of theft losses are due to other or unknown causes.
From 2019 to 2020, the dollar value of retail theft losses increased 47.2%.
The dollar amount loss per shoplifting incident increased 71.2% YoY.

Retailers in California lose an estimated $7.837 billion in annual revenue to theft.

California retailers lost $256.77 in sales per capita.

31 thoughts on “US Retail Theft is About $95 Billion and California Leads With $7.8 Billion”

  1. I frequently work with the police in my own city. They tell me about 200 people are responsible for something like 80% of the crime. The point being, they know who these people are. It’s not a lack of anti-theft technology that’s the problem. It’s a society that isn’t able to demand what it needs before it insists on what it wants. The solution will not involve sweetness and light and endless forbearance and forgiveness.

  2. Would be interesting to see the correlation between self-checkout and having less employees in the store vs theft. Also adjusting the graph for inflation might show a flatter profile.

  3. I’ve been to stores where everything is now all locked up. Cant really shop at em. Oh, could, if the next store was 25 miles away, sure. But realistically, I just stopped going. Not very long after, the stores were shuttered, emptied, vacated, abandoned. The property owners — in all cases! — didn’t even try to put the properties on the market for lease. Shells. Graffitti covered shells.

    We used to call this Urban Blight.

    I think the term still applies, and maybe moreso than I ever remember before. Being in my 7th decade of experiencing The Bay Area (SF/Oakland, California), I also can say that I’ve never seen it ‘so bad’ before.

    Oh sure, there’ve always been rises-and-falls of prosperity in town centers, at malls, and even high traffic retail meccas. But you know, it just feels ‘damaged’ now.

    It is anecdotal, but I estimate that half or more of blighted businesses are ‘Long COVID’ victims in a business sense. They were shuttered, they were modestly bailed out by the State, they hung on and came back to a ‘modified life’ after people took off their face-masks and returned to shopping. But … there is a new rougher, harder element in play now.

    I think that people may be employed, but with local prices being THRU the roof, there really is a lot more petty theft going on. And this thing compounds upon itself: when the proportion of sales lost rises, the price of goods is jacked up to cover. The law abiding consumers ‘pay for’ the criminals’ loot. Have to. Doesn’t matter if it is a mom-n-pop operation selling vegetables, rice and breakfast cereals, or a big conglomerate. Losses are ALWAYS passed back onto the bonafide customers.

    Many of the older business people are also well into their retirement years. Trying to hang on, for God knows what. They’ve been shopkeepers for the last 40 years. Time to retire, but no one wants their struggling business. Not their kids or their grandkids. They are work-till-you-drop shopkeepers. Sad. And now being stölén from at rates that will force their closure, very likely either already, or soon.

    It is a pölïtical hot-potato of course, but the thieves definitely have a demographic-and-racial profile which The Media tries hard to obfuscate. Everyone’s equal, right? To notice the race of a thief is rαcist, but to notice the race of a award winning ball player, musician or CEO is lauded. Right. Same rαcism, folks. Exactly the same.

    Note that I pointedly did NOT mention particular races, particular demographics (sêx, age, socio-economic clades). Nope! The facts are as hard to find as the endless customer-or-employee made YouTube videos of thefts in progress. Or post-mortem. Ahem… literally.

    Point is, we are fracturing as a society. Fracturing like little broken window panes all over the grand mosaic of stained glass which is the masterpiece of our civilization. Fracturing, one pane at a time, every opportunity a thief grabs in micro-looting our stores and shops, our malls and outlets. We’re ALL paying for the thievery, and it really sucks.

    How’s that, folks. A non technological answer to one of Brian’s more sharp edged articles. Yet and still, though I definitely COULD name the basket of solutions, none of them at present are remotely palatable, pölïtically. So… I’ll hold my pen.

    ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

    • A safe neighborhood is better for everyone, not just the privileged. Tolerating petty thefts and raising the required price of the stolen goods to do something, just to avoid victimizing some population and the ire of the bleeding hearts is the problem.

      The lefties victimism is cancer.

      It infantilizes everyone and makes things worse for those it pretends to protect.

      • “The lefties victimism is cancer”

        FFS! Amazon did not become a trillion-dollar business because Bezos drove out the competition paying goons to shoplift.
        Retail stores close because their business model is becoming obsolete.
        Retail stores are forced to exist in locations where there is a theoretically high passage of potential customers but
        1) Unless you sell very specific high-craftsmanship, not-standardized products, you compete with products that are available and listed on the web.
        2) Even the crowd moving through Times Square, or the busiest neighborhood in Tokyo, is a “small local marked” compared to the rest of the world. And online businesses compete globally and have the advantage of being able to target potential customers in a highly specific way.
        3) Phisical shops are forced to pay premium because they have to exist in premium locations (like Times Square) but fundamentally: either you have a storage issue (that increases logistic costs because your storage is somewhere else and you need frequent delivery), or worse, you have storage that you pay in a premium neighborhood.

        Shoplifting is not the reason why stores close. The reason that billionaires and trillionaires impoverish our societies convincing the middle class to look the other way and focusing on who is poorer, is the reason why shop close.

        The article above is an example.

        Brian caters to a certain political leaning group and gave a title that is completely misleading.

        California is below, the national average, but most of the people will not even read the data linked.
        I am not sure Brian read them either because he could have attacked hawaii, although as for Alaska and Wyoming there is a reasonable explanation why the data are such outliers.

        We complain about the good old times, but we do not focus on the problem, Is like complaining that most of the photographers shops closed between the 90s and the turning of the century but not acknowledging that the technology moved from film to digital.

        Retail is dead, and it is not because of shoplifters.

        • State by state per capita data
          https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/10/retail-crime-and-theft-worse-in-pennsylvania-washington-and-california-per-person.html

          Thousands of videos of looting and theft.

          Philadelphia retailers ransacked for a second night
          https://www.reuters.com/world/us/philadelphia-retailers-ransacked-second-night-2023-09-28/
          Sept 28 (Reuters) – Roving groups of young people broke into retail stores in Philadelphia and grabbed merchandise in the early hours on Thursday, as a beefed-up police presence failed to bring a halt to a looting spree that began the previous night.

          Major retailers blame theft for their decision to close locations – NPR
          https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202264923/major-retailers-blame-theft-for-their-decision-to-close-locations
          Sep 28, 2023 — Major retailers blame theft for their decision to close locations

          • 1) Brian, The Link YOU initially provided stated clearly that California was below the national average AND YOU MISREPRESENTED the data by choosing a misleading title. I will verify the data you provided now.
            2)Looting videos and ransacked shops is not a statistic, I will check the data you provided. Everybody has a sad story, it does not make it false, but it does not make it relevant either.
            3) I am sure retailers blame shoplifting, but numbers do not lie, the retail market size in US in 2022 is 4938 billion dollars, so 87 billions represent 1.7% of the market, Amazon revenues in US are in the order of 538 billions which is 10.8% of the retail market. So again the narrative is to blame someone else to misdirect the attention from the billion dollar industries.
            By the way, I DO NOT condone shoplifting, nut numbers do not lie. the bigger issue (one order of magnitude bigger) is that trillion dollars companies have a new/more efficient business model.
            You see the guy running out of your shop with a pair of jeans, but you do not see the 10 more that bought online.

            As I mentioned in other posts here on NBF I lived in Italy, Switzerland, U.S. and now I live in sweden. To reduce the impact of online purchases, most of the purchased deliveries are not directly delivered at home, but to delivery points (often post offices that are usually located in supermarkets). This allows many local stores to survive (in my small town there is still a vinyl record store usually quite crowded for example).

            Regards.

            P.s. I appreciated that you took your time to reply

            • The data in the previous link was that California had the most retail theft at $7.8 billion and this is correct and not misleading or misrepresented.
              This new data is with retail theft and additional retail crime in 2021.
              the new data has clearer per capita retail crime and theft data

  4. When people have finally had enough, the cycle will end and the pendulum will swing back. Unfortunately, because it was propelled to such heights in this direction, it will likely go very far in the other direction. It is hard to see it getting to the point where thieves are getting their hands chopped off, but then again, whoever imagined the stealing would be allowed to get this bad (and with no end in sight)?

    I see videos of people in San Francisco leaving their parked cars with the hatchbacks and trunks wide open so thieves won’t break in to see if there is anything. Unbelievable when you know the police, given proper support from the elected officials and the judiciary, could put a stop to all of that in an afternoon.

  5. Brian,

    I am astonished by the intellectual dishonesty of the title you chose for this piece.
    Not mentioning the PER CAPITA information when comparing states that can have two orders of magnitude differences in population is absurd.
    The very link you provide clearly states that California is BELOW the national average.

    • My exact reply that I was creating. You, Brian, in another act of slanted partisanship, chose to showcase the state with the highest population, yet even a quick visual calculation of the given figures puts about 8% of the overall national theft on about 14% of the population. California is not the problem.

        • Hi,
          From the report you linked, it is stated that they treated the California data with a different methodology, (table 4 and page 11). furthermore, sentences like:

          “The correlation coefficient (0.61) suggests that 61 percent of the growth in
          shoplifting can be explained by the growth of online retailing.”

          Suggest a naive/superficial/cavalier approach to the data interpretation: correlations are just correlations. While I might even agree, on a certain level, the growth in shoplifting cannot be “explained” by the growth in online retailing, it just correlates with that. An increase in online retailing and shoplifting may have the same common cause driving them and not being one the cause of the other.

          Regards

  6. I’m not too worried. I believe tech against shoplifting will be cheaper and more efficient over time then a new equilibrium will be established. Email spamming is a very big problem 20 years ago but now it almost gone.

  7. That is unsustainable. That means someone is stealing $100 worth of merchandise over 30 times a second. Can’t be allowed to continue. The idea these jerks are only stealing what it takes to stay alive is ludicrous – they are selling what they are stealing at a step discount…. Good fellas…..

  8. I don’t understand why there isn’t more of an effort to deny bail to repeat offenders. We should be fingerprinting the more expensive merchandise, barcode the serial #. Then randomly purchasing items off online auction sites to find the sellers of stolen merchandise. We should also be monitoring social media looking for mass shoplifting planning. We can use AI to look for keywords.

    • “I don’t understand why there isn’t more of an effort to deny bail to repeat offenders.”

      Enforcing laws has a disparate impact on our most beloved demographic therefore laws are ignored, altered, or punishments eliminated. To do otherwise would be racist.

    • The problem is that most are not caught. They walk in look around and when no one is looking at them the grab something small and put it in there pocket and run out the store. The person is long gone before the police arrive. And some of these people have guns and are willing to killl so the employees don’t try to stop them. Other times they are organized online. Everything is fine at a store and suddenly 30 people or more run in grab items and then run out. The solution to this problem is to require a person to submit a ID and get a good photo or video of them. before they are allowed in the store. Then only allow them out if they buy something or tell the person at the door that they decided not to purchase anything and swipe there ID card again. The ID card can be a bank or credit card or drivers license.

      Gas stations do something similar. You have to put in a credit or bank card first, then you fill the car with fuel. and your account charged.

      The has been also a rise in restaurant thefts. People come in order food eat and then leave without paying. The restaurant could solve this by requiring people to pay fore there drinks before they order the food. Then if they walk out the store can still bill them for the food.

  11. So 95000 million / 330 million = 287 usd pr capita

    And 7800/40 = 195 so pr capita California is 67% of average. What state is the worst pr capita?

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