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Retail Group Retracts Startling Claim About ‘Organized’ Shoplifting

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The National Retail Federation had said that nearly half of the industry’s $94.5 billion in missing merchandise in 2021 was the result of organized theft. It was likely closer to 5 percent, experts say.A national lobbying group has retracted its startling estimate that “organized retail crime” was responsible for nearly half the $94.5 billion in store merchandise that disappeared in 2021, a figure that helped amplify claims that the United States was experiencing a nationwide wave of shoplifting.The group, the National Retail Federation, edited that claim last week from a widely cited report issued in April, after the trade publication Retail Dive revealed that faulty data had been used to arrive at the inaccurate figure.The retraction comes as retail chains like Target continue to claim that they are the victims of large shoplifting operations that have cut into profits, forcing them to close stores or inconvenience customers by locking products away.The claims have been fueled by widely shared videos of a few instances of brazen shoplifters, including images of masked groups smashing windows and grabbing high-end purses and cellphones. But the data show this impression of rampant criminality was a mirage.In fact, retail theft has been lower this year in most of the country than it was a few years ago, according to police data. Some exceptions, including New York City, exist. But in most major cities, shoplifting incidents have fallen 7 percent since 2019.Organized retail crime, in which multiple individuals steal products from several stores to later sell on the black market, is a real phenomenon, said Trevor Wagener, the chief economist at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, who has conducted research on retail data. But he said organized groups were likely responsible for just about 5 percent of the store merchandise that disappeared from 2016 to 2020.He emphasized that there’s “a lot of uncertainty and imprecision” in measuring losses, because it is difficult to parse out what is shoplifting and what is organized crime.Mr. Wagener testified in Congress in June about the discrepancy in the National Retail Federation’s report.Even as it retracted the figure and revised the report, the federation, which has more than 17,000 member companies, insisted in an emailed statement that its focus on the problem was appropriate.“We stand behind the widely understood fact that organized retail crime is a serious problem impacting retailers of all sizes and communities across our nation,” the statement said. “At the same time, we recognize the challenges the retail industry and law enforcement have with gathering and analyzing an accurate and agreed-upon set of data.”At issue is “total annual shrink” — the industry term for the value of merchandise that disappears from stores without being paid for, through theft, damage and inventory tracking mistakes.Mary McGinty, a spokeswoman for the federation, said the error was caused by an analyst from K2 Integrity, an advisory firm that helped produce the report.The analyst, who was not named, linked a 2021 National Retail Federation survey with a quote from Ben Dugan, the former president of the advocacy group Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail, who said in Senate testimony in 2021 that organized retail crime “accounts for $45 billion in annual losses for retailers.”Mr. Dugan was citing the federation’s 2016 National Retail Security Survey, which was actually referring to the overall cost of shrink in 2015 — not the amount lost to just organized retail crime, Ms. McGinty said.Alec Karakatsanis, a civil rights lawyer who has studied and critiqued how the media has covered organized retail crime, said that the retraction underscored how some news organizations, which have extensively covered the issue of shoplifting, were “used as a tool by certain vested interests to gin up a lot of fear about this issue when, in fact, it was pretty clear all along that the facts didn’t add up.”One of the most prominent examples came in October 2021, when Walgreens said it would close five stores in San Francisco, citing repeated instances of organized shoplifting. The company’s decision had come months after a video seen millions of times showed a man, garbage bag in hand, openly stealing products from a Walgreens as others watched.But an October 2021 analysis by The San Francisco Chronicle showed that Police Department data on shoplifting did not support Walgreen’s explanation for the store closings.Eventually, Walgreens retreated from its claims. In January, an executive at the company said that Walgreens might have overstated the effects on its business, saying: “Maybe we cried too much last year.”Mr. Karakatsanis said the exaggerated narrative of widespread shoplifting was weaponized by the retail industry as it lobbied Congress to pass bills that would regulate online retailers, which they claim is where much of the stolen product ends up.Commentators and politicians have seized on the issue. Earlier this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrat of California, responded to reports of large-scale thefts in the state with a call for tough prosecution of shoplifters and a plan to invest millions of dollars to fight “organized retail theft.” Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida, signed a bill last year aimed at retail theft, and former President Donald J. Trump called for violence, telling Republican activists in California this year that the police should shoot shoplifters as they are leaving a store.Mr. Wagener, the chief economist at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said that the National Retail Federation’s report in April immediately stuck out to him as wrong. The error was troubling, he said, because the federation has long been viewed as a trusted provider of data for the industry.What made the federation’s mistake even more surprising, Mr. Wagener said, was how starkly the figure contrasted to the group’s own previous findings.In 2020, the federation said in a report that organized retail crime cost retailers an average of $719,548 per $1 billion in sales — a number that would point nowhere near the roughly 50 percent claim made in the April report.Another National Retail Federation survey showed that all external theft — including thefts unrelated to organized retail crime — accounted for 37 percent of shrink, a figure that would still be billions of dollars less than the incorrect estimate of 50 percent made in April.“It would be a bit like the census claiming that nearly half of the U.S. population lives in the state of Rhode Island,” Mr. Wagener said. More

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    Broadcast News Is at Center of Fight Over Noncompete Clauses

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    Job-switching barriers are routine at TV stations, even for workers not on the air. A proposed federal rule would curb the practice across all fields.Of all the professions, perhaps none is more commonly bound by contracts that define where else an employee can go work than local television news.The restrictions, known as noncompete clauses, have been a condition of the job for reporters, anchors, sportscasters and meteorologists for decades. More recently, they’ve spread to off-air roles like producers and editors — positions that often pay just barely above the poverty line — and they keep employees from moving to other stations in the same market for up to a year after their contract ends.For that reason, there’s probably no industry that could change as much as a result of the Federal Trade Commission’s effort to severely limit noncompete clauses — if the proposed rule is not derailed before being finalized. Business trade associations are lobbying fiercely against it.“The vast majority of people who work in this country, if they find themselves in a bad situation and they don’t like it, they have options to leave, and they don’t have to move,” said Rick Carr, an agent who represents broadcast workers. “And TV doesn’t allow that.”The pending rule would most likely help people like Leah Rivard, who produces the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts at WKBT in La Crosse, Wis.She was hired in the summer of 2021, at an hourly rate of $15. A year later, the station brought on a cohort of recent journalism school graduates as part of a new training program that promised to pay off a chunk of their student loans. Several longer-tenured producers left, and Ms. Rivard wanted to leave, too, since she ended up having to teach a bunch of inexperienced young people how to write scripts and edit video.When Ms. Rivard spoke to her managers, she was told that if she left for another station anywhere in the country before her contract expired this year, they could sue her. So she has continued to work for the station, an experience she’s called “absolute hell.” But even after her contract ends in June, a noncompete clause will prevent her from working for any of the other stations in La Crosse or Eau Claire, an hour and a half north, for a year after that.Ms. Rivard plans to look for work in Milwaukee, and since she doesn’t have much to tie her down in La Crosse, she’s eager to leave. But for plenty of older employees with children in school and mortgages to pay, a noncompete means there’s no easy way out.“If your station is so toxic that it’s affecting you, and you want to leave, you have to leave news altogether and find a public relations job,” Ms. Rivard said. “It leaves no accountability for the company to be a good company for employees.”Chris Palmer, WKBT’s general manager, said he believed noncompetes benefited both employers and employees.“We invest a lot of time and money training and publicly marketing an individual journalist, which, in turn, increases the value of that journalist in the local market,” he said. “These employees also have access to proprietary local research and strategic investments. It would be unfair for that to benefit a direct competitor without protection.”Noncompete clauses have become standard in many workplaces and cover about 18 percent of the U.S. labor force, according to research by economists at the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan.In broadcasting, though, noncompetes are ubiquitous. According to a survey of TV news directors by Bob Papper, an adjunct professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, about 90 percent of news anchors, 78 percent of reporters and 87 percent of weathercasters were bound by noncompetes in 2022. Those numbers have been fairly stable for decades.Amy DuPont quit her job as an anchor at WKBT and went to work in public relations, knowing that she wouldn’t be allowed to work locally in broadcasting for another year.Narayan Mahon for The New York TimesIn recent years, however, noncompetes have grown to cover a far wider swath of the newsroom. About half of digital writers and content managers, 71 percent of producers and 86 percent of multimedia journalists have clauses restricting their ability to work elsewhere in the market after their contracts end. That’s up significantly from when Mr. Papper started tracking contract provisions in depth two decades ago.That growth has occurred despite a campaign by the one of the biggest labor unions in television, SAG-AFTRA, to limit noncompetes for broadcast employees. Since the mid-90s, the group has been successful in a handful of states — like Massachusetts and Illinois — while failing in others, like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Some states, most notably California, decline to enforce most noncompetes, regardless of the industry.In states that circumscribe noncompetes, where SAG-AFTRA also tends to have the most members, the union says workers enjoy higher wages and more freedom to escape bad workplace conditions — particularly important for women, in a field notorious for sexual harassment.“We have seen more flexibility within our membership, and also nonunion shops, for employees who decide at the end of their contract that they’d like to move on,” said Mary Cavallaro, the chief broadcast officer for SAG-AFTRA. But the National Association of Broadcasters — which signed on to a multiindustry letter opposing the federal government’s proposed ban — says that because stations promote their reporters and anchors to develop their local brand recognition, they should be able to prevent them from “crossing the street,” in industry parlance.“While there are certainly some cases where noncompete clauses are overly restrictive, we believe a categorical ban goes too far and that broadcasting presents a unique case for the use of reasonable noncompete clauses for on-air talent,” said Alex Siciliano, a spokesman for the association.Mr. Siciliano did not respond to a further inquiry about why noncompetes were needed for employees not appearing on air.To many broadcasting veterans, the main reason that stations impose noncompetes is clear: There’s a recruiting crunch in broadcast news, particularly for producers. It’s a difficult job, with either very early or very late hours and tight deadlines. It requires a college degree and sometimes a master’s degree in journalism, and pay is no longer competitive for people with media skills. The median salary for a producer is $38,000, according to Mr. Papper’s survey.“There is a belief on the part of non-news executives that working in TV news is still glamorous enough that people are lining up to go into the business,” Mr. Papper said. “But what I’m hearing is that they’re not lining up anymore. And the fact is that the skill set you learn in college that allows you to start in TV news also allows you entry into a whole lot of other, better-paying jobs.”The apparent disconnect between television news management and the pool of available talent has meant that job postings stay open longer. When an offer is extended, it comes with an almost inescapable time commitment.Beth Johnson, a television talent agent, says she had to move from exclusively representing clients to more training and consulting, since newsroom employees were no longer able to move around enough to negotiate significant pay raises. The rapid consolidation in local news, with major companies like Nexstar and Sinclair buying out smaller ownership groups, has further diminished the employees’ options.“It’s really hard for these journalists to make a good living, and it’s getting harder to leverage to make sure they can,” Ms. Johnson said. “So we wanted to pivot to say to journalists, ‘It doesn’t make sense for you to pay me for three years, because you’re not going to make enough to keep me for three years, but you’re really going to need help with that promotion for a year.’”Although reporters and anchors are paid slightly better than producers, they are routinely forced to move if they need to earn more. If they can’t leave town, they often leave the business. The docket for the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed noncompete ban is peppered with examples of reporters and producers whose careers had been constrained or cut short by the inability to leave their employer for similar work nearby.Take Amy DuPont, one of Ms. Rivard’s former colleagues at WKBT. After working as an anchor in San Diego and Milwaukee, she moved with her husband to La Crosse, her hometown, after he retired from the military. When Ms. DuPont felt she had reached a breaking point at the station, she quit for a job in public relations. Other stations in town asked if she was interested in switching over, but she didn’t even try.“Even if I wanted to, I’m not legally able to go there,” said Ms. DuPont, who now represents Kwik Trip, the Midwestern gas station chain. “For someone like me, who’s married and 43 years old with two children, and I own my home, it prevents me from doing my career, something I’ve spent 22 years doing.”Ultimately, when journalists have to switch cities to earn enough to keep up with the cost of living, local residents lose a trusted source of reporting.David Jones worked in broadcast news for 23 years, mostly in management roles that required him to recruit and hire. He quit in 2021 to join a public relations firm, and posted a long meditation on LinkedIn about how inhospitable the industry had grown for employees.Not mentioned, but under the surface, were noncompetes, which hurt the public as well as the people bound by them, he said in an interview.“You really want someone with market knowledge,” Mr. Jones said, “which isn’t to say that someone can’t come in and learn the market quickly, but there’s so much benefit to the community when you’re able to do that. With noncompetes, you almost never get to do that.” More

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    These Online Publications Are Not Free … and Readers Don’t Mind

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    Defector, The Daily Memphian, The Dispatch and other outlets of recent vintage are driving a shift in the digital media business.You had to pay to get in.Roughly 250 people paid $15 or $20 apiece to attend a party hosted by the staff of Defector, a subscription website started a year ago by journalists who had quit (or were fired from) the sports news site Deadspin after refusing to heed a request from their bosses that they “stick to sports.”The party guests were accustomed to paying. They were Defector subscribers, for the most part, meaning they had paid $79 for a year’s subscription, allowing them to get past a strict paywall to read articles like “What 1993 Video Game Tony La Russa Taught Me About Baseball” and “Please, I Am Begging You, Stop Putting the Giants in Primetime.” (Subscribers also received the discounted $15 ticket price.)In charging for access to its website, Defector differs from its predecessor, Deadspin, which belongs to a digital-media generation that gives readers free access and tries to make money by selling ads.It remains a challenge for online publications to persuade readers to pay, and it’s perhaps more difficult to get them to pay again after the initial subscription. Defector is optimistic that it will hang on to its fan base as it heads into its second year.In an annual report sent to subscribers on Monday, Defector, which is owned by its employees, reported that nearly all of its $3.2 million in revenue had come from its more than 36,000 subscribers. Roughly 85 percent have renewed for a second year, according to the report, suggesting that the site will pass the do-or-die test.“This is the math problem now, for the rest of eternity,” Tom Ley, the editor in chief, said in an interview last week. “We’ve got to keep this number about where it is, or else we’re in trouble.”The staff of Defector, a subscription website started a year ago by journalists who had quit (or were fired from) the sports news site Deadspin.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesPrint newspapers charged readers for a century, and readers never questioned the idea that they would have to pay for journalism. The first generations of online-only news sites, eager to build their audiences by pulling readers away from old habits, offered up their work free of charge.Defector and the digital newsletter platform Substack are part of a wider shift, one made possible by readers who have come to see paying for journalism as the right thing to do, rather than an annoyance.The Daily Memphian, a nonprofit news site in Memphis, is also part of the wave, with readers contributing the bulk of its revenue. It started in 2018 in response to the shrinking of the local newspaper, The Commercial Appeal. Nearly 17,000 subscribers pay $99 per year (or $12.99 per month) for The Memphian, and they have renewed their subscriptions at a rate of 90 percent, said Eric Barnes, the publication’s chief executive. Ad sales, sponsorships and donations cover the rest of a $5 million annual budget that supports a newsroom of 38.“People paid for news for decades,” Mr. Barnes said. “Why can’t they pay for it now?”The imperative to hold on to subscribers has influenced The Memphian’s journalism, he added, bringing an emphasis on straightforward articles on local issues. The publication connected with readers, for instance, through its coverage of the replacement of East Memphis’s elegant Century Building with a Woodie’s Wash Shack convenience store and carwash.Mr. Barnes added that he was against offering discounts to subscribers, a strategy that is backed by Matt Lindsay, the president of the subscription consultant Mather Economics, who said the price of a subscription was not the main factor for readers who declined to renew.“Usually, it’s some other reason,” said Mr. Lindsay, whose clients include The New York Times. “They lose the habit of reading every day, there’s other competition for their entertainment, someone else has attracted their attention.”The business news site Quartz started in the days of giveaway journalism and made the shift to asking readers to pay in 2018. In addition to 1.3 million regular readers of its newsletters, which are still offered free of charge, it has 27,000 subscribers who pay $99.99 a year (or $14.99 a month), a Quartz spokeswoman said, and the renewal rate is 97 percent.“Listening and responding to readers is what’s necessary for retention,” said Katherine Bell, the editor in chief.Writers who have a significant number of loyal readers have had success on Substack. Heather Havrilesky started publishing extra bits of her advice column for New York magazine, “Ask Polly,” on Substack in 2020 before moving the column there full time. That newsletter — and another, “Ask Molly,” which she described in an email as “written by Polly’s evil twin” — have more than 30,000 subscribers and a paying list above 3,000. The figures have grown every month and especially in recent months, Ms. Havrilesky said.Stephen F. Hayes, the chief executive of The Dispatch, says the key to keeping subscribers is “making sure your stuff is good.”William B. Plowman/NBCSubstack also hosts news outlets run not by solo practitioners like Ms. Havrilesky but by staffs of journalists. The Dispatch, started in 2019 by conservative journalists opposed to Donald J. Trump, has a newsroom of 17, nine newsletters and four podcasts. With 150,000 readers signed up for free newsletters and nearly 30,000 paying subscribers — at $10 per month, or $100 a year — The Dispatch has reached the conclusion of its “start-up phase,” said its chief executive, Stephen F. Hayes.He added that the publication had a 91 percent retention rate, and that the reason was simple: “I still think the first and most important aspect of mitigating churn is making sure your stuff is good.”Still, The Dispatch has recently hired a publishing executive, Justin Fritz, who most recently worked on — what else? — subscriber retention at the sports news site The Athletic. More