Edelman
Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes. -Murray Edelman
Shrinkage
I was standing by the door at a pretty fashionable department store yesterday,
and as a guy walked past me, a man and a woman ran up to him. The man flashed
a badge, and said “We’re going to need that hat back, sir”. The guy walking out the
door was a pretty wealthy looking 30 year old, and the undercover store detectives
looked… well, as shabbily dressed as me. Nice disguise!
Much to my surprise, the guy pulled a black hat out of his pocket, and said “Here
you can have it back and I’ll leave” and they said “It doesn’t work that way, sir”
and they hauled him to the back room.
I am still creeped out by this for some reason, 30 hours later. It was such a reversal
of stereotypes. It adds more fuel to my thesis that you never know who to trust a priori.
There is no amount of profiling that would have suggested that this guy was the crook.
My friend actually works as a store detective at a very high end store, but I haven’t
talked to him that much about his work. He claims that most of the theft is actually
internal, by other employees.
The tragic thing about this is that it is an unwise computation of risk/reward on everyone’s
part, and just drives up costs for honest consumers. For the thief, he risked arrest over
a hat that looked like it might have cost $10 on sale. That’s a pretty stupid tradeoff for him.
For the store, they had at least two undercover detectives on staff. The loaded cost of that
has to be at least $40 an hour. If they snag someone stealing a $400 pocketbook every five
hours (that cost the store $200 wholesale), then it is maybe a break even proposition. But
there is the security room in the back… if it is 100 square feet, maybe they could have sold
$10,000 worth of merchandise on that square footage. Maybe they will falsely arrest someone
and trigger a costly lawsuit. Anyway, paying some people $40 an hour to catch a guy stealing
a $10 hat is not a huge return on investment, unless you taught this guy a lesson and prevented
him from coming back and doing that for the next 30 days.
This is all impossible to analyze for certain, but in any case, the theft and the infrastructure to
prevent it is a huge inefficiency on the system. It also gives mail order retailers even more
of an edge than what they already have because of sales taxes and so on.
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