If you’re a regular reader they you already know about the retail theft that is plaguing brick and mortar stores across the country. In many cases these thefts are being organized by gangs who steal, transport and then resell the merchandise online. Yesterday, ABC News did a report on the growing trend which seems to have been based on what has been happening at Home Depot stores in particular.

“Organized retail crime is what I call theft for greed, not theft for need,” said Scott Glenn, vice president for asset protection at The Home Depot, which has been hit hard by organized retail theft. “[But] they don’t just come to a Home Depot and then decide to go home … they go to Target, they go to Lowe’s, they go to CVS, they go anywhere.”

The groups behind organized retail theft can be expansive — “like your traditional organized crime families,” as Glenn put it — or, as Aguilar noted, they can be just two or three people working together.

They target stores big and small, and they take whatever they know they can sell — from power tools and spools of wire worth $3,000, to designer clothes and even medical supplies, officials told ABC News.

“They do a lot of research about what is profitable,” Aguilar said. “They have shopping lists.”…

Glenn said The Home Depot investigated about 400 cases of suspected organized retail theft in the past year alone — more than one per day — and that the numbers are “growing double digits year over year.”

Home Depot says this all adds up to “billions of dollars a year” in losses. And of course the companies cover those costs by raising prices which means the real costs of all of this are shared by everyone.

In addition to the loss of merchandise, Home Depot has seen at least two deaths of employees connected to this trend in just a few months. In April an employee was shot and killed as he tried to stop a thief leaving the store. And last year, an 82-year old employee was shoved to the ground and later died by a thief. The victim’s son has called for more serious effort to stop these gangs.

In the disturbing caught-on-camera assault, Gary Rasor, 83, was forcefully shoved to the ground after he approached a man wheeling out three pressure washers worth over $800 from the Hillsborough, North Carolina store on Oct. 18.

He died due to complications from his injuries on Dec. 1.

Rasor’s eldest child, Jeff Rasor, said his father was just doing his job and asking for proof of purchase when he was remorselessly attacked…

“There has to be consequences in my mind, and the consequences have to fit the crime,” Rasor told Nightline on Thursday. “I can’t imagine that any piece of equipment in Home Depot is worth a life — and so when you find out it’s $837, it’s just pretty bad.”

There has always been retail theft of course. What’s different now is the brazenness and the frequency both of which are up sharply since the pandemic. There’s report out today about a poll of retail workers. At least half of them have witnessed an attempted theft in the past year.

Half of retail and grocery workers witnessed a theft or attempted theft in their stores from October 2022 through mid-April 2023, according to research from learning provider Axonify.

The research surveyed 1,000 workers in the retail and grocery sector and spanned both small businesses and major retail chains.

No doubt part of this has to do with the pandemic and the fact that everyone was suddenly wearing masks, which was beneficial to thieves. But I think part of it also has t do with the growing sense that progressive DAs in a lot of cities have largely decided crimes like retail theft either aren’t worth their time or should be dealt with using very mild responses. As a result, the chances of getting caught and prosecuted seem to be way down. The same is true for risk of going to prison for selling drugs. Thanks to the lax approach to drugs many of the same cities suffering from retail theft are also full of open-air drug markets.

Thieves may not be terribly smart but they do respond to marketplace conditions. Right now, conditions are favorable for this sort of rampant theft. Here’s the full ABC News report on the trend.