Washington. -- I like shoplifting. No, I don't mean slinking away with unpaid-for goods. Rather, my fondness is for the annual holiday-season alarms about the billions of dollars lost to shoplifting.
Studded with seemingly solid numbers, the worrisome accounts mostly originate with security firms peddling anti-theft gadgets. Somberly and unskeptically accepted by the press, the ensuing echoes are reminiscent of the bloated assessments of the Soviet menace that used to come out of the Pentagon, with precise numbers attached.
Sure, shoplifting occurs and can be a serious menace to business. But how many billions of dollars are lost to shoplifting? That's the fun of it. No one knows, and there's no way of knowing. Shoplifting is a furtive activity, unencumbered by record keeping. Shoppers do it. So do store employees. And managers and owners have been known to whisk away goods for their own personal use or to explain away poor profits.
No matter. Custom calls for quantifying problems, even if the numbers are invented. According to a survey reported in the Wall Street Journal in 1992, theft by employees accounted for 38 percent of retail losses, while shoplifting was rated at only 25 percent, just a couple of points ahead of the cryptic category "bookkeeping errors."
The reliability of these figures invites wonder. But there they are, as are similar assertions of certainty about the dollar value of shoplifting.
One of the latest figures to appear in print is "$30 billion or so in goods stolen each year," reported last week in the New York Times, which noted that "shoplifting is a growth industry." Though the annual dollar value of shoplifting varies wildly from one report to another, a constant should be noted: Shoplifting is usually described as on a vigorous upswing, a booming enterprise, despite flaky numbers that make year-to-year comparisons very suspect. The Times estimate, without attribution, was included in an article focused on two security firms that sell anti-theft devices.
Thirty billion or so and growing, according to that 1994 report. But in 1986, The Economist reported that "Some put the cost of shoplifting at $50 billion a year to American retailers" -- probably the most stratospheric estimate ever for what's been referred to as the "five-finger discount." The "some" were not identified, but this article, too, was about an anti-shoplifting security company.
In 1990, four years after The Economist's $50 billion figure appeared, the Wall Street Journal reported that shoplifting "is the fastest-growing larceny crime and now amounts to a $9 billion-dollar-a-year problem." The Journal report did not address the possibility that in the intervening years the incidence of shoplifting had abruptly declined from The Economist's $50 billion peak before resuming fast growth.
So, we're at $9 billion in 1990 and growing fast. But after all, not so fast if we look back to a 1979 report in Business Week, which stated that shoplifting "is draining upwards of $8 billion a year from U.S. merchants . . ." Factor in inflation, population growth, and, presumably, steadily growing sophistication among the shoplifting set, and the enterprise of acquisition without payment has clearly been on a losing trajectory.
The Business Week article was alarmingly titled "How Shoplifting is Draining the Economy," but did not explain how $9 billion in shoplifting losses could be much of a drain on a trillion-dollar retail economy.
In 1983, the Washington Post reported a figure of $26 billion in shoplifting losses for 1981, attributing the figure to the Atlanta-based National Coalition to Prevent Shoplifting. A year later, however, the Post cautiously estimated annual shoplifting losses at between $8 billion and $40 billion, though in 1980 it had set the figure at $16 billion.
The numbers game doesn't matter, except for the gullibility that it reveals in the press, which accepts the self-serving fabrications from the retail-security industry and passes them along as established facts. Makes you wonder about other numbers.
Daniel S. Greenberg is a syndicated columnist specializing in the politics of science and health.