The Swiped Stuff

What’s in His Garage?

We’ve seen it in the movies: the guy with the garage filled with boxes of toasters, microwaves, and televisions; racks of fur coats and suits; gaggles of granola bars and energy drinks.

Is he stockpiling for the day after an alien invasion? Starting an Etsy shop?

Nope. Chances are that he either stole it (the “thief”) or received the merchandise (an “accessory after the fact”). What he does with all that stuff has fueled…a thousand movies.

Over here on the “real” side of the silver screen, retail and wholesale theft has been at epidemic levels. Some of that generates from shoplifting: swiping the pack of gum, the earrings, the brisket stuffed into spacious jogging pants.

Retailers have taken to locking up inventory. Rows of deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste, cosmetics, backpacks, over-the-counter medicines: under lock and key, requiring us to find an employee to open up a particular case or shelf in order for us to get a single tube of Old Spice into our shopping cart.

On TikTok, one man ranted about CVS treating a bag of candy like a controlled substance. A comment on Reddit referred to our new “inconvenience store.”

So, it’s the inconvenience of the barricaded shopping experience versus the loss of revenue from sometimes rampant theft. The industry has a term for it: “shrink.” Yep, that’s what inventory and revenue do when things get swiped.

Theft is not at all a new phenomenon. As Marisa Gerber writes in the L.A. Times, “Shoplifting is as old as shopping itself.” Yet statistics and the prominence of those barricades in the retail stores give us strong hints at how much of a problem this has become.

The trucking angle here? Go back to the guy with his garage filled with all that merchandise. He skipped the middle man. No retail store visits for him. He stole straight from the sources, either the truck or the warehouse.

How he did that is a fascinating and vexing thing. And that’s where we pick up next time.