Value proposition

JERUSHA SUNDEM WATCHED A LARGE security monitor in the back office of her midsized grocery store in Everett, Wash. A bearded, middle-­aged man in plaid pajama pants, a black hoodie, and a denim jacket lingered in the frozen food section.

The man glanced up the aisle, opened the freezer door, and grabbed a Double Gold ice cream bar. Then he sneaked around the corner to a quieter aisle with fewer security cameras and stuffed the bar into his jacket.

Jerusha had seen enough. The 31-year-old grocery store owner strode out of her office to confront the man. As she approached, he pulled a can of whipped cream off the top shelf and sprayed it into his mouth. Then, he laughed—not at Jerusha, but definitely in defiance.

“You know that’s not funny,” Jerusha told him, keeping her voice calm and controlled. She asked for the ice cream bar and whipped cream and told the man he was no longer welcome to shop at the store.

But then, as she walked him toward the front exit, she surprised him: “You’re worth more than that $1.99 ice cream you tried to take,” she said. “You’re worth more than any item in the store.”

Not every business owner would agree. Shoplifting was once considered a marginal issue, but it now costs American companies billions of dollars, and many can no longer afford it. Several national chains have shuttered locations in high-crime areas and given up doing business there. But not everyone is leaving. Some small-business owners, like Jerusha and Spencer Sundem, are staying put, confronting crime, and, they believe, serving their communities in the process.

When Jerusha told the would-be ice cream thief his worth, she shocked him into an argument. Was he worth more than everything he could fit into his pockets, he demanded to know? Yes, and so much more, Jerusha said.

“In my mind, it’s a given that someone is worth more than whatever they’re trying to steal,” she tells me later. “But when you are down in life, it doesn’t feel that way.”

When the Sundems took over the 13,000-square-foot grocery store in Everett, a small city on Seattle’s northern outskirts, a year and a half ago, they quickly discovered it had a big problem with theft.

“It was really bad,” says Spencer, 29. In the first few weeks, he and Jerusha caught multiple shoplifters every day. But after consistently confronting the problem, shoplifting incidents tapered off to one or two a week.

The Sundems, who met at Princeton Theological Seminary, address shoplifters personally and specifically. Often that includes Jerusha’s best “Mom” talk: “Hey, you know, you can make the world a better place or a worse place, right?”

But she also tells shoplifters they are made in God’s image. “I would tell them, too, that it’s not just bad for us, because you are stealing from us, but you are hurting yourself. This is not good for you. It’s not good for your soul to steal.”

When Jerusha told one woman she was more valuable than the items she pocketed, the woman looked her in the eyes and asked, “Are you sure about that? How do you know?”

“I said, “Yes! I’m sure about that. Yes!” Jerusha remembers. She also remembers that the woman’s questions made her very sad.

AMERICAN STORES LOST $112 BILLION IN retail “shrinkage” in 2022, according to the National Retail Federation’s latest survey, released last September. And while that number includes various kinds of financial losses, more than two-thirds of it—about $74.67 billion—is directly related to theft. That’s equivalent to shoplifting the entire gross domestic product of a midsized country like Sri Lanka or Serbia.

“Never before have we seen the number of CEOs, executives, and even community leaders reach out and highlight the dangers that are taking place in the retail industry,” said David Johnston, vice president of asset protection and retail operations for the National Retail Federation.

Critics claim the survey findings are inflated to deflect poor business management. But Johnston argues that if the numbers are wrong, it’s only because they’re too low. The $112 billion loss only partially reflects the actual cost of retail theft. It does not include the costs of hiring security, investing in anti-theft technology, repairing property damage, and paying worker compensation claims for employees injured in smash-and-grab events. It also does not account for the loss of customers who no longer feel safe shopping in person.

“What is happening today is an outright crime, targeting and taking advantage of a specific industry where committing a crime has few consequences,” Johnston said. “We are living in a nation where stealing is no longer considered a crime, and where those stealing are not criminals. We have created an environment that allows others to instill fear and steal in a ‘free-for-anyone’ environment.”

Of the 177 retail brands included in the National Retail Federation’s survey, 28 percent reported closing a store due to theft, and 45 percent said they reduced hours for the same reason.

The pharmacy giant Rite Aid, which also faces lawsuits over its handling of opioids, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October and announced it will close nearly 200 of its stores nationwide. The low-cost California-based chain, The 99 Cents Only Store, announced in April that after four decades of business it would file for bankruptcy and shutter all of its 371 locations. Its reasons included inflation and retail “shrink,” a now-too-common euphemism for theft.

When the local Walmart in Everett, Wash., closed last year, the Sundems noticed an uptick in shoplifting at their store. People stole gel pens, flashlights, phone chargers, health and beauty items, essential oils, tin foil for drug use, junk food, and ice cream—always ice cream, even in the winter.

They addressed these new shoplifters with the same vigilance they had when they opened the store, and once again, word spread: Their store was not shoplifter friendly.

But big-box stores are reluctant to adopt such a direct approach due to the risk. “There are potential legal dangers if there is a misunderstanding or if somebody thinks they see something they don’t see,” Spencer says. For that reason, the Sundems handle shoplifters themselves, encouraging their 24 employees to report suspicious behavior to them or to their managers. A few shoplifters have reacted violently, punching and biting. Each time, the Sundems called the police and pressed charges. So far, neither has been injured.

The National Retail Federation survey revealed that more than two-thirds of respondents worried about heightened levels of theft-related violence. As a result, 41 percent of retailers now enforce a “hands-off” approach in which no employees are authorized to stop shoplifters.

April Ullman worked as a sales associate at a Seattle-area REI store for 15 years. She witnessed criminal behavior gradually increase as store managers shied away from engagement.

When Ullman started working for REI in 2007, any employee who noticed a suspicious person lingering in the store could use a code over the intercom to alert all sales associates of a potential threat. Employees would move to the department where the suspected shoplifter lingered. They could follow a suspected shoplifter around a department or offer to hold an item at the front of the store. If someone walked out the door with stolen goods, store employees could follow them to the parking lot and jot down their license plate number.

But over time, as the public became more concerned about racial profiling and discrimination, the store changed its policies. Eventually, it forbade employees from engaging with potential shoplifters at all.

“Even though we would have eyes all over the place, you weren’t even allowed to say anything,” Ullman said. Eventually, she would watch as shoplifters grabbed armloads of $300 ski jackets and walked out the front door past the greeter as if to say, “You can’t touch me.”

“You couldn’t stand in their way,” she explained. “You could not take it from their possession. If you walked out of the store, you could get fired.”

This year, REI closed two of its iconic urban stores, a 20-year-old Portland location and one in an upscale shopping area of Santa Monica, Calif. During a 2020 riot following a Black Lives Matter protest, local news coverage showed looters in Santa Monica walking away with thousands of dollars of stolen merchandise. In a 2023 statement, REI blamed Portland’s crime for its departure. But since then, the company has been reluctant to give reasons for its urban flight. In both the Portland and Santa Monica instances, the company announced it would relocate to nearby suburban neighborhoods.

WHILE NATIONAL COMPANIES ARE increasingly cautious about employees confronting shoplifters, they have invested heavily in physical and technological deterrents.

Many owners deploy an extensive ecosystem of cameras, sensors, computer chips, and facial recognition software. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, first used to track marathon runners’ start and finish times, are now heavily used in consumer products—everything from luxury handbags and smartphones to underwear. Stores use special sensors to detect these tags, which are often embedded in products. RFID product tracking helps with inventory management and supply chain issues, but it’s also a useful tool in analyzing and deterring shoplifting.

Walmart led the way in RFID expansion. In 2022, the retail giant required all of its toy, electronic, home goods, sporting goods, and automotive battery suppliers to include RFID tags on their products or in their packaging. Since then, the RFID tags have become an industry standard, especially in clothing, a key shoplifting category.

Many retailers have resorted to locking away high-theft items, which include common, relatively low-priced goods like mascara, razors, and toothpaste. Small items are particularly lucrative to organized theft rings, which deploy multiple shoplifters across a wide area to pocket them. These are then resold through platforms like Facebook Marketplace and eBay. Gangs involved in such organized theft often “pay” shoplifters with illegal drugs like fentanyl.

When the Sundems bought their grocery store, it already had locking cabinets to display more valuable items. But locking away goods has a downside.

“People are less likely to buy it if they have to ask [or] if they have to wait,” Spencer said. So they removed the cabinets and put valuable items in visible areas near cash registers, which are always operated by watchful, friendly employees.

For nearly 50 years, retailers have used the familiar—and visible—electronic article sensors that trigger an alarm when a thief walks out of a store, but experienced shoplifters know how to evade that system. Now, though, AI technology, along with facial recognition capabilities, can match a person’s features against a database of suspected shoplifters and prevent theft before it happens, Minority Report–style. With an instant match, security officers can escort would-be thieves out of the store before they actually steal.Opponents of facial recognition surveillance cite privacy concerns and fears that machine-driven profilers might reinforce negative stereotypes. The national pharmacy chain Rite Aid discovered this potential flaw after being accused of falsely identifying too many blacks, Hispanics, and Asian Americans as potential shoplifters. In December 2023, the Federal Trade Commission barred Rite Aid from using surveillance facial recognition for five years.

THE SUNDEMS APPROACH THEIR STORE AS marketplace ministry. It’s forced them away from intellectual conversations about theology and into on-the-ground realities.

For example, Spencer notes that people often think a person stealing food must be hungry. As a Christian, if people are hungry, shouldn’t you feed them? But looking the other way when a person steals is not the same as feeding the hungry, he says.

“We need to feed the hungry, clothe the naked,” he says. “But we also need to give people direction, because justice and mercy are not a dichotomy …Doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with your God … that’s all one thing. It’s not three different things that you do at different times.”

The Sundems give people food when they feel it is appropriate. They routinely donate food to local food banks and help direct needy people to church and community resources. And ultimately, they believe that by ethically running their business and graciously addressing crime, they are serving their community.

Jerusha hopes other business owners will adopt a similar strategy. Otherwise, she says, the thieves who once targeted their store will simply move elsewhere. But if enough people consistently confront thieves with both strength and love, it will eventually have an aggregate effect.

“Sometimes,” Spencer says, “grace is stopping somebody and saying, ‘This is not the right way to do things.’”

—Theresa Abell Haynes is a freelance writer and World Journalism Institute Mid-Career graduate