Retail theft is a sign of social breakdown

The United States has a long record of emphasizing freedom. Our Statue of Liberty maintains its vigil outside New York City. The Liberty Bell resides in Philadelphia. For a long time, we have cherished the idea of the great frontier as a place of possibility. We live in a vast geographic area crisscrossed by a system of interstate highways that seem to proclaim the freedom of the open road by their very existence. Americans identify as free people.

But freedom is not the kind of political value that can simply stand on its own. John Locke imagined human beings as free in the state of nature. However, he understood that such a freedom would be frequently in danger. In order to better preserve their freedom, then, people would join together in political society. Morality would be joined by civil law and government in such a way as to make freedom more secure. Freedom relies upon the existence of both virtue and order. But there are signs that both virtue and order are breaking down in the United States.

One sign of this breakdown comes to us through the financial media, of all places. One of the earliest indicators was Walgreens' decision to close down several stores in San Francisco. Amid political criticism, the Walgreens CFO conceded perhaps they’d cried too much about theft. The numbers reveal, however, that the closures (and added security) did substantially reduce what the industry calls “shrinkage.” Similarly, the CEO of Target declared that shrinkage cost the company half a billion dollars in profit this year. Other well-known retailers, such as Walmart and Home Depot, have shared similar problems.

To make matters worse, a new phenomenon has manifested. Shoplifting has morphed into organized retail theft. A determined group of thieves can easily overwhelm a store’s employees and exit with expensive goods. The National Retail Federation has encouraged the federal government to get involved via new legislation that would bring federal law enforcement into the picture.

Some of the immediate impacts are obvious. Retailers will close more stores in higher crime parts of town. Areas that already have distress over a lack of food markets will find that other kinds of goods and services will also become scarce. Prices will rise everywhere else. Merchants who sell online to suburban consumers will avoid the problem of theft, but brick-and-mortar locations will suffer a comparative disadvantage and will be still more pressured. Unsurprisingly, a form of crime that looks like stealing from the rich will actually harm the poor the most.

These immediate problems are far from the biggest ones. The proliferation of shoplifting and its evolution into more organized forms signal a greater breakdown in the morals of the broader society. Rather than risk a confrontation, it seems that many retailers settled upon a no contest policy regarding theft. This approach appears to have fanned the flames of disrespect for the law. It may be that thieves have developed contempt for a system that lacks the will to oppose them.

The simple fact is that law and order is always an ideal upheld far more by the respect and cooperation of citizens than it is by the presence of police officers and courts. Even a relatively low percentage of Americans could, through determined and repeated action, completely overwhelm and defeat the nation’s law enforcement organizations. The only way to stop a populace without respect for virtue and for the necessary conditions of freedom would be to embrace the idea of a military organization of society or a police state. Even then, order would only be possible thanks to dramatic demonstrations of power and humiliating, public, and cruel punishments applied liberally until the message sinks in.

Somehow, perhaps through the never-ending drumbeat of social criticism that eats away at public institutions like an acid, we have eroded the fundamental trust and honor that must exist in order for a free republic to endure. How do we recapture it? First, local governments must demonstrate that they have the will and the moral authority to resist crimes such as organized shoplifting. They must recognize that tolerance of crime leads to greater crimes and a higher frequency of their occurrence. But second, and more important in the long term, we must recover the virtue and the responsibility of citizens. We must communicate it in our schools and churches. The civil authorities are God’s servants for our good (Romans 13).

If we would seek the good, then we must also seek to obey the laws that promote our flourishing and to raise children who will carry forth the light of civilization.