Home Depot, Target, Ulta and more strike back at retail crime

A lot of crimes, at least when it comes to retail theft, are crimes of opportunity or crimes of need. Maybe you forgot to scan an item, or maybe you intentionally missed it.

It’s hard to know and even harder to enforce at a self-checkout.

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Sometimes the person stealing does it because it’s easy and plausibly deniable, while in others, the person steals because they’re hungry and broke. 

Shoplifting and petty checkout theft is a problem, but it’s mostly a nuisance compared to organized retail crime.

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“Organized Retail Theft (ORT), also known as Organized Retail Crime (ORC), is the large-scale theft of retail merchandise with the intent to resell the stolen items for financial gain. ORT may involve a criminal enterprise that employs a group of individuals to steal large quantities of merchandise from multiple stores. These ORT groups maintain or utilize fencing operations to convert the stolen goods into cash,” according to the FBI. 

Stolen items are then sold online, at flea markets, and other places where it’s hard to track where the items came from. 

Massive anti-theft efforts underway

You would probably not expect a massive pushback effort to thwart ORT to come from a single group in Illinois, but that’s what happened. The Cook County Regional Organized Crime Task Force coordinated a huge effort across 28 states that led to hundreds of arrests.

The agency thanked its many partners on X, the former Twitter.

“Thank you to all the agencies, ORCAs, and retailers who participated in the first-ever National ORC Blitz event. The event was a great success!,” it shared.

An ORCA is an organized retail crime association designed to tackle the problem.

The crackdown involved 30 retailers — including Home Depot, Kroger, Macy’s, Target, Ulta Beauty, and Walgreens — across 100 jurisdictions, according to CNBC.

Joint efforts to crack down on ORC have been supported by the National Retail Federation (NRF).

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“Organized retail crime and related thefts cannot be solved by the retail industry alone. Addressing this issue requires collaboration between retailers, law enforcement, prosecutors, community leaders, and legislators, with action needed at local, state, and national levels,” it shared in a report on the NRF website.

Will these efforts help retailers?

RetailWire asked its panel of industry experts whether they thought efforts like this would work.

“Retailers have enough pressures and issues without having to deal with the cost of retail crime. Shoplifting and stealing from retailers should not be tolerated, and people should be prosecuted and punished. No ifs, no buts. Credit to State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke for spearheading and organizing this crackdown. It needs to be an ongoing effort to show that retail crime comes with consequences,” wrote GlobalData Managing Director Neil Saunders.

Social media poster James Tenser was very specific about the cause of the problem and how to lessen its impact. 

“It’s unfortunate that self-service merchandising (which helps keep prices a little lower for honest customers) also creates a temptation for this kind of organized thievery. Retailers can’t safely intervene, but they can use electronic surveillance to identify professional thieves and aid their apprehension and prosecution by the authorities,” he posted.

Organized retail theft is not garden-variety shoplifting, he explained. 

“The stakes are much higher, which makes the perpetrators more potentially dangerous. Since stolen goods are likely to find their way into online marketplaces or neighborhood flea markets, only a focused law-enforcement effort can find and trace items back to the offenders,” he added. “While the term ‘crackdown’ seems a bit harsh, I’d like to think that ‘certainty of prosecution’ would be am effective deterrent. The key is consistent enforcement of existing laws.”

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Poster Christopher P. Ramey was not interested in exploring the possibility that some people steal because they need to in order to survive.

“Thieves are thieves. There are no free passes. Retailers can’t fix societal root causes, nor should they be expected to fix them. That’s why we have laws and police to enforce them,” he shared.

Ramey supported the enforcement efforts.

“A national crackdown that includes other law enforcement agencies is exactly what may be needed. Then we need to put the shoplifters away long enough so they learn their lesson. We owe the retailers an aggressive response, for they are the victims,” he added.

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