It said he was an informant.
Also did that article PW posted really just say the shopping day black Friday was symbolic to BLM and the Mexican Mafia black hand?

The guy did it for the fame that he no longer gets cause he’s not La eme anymore


Now he can get fame without being in La eme


La eme= Mexican mafia

Mexican mafia takes orders from cartels in Mexico

The black hand is a eme symbol. There’s a good book about it from Rene boxer

Yeah but I think it's weird they say he chose black Friday.

Jail is a terrible place

Indeed

hey guys. the retailers retracted all their "organized shoplifting" claims..

HUGE SURPRISE.

https://www.reuters.com/business/ret...me-2023-12-06/

This is gold. Just a complete crumbling of the argument.

So the NRF retracted their stance that organized retail crime makes up "nearly half" of inventory losses to now they are saying 36%. When I think of the term "nearly half" I think of a number around 40% (I'm sure everyone is different on this) so what they are really saying is that they were ~4% high or pretty dang close. As a total dollar figure they are guessing 45B!

On the other hand the retail industry leaders association estimated that organized retail crime is stealing closer to 70B - a number 55% higher than what the NRF's new guess is.

These are huge numbers and makes you wonder how much actual theft is going on since this doesn't include a lot of smash and grabs or a small group of knuckleheads who run in a store with a big bag and steal as much as they can in 2 minutes.

Trying to round up 36 percent to nearly half instead of a third is hilarious.


The article also makes the point that these estimates haven’t really been substantiated.

Nobody here did this and if they did I don't think it would be hilarious. All I said is they slightly reduced their estimate which is very different than rounding. They thought the number was in the 40s and now they are saying high 30s - it isn't like they were trying to round to make the number seem bigger.

Obviously, it is impossible to come up with exactly how much in goods were stolen over a long time frame in an economy this large. However, there are people that study this type of stuff and we can average all of their opinions. So far we have estimates around 45B and 70B so if we average those two numbers we will find a massive number that inevitable gets paid for my the companies that are being stolen from, their employees and their customers.

You were making the case that 36% is still close to nearly half. Your number of 40% as a reasonable nearly half is still closer to a third than a half. I’d say you need to at least be north of 42% to be able to start saying nearly half and that most people would put the number above 45%.

The people who have offered these numbers have a vested interest in making high estimates and they haven’t shown their work. I’d take it with a large grain of salt.

The number 36 is not a "high 30s" number.

Very accurately a "mid 30s number" imo

the 36% is still unverified and also just made up.. another article says that experts put the 36% number at closer to 5%..

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/b...0experts%20say.

people are guessing that the only reason the retail federation is trying to retract and redirect their claims is because that NYtimes article was coming out, where someone actually looked into the claim..

Is theft less impactful to a business if it's not "organized"?

Because that's what you guys are arguing about here. Whether it was stolen by employees, random shoplifters, or groups of people who plan it out in advance, the inventory isn't stealing itself.

What wrong are trying to correct by turning this into a game of semantics?

it's completely unsurprising that you see little difference in blaming random unrelated poor and black people for the crimes that the store itself is committing in your scenario.. lol


the idea is that you are all rubes if you think that any of this data that solely benefits the executives is somehow real. but most people will swallow it wholesale because it scapegoats minorities and the poor and that just feels right. it's also false data used to usher in the 1984 police/surveillance state that all the republicans pretend they dont want..

The workers stealing product are all from the same pool of neighborhood residents. I fail to see how your distinction between "unrelated" outsiders and in-house theft matters even the slightest.

Also, how does this data benefit the executives? Are you suggesting that blaming the black poors absolves them from the responsibility of policing their own employees?

i can take this back to the beginning for you.

stores are shutting down because of poor management decisions(over expansion, expanding into unprofitable areas) and losing the fight against online retailers. they have been trying to blame "rampant shoplifting and theft" because they don't want to admit to their shareholders that they ****ed up and they themselves should be held accountable for those failures. together with their lobbying group they shouted to everyone who would listen uncritically "we cant do anything but close stores because of this glut of organized retail theft!!." and the 24hour fearmongering news media went with it.

it was all made up. it's still debatable about how much theft makes up actual shrink, but stores like TARGET(who said they had to close stores because of "organized retail theft") were actually found to have tons of unsold inventory from poor sales strategies that were making up large portions of their shrink..

Alright, "theft doesn't make a material difference" makes more sense than what it seemed was happening in recent posts.

"Chicago isn't profitable" is quite a take to have for different reasons, though.

i can walk to two CVS's from my apartment quite easily.. if one eventually fails and closes, it doesn't say what you are trying to allude to by "isn't profitable"..

How does blaming organized crime for something equal blaming poor and black people? I would suspect that people in organized crime are not typically poor, and I see no connection with race.

You are the one that brought up race.

Also, up to this point we aren't debating how much theft stores face - we have only debated what % of theft is considered organized. I find it odd that you think organized theft is done at a higher % of minorities than un-organized theft. Is that really what you think and if so, why?

blaming shoplifting for corporate failures is an extremely thinly veiled attempt at blaming poor people and people of color.. if that isn't obvious to you, then i dont know what to tell you, but the weird internet bubble you guys live in must be nice and have rainbows, and flying pigs, and stuff..

we've been debating that most shoplifting statistics are completely made up in the self serving interest of corporations in several different threads over the course of months because people believed all the obvious race baiting broken window policing bullshit thrown around by the fearmongering media. it's also amusing to me that the same dont trust the media tinfoils in this forum were quick to slurp this stuff up.

Sounds like you think poor and black people do most shoplifting, which I never would have thought.

But I wasn't even asking about shoplifting overall, just the organized kind. So you think poor and black people are more likely to be in organized crime groups as well?

I certainly can see why store executives would want to blame their poor decision making on someone else. I fail to see how it would help them more to blame it on a particular type of person.

Oh, i just noticed you also think black people do most of the window breaking.

I live in Portland, which has a very small black population, and I certainly don't blame any minorities or poor people for the vandalizing of businesses in the city. I think it's mostly spoiled rich kids from the suburbs who want to feel edgy by sticking it to the man and fighting the capitalist machine.

you can try this whole "i dont see color"/there is no such thing as systemic and institutionalized racism bit.. but you just look like an idiot. unless of course that is your goal.