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Retailers also seem to be deploying a solution that includes moving their stores out of cities that don't crack down on theft.


Most retail shrink is done by employees, not customers.


That's commonly repeated but it's misleading for at least two reasons.

Firstly, employee-related shrinkage includes inventory control and accounting errors ("paper shrink") in addition to employee theft. These are often added together to differentiate them from external theft, but they're not the same and the mitigations for each are as different from each other as they are from external theft.

Second, and relevant to the GPs point, there is variation in the amount and proportions of shrink from one site to another across a chain. The stores that get closed are the outliers, not the average stores. e.g. Your chain wide average shrink is 2%, but all of your stores in this one market are 10% for several years running. Realistically, the difference is almost entirely from external theft.


Or internal theft syndicates - but those are even harder to fight than external theft.


Do you have any data to back this up? That feels very wrong anecdotally, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong.


After looking through a few links I don't have as good data as was in my retail training in 2004 or so, but https://www.businessinsider.com/stop-blaming-theft-shrink-ta... talks about them being fairly comparable, and that retail mismanagement is within 10% or so of the problems due to theft.

Overall my point is just that the retail theft story is blown way out of proportion, and many media and political outfits benefit from concern around crime.


I dont understand how that supports the conclusion that it is out of proportion. It can be simultaneously true that mismanagement is a meaningful budget impact, and theft is a meaningful budget impact.

I think the more interesting questions are if the rates of theft are changing. IF it has gone 10x in 10 years, that might be noteworthy, no? If theft rates are concentrated in 10% of locations, that might be noteworthy too.

My national retail supermarket has profit margin of about 1% of sales (ticker ACI). If mismanagement was always 1%, and now theft goes up to 1%, the company will go bankrupt.


It probably differs by stores and locations, right? I can imagine one city having a huge problem and another having barely any issues.


Even if so, it is less of-putting to customers. I'd rather have employees stealing in the back, than deal with ski-masked thieves and locked up tools


Ski masked robbers are stealing deodorant and contraceptives?


yep, Ive seen it in SF. More often the case at hardware stores/home depots.

Laundry detergent is actually a really common item for resale, maybe because everyone uses it. You will see people with 40 gallons in their cart and you know they aren't paying.

Its not a fun experience.


Folks are walking around HD with a ski mask, and 40 gallons of laundry detergent, and the clue they are there to steal is the 40 gallons of detergent?


CNN witnesses 3 alleged thefts in 30 minutes while reporting on shoplifting https://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/07/25/san-francisco-s...


I haven't seen any medium to large size codebases that are bug free. How do those issues get identified when it's on paper?


The graph in the article shows 1000 being reduced to 300


From LKML

"A lot of these have already reached the stable trees. I can send you revert patches for stable by the end of today (if your scripts have not already done it)."

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH%2F8jcoC1ffuksrf@kroah.c...


It's not saying that those are introduced bugs; IMHO they're just proactively reverting all commits from these people.


> > > They introduce kernel bugs on purpose. Yesterday, I took a look on 4 > > > accepted patches from Aditya and 3 of them added various severity security > > > "holes".

It looks like actual security vulnerabilities were successfully added to the stable branch based on that comment.


Yes because the UMN guys have made their intent clear, and even went on to defend their actions. They should have apologised and asked for reverting their patches.


Which kind of sucks for everyone else at UMN, including people who are submitting actual security fixes...


>Do you think there's some kind of law that says you have to respond to someone's legal representatives? >Which law do you think that is?

Answering with 2 belittling questions is clearly inflamatory.

>Legal representatives never have any power whatsoever, whether courts are involved or not, to make you do anything. Only a court has the power to do that.

This response after being called out for being snarky would have been a fine original response.


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