Store Owners: Plastic Bag Ban Leads to More Shoplifting

Seattle store owners are complaining that the mandated use of reusable bags is causing a sharp spike in shoplifting, among other problems:

Mike Duke, who operates the Lake City Grocery Outlet with his wife, said that since the plastic-bag ban started last July, he’s lost at least $5,000 in produce and between $3,000 and $4,000 in frozen food.

“We’ve never lost that much before,” said Duke, who found those numbers through inventories of stolen and damaged goods.

The Dukes opened the Lake City grocery store in June 2011, and Mike Duke said in the year before the plastic-bag ban losses in frozen food and produce were a small fraction of what he’s seeing now. As he explained to seattlepi.com and also the North Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the shoplifters’ patterns are difficult to detect.

They enter the store with reusable bags and can more easily conceal items they steal. The reusable bags require staff to watch much more closely, and even though the store has a loss-prevention officer and more than a dozen security cameras, it’s tough to tell what a customer has paid for and what they may already have brought with them.

(Thanks to Heather, my wife.)

UPDATE: Jeremy Neufeld writes: “Further, some economists suggest that such bans are responsible for increased incidence of disease and death.”

Jeremy Neufeld

Further, some economists suggest that such bans are responsible for increased incidence of disease and death. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2196481
Joseph

I recently visited South Korea and a retail store akin to Walmart in the USA called Homeplus. I was surprised to find that complimentary plastic shopping bags were not the norm. Instead, as my friend who works and lives there pointed out, people buy just enough that they can carry with them back to the subway or out to their cars. I would imagine the retail shortage rates there are comparable to the USA.

Perhaps what these stores are experiencing is the coincidence of government induced poverty and opportunistic theft rather than simply theft arising from a sea change in baggage preference albeit also government induced. That said, government mandates often do lead to unforeseen circumstances and moral hazards abound.
Pastor Ko-Rect

Regulation crazy lawmakers will never understand accounting. In reality, there are always assets and liabilities (pretty and ugly). When politicians laws, they only consider the assets. Expand this to the federal government and you get Obama-ism.
FreemanDjango

Here’s a Youtube video of a shopping experience in E MART, the So. Korean equivalent of WalMart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhxkAxZG6vY

At the end of the video, you see people lined up with shopping carts full of crap and plastic bags sitting on the conveyor belts.

Here’s another Youtube video of people shopping in Homeplus in South Korea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL3oDAEX28M

Again, you see lines of people with carts full of crap checking out just as we do at WalMart all across Amerika. Kinda hard to imagine people carrying all that to the subway in their arms…
Joseph

I can only attest to my experience over there. I went through a self checkout and there were no free bags in sight. I did also mention that people do drive cars in South Korea so it stands to reason that people with carts of merchandise may be the ones who drive cars. I cannot recall seeing South Koreans with plastic bags of merchandise on the subway there; it was more the case of department store bags or colorful boutique bags. The flat my friend lived in was several stories above a small grocery store in the same building so it made grocery shopping manageable. I will concede that I was offered a free bag at a 7-eleven convenience store that was conveyed to me through some creative sign language by the clerk there. Another culture trip was finding the lack of liquid soap in restrooms in just about all but the tourist-oriented or upscale businesses. Instead if you visit South Korea outside the airport, you’ll find bar soap on a metal roller.

I did work in retail in a large haberdashery outfit at one point in my life so merchandise theft was a concern that I was acquainted with. Bags that thieves brought in that were designed to evade the theft detection were called booster bags by the Loss Prevention agents. One of the methods used to prevent the thieves from “boosting” the merchandise was to identify suspicious bags and provide “good” customer service as to spook opportunistic thieves. Granted, grocery stores typically cannot employ such a labor intensive tactics though. I am suggesting that Americans have been conditioned to believe complimentary bags are the norm but this is not necessarily the case elsewhere in the world. I am not suggesting that merchants should be abridged of their flexibility of providing complimentary bags (at their expense) as a means to mitigate shrinkage of their inventory which represent a greater business expense.