A few years ago, videos of brazen shoplifters ruthlessly looting retail stores were shocking everyone, but now this sort of thing is so common that very few of us are shocked anymore.  We have come to expect that our retail stores will be regularly looted because this is who we have become as a nation.  Sadly, even many of our politicians aren’t too concerned that the impoverished masses are stealing billions of dollars worth of merchandise from our major retailers.

Like so many others, maybe they figure that those retailers won’t even miss what is being taken.  But the truth is that they do miss what is being taken, and CEOs have been complaining very loudly about it…

For much of the past year or so, executives at big retailers did something unusual: They talked about theft in their stores. A lot.

Walmart’s CEO warned it could lead to store closures and higher prices. Target’s CEO said it was costing the chain upward of a billion dollars. Home Depot’s finance chief called it a “consistent pressure” that the chain is “tackling every day.”

With a backdrop of viral videos showing brazen and violent thieves, crime became a common theme on retailers’ typically dry quarterly earnings calls. Executives often mentioned “shrink” — inventory missing for one reason or another — as a factor behind declining profits. The list grew long: Macy’s, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, T.J.Maxx, Dollar General.

Year after year, things get even worse.

It is being reported that “revenue loss to theft has been steadily rising since 2016”, and “shrink” is now costing our retailers more than 100 billion dollars a year.

That is about the size of Russia’s entire military budget for 2024.

Just think about that for a few moments.

We have never seen anything like this before.

So far this year, retailers in New York City have filed more than 21,000 shoplifting complaints…

Don’t believe pro-crime progressives when they lie about public safety here in NYC: This year so far has seen 21,578 shoplifting complaints from Gotham’s retailers.

That’s a 5% increase over last year’s obscene 20,552; more than 41% of the 2024 crimes are concentrated in Manhattan.

And that’s part of an ugly, persistent trend.

Full-year numbers since 2021 have jumped from 43,892 to 59,137, an increase of almost 35% — and the real problem is surely far higher, as exhausted merchants don’t bother to report many incidents.

Even in the very best areas of the Big Apple, major retailers are being routinely ransacked, and authorities seem completely powerless to stop the endless crime wave…

Many would argue that conditions are even worse on the west coast.

One store manager in California that recently had a “meltdown reaction” when a young woman was stealing from her store says that businesses “are closing left and right because of all this looting going on”…

“Businesses are closing left and right because of all this looting going on,” Jolly said. “The system is broken, nothing is being done about it.”

She says that when she called police to report the incident, they suggested she contact the store’s insurance company.

“I just think it’s like, the people are trying to get away with it because there’s no consequences,” Jolly said, noting that the “meltdown reaction” came from a place of concern for her community and even the girl in the video. “I’m worried for her and she’s already doing this.”

It wasn’t like this when I was growing up.

But this is our country now.

In a desperate attempt to reduce shoplifting in his stores, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos is removing self-checkout options in thousands of locations…

Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said Thursday that the company plans to remove self-checkout from “the vast majority of stores” as part of larger overall shrink reduction efforts that include changes in supply chain and merchandising. Dollar General has already removed self-checkouts from 12,000 of its more than 20,000 stores, Vasos said.

Walmart is also removing self-checkout kiosks from many stores, and the number of products that are being locked up just continues to increase…

A frustrated Walmart customer has revealed the latest item to be locked up on the shopfloor during the shoplifting crackdown – and it only costs $1.50.

Victoria Damor, 22, from Las Vegas, made a TikTok detailing her shocking experience at the big box retailer last month.

Her video, which she posted under her handle @toridamore, has already been seen by almost 90,000 people, who have flocked to the comments to share their outrage.

Talking to the camera, the shopper exclaimed: ‘This is the future of Walmart. I can’t even walk into Walmart and pick up a nail file worth $1.50 because it’s locked up.

When a $1.50 nail file has to be locked up in a cage so that the thieves can’t get at it, your country is in huge trouble.

Of course it isn’t just the United States that is descending into anarchy.

Shoplifting has also risen to unprecedented levels all over Europe.

For example, just check out these eye-popping figures from the UK…

According to the Office for National Statistics, 2023 was the worst year on record for shoplifting, with more than 430,000 cases recorded, an increase of more than a third from the year before. But that is probably just a fraction of the real number. The British Retail Consortium – the body representing almost all of the major retail chains, incorporating food and drink, fashion, DIY, health and beauty and more – recently reported that incidents of customer theft more than doubled from 8m to 16.7m in the period between 1 September 2022 and 31 August 2023. Losses reached £1.8bn, up from £950m the year before.

Throughout the western world, the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. If things are this bad now, what will happen once economic conditions become extremely harsh?

Even though economic conditions are still at least somewhat relatively stable, chaos is already erupting all around us.

I can’t even imagine what things will be like once tens of millions of people feel like they have nothing left to lose.

We really are in the early stages of a horrifying societal meltdown, and most of the population is not even close to ready for what is coming.

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

Highly organized gangs have developed extremely sophisticated plans for how to rapidly loot our major retailers, and the best ones can be in and out in just minutes.  Those goods are then resold online or in the streets, and the amounts that we are talking about are absolutely staggering.  In fact, as you will see below, theft is now costing retailers in this country about 100 billion dollars a year.

This week, Target made headlines all over the nation when it publicly admitted that theft will cost it 500 million more dollars than it did last year…

Target said Wednesday that organized retail crime will fuel $500 million more in stolen and lost merchandise this year compared with a year ago.

Target’s inventory loss, called shrink, totaled about $763 million last fiscal year, based on calculations from the company’s financial filings. With the anticipated increase, shrink this year would surpass $1 billion.

Let’s do some math. 763 million from last year plus 500 million more this year equals 1.263 billion dollars. Please keep in mind that this is just one chain.

As Target CEO Brian Cornell openly admitted earlier this week, organized retail crime has become a massive problem “across the entire retail industry”…

‘The unfortunate fact is violent incidents are increasing at our stores and across the entire retail industry. And when products are stolen, simply put they are no longer available for guests who depend on them.

‘Left unchecked, organized retail crime degrades the communities we call home. As we work to address this problem, the safety of our guests and our team members will always be our primary concern.

‘Beyond safety concerns, worsening shrink rates are putting significant pressure on our financial results,’ CEO Brian Cornell said on a call with reporters.

In the entire history of our nation, we have never seen anything quite like this.

Do you remember all the looting that we witnessed during the riots of a couple years ago?

Well, now the looting literally never stops, and it has become very sophisticated…

According to the NRF report, which conducted its latest assessment in partnership with global risk advisory firm K2 Integrity, these organized retail crime groups “primarily favor large national retailers and big-box retailers, and cargo shipments for booster operations.” They are also more likely to target everyday consumer goods rather than luxury products. Based on an analysis of 116 groups, 81% exclusively stole general consumer goods.

These groups have also been planning out their booster operations in advance by studying store layouts, camera and exit locations, understanding the types of anti-theft precautions and knowing the different store policies for stopping suspected thieves, the report said. Boosters are known as the individuals who are paid to commit theft on behalf of these groups.

In 2020, theft cost U.S. retailers 90.8 billion dollars, and that number increased to 94.5 billion dollars in 2021…

Last year, a survey from the National Retail Federation, an industry group, found that so-called “shrink” — or losses attributed to theft, fraud or employee error — amounted to $94.5 billion in losses in 2021. That was up from $90.8 billion in 2020. And the survey found that retailers reported a 26.5% increase in organized retail crime, on average.

The final number for 2022 is expected to be somewhere around 100 billion dollars, and the final number for 2023 is expected to be way above 100 billion dollars.

For a while, major retailers tried to weather the storm because they had invested so much money in these stores.

But now retailer after retailer is shutting down locations in the cities where organized retail crime is the worst.  In fact, even Walmart is now shutting down stores in the most troubled areas…

Walmart decided to shut 17 of its stores across nine states after CEO Doug McMillon warned in December that theft was the highest it’s ever been around the country and if it did not slow down, stores would have to close.

And the company announced on Tuesday it would be shutting half its Chicago stores, mostly located on the crime-ridden city’s south and west sides, because they are losing tens of millions each year.

So where do we go from here?

That is a very good question, because conditions in many of our major cities just continue to get worse and worse.

For example, an 83-year-old Vietnam veteran says that he actually felt safer walking the streets of Saigon than he does walking the streets of Portland…

‘I felt safer when I was walking around in downtown Saigon when I was in Vietnam than I do here in Portland,’ 83-year-old Vietnam veteran Armand Martens told Fox 12 Oregon about a homeless camp where people were using drugs and setting fire to properties.

Martens told how his neighbors have been terrorized by squatters who set up camp next door to their home and even set their property on fire.

So far, more than 2,600 businesses have left downtown Portland.

We aren’t just talking about a handful of businesses that have decided that it is time to look for greener pastures. What we are witnessing is literally a “mass exodus”, and that is because Portland now resembles a Mad Max movie…

Real estate developer Dustin Michael Miller told ‘Fox & Friends First’ that he’s moving his company out of Portland after his office was targeted in a rain of bullets in an incident he described as ‘absolute madness’.

‘It’s not uncommon to see homeless people running around the city with axes and machetes, and it’s just a common thing that nobody does anything,’ Miller said. ‘You call the police, and it’s very rare that they show up.’

Of course the exact same thing could be said about many other large cities.

Happy Days star Scott Baio has admitted that he has decided to sell his home and leave Los Angeles for good because the city has literally become “unlivable”…

The actor said he has been ‘forced out’ of his $3.85million home in Woodland Hills, LA, because the city has become ‘unlivable’, citing the homeless doing drugs on the sidewalk in the middle of the day, crime being ‘out of control’, and ‘graffiti on everything’.

‘Between the homeless defecating on the sidewalk, doing drugs on the sidewalk in the middle of the day, illegal aliens all over the place, law means nothing, crime is out of control, graffiti on everything… all of my tax dollars, I don’t know what they go for,’ Baoi said.

This is our country now.

We have been eagerly embracing evil for decades, and as a result we now have evil all around us.

I wish that I could tell you that things will be much better a couple years from now. But I can’t do that, because it isn’t true.

In fact, as economic conditions deteriorate it is likely that the looting will go to an entirely new level. Decades of very bad decisions have brought us to this point, and now we are paying a very great price for our foolishness.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.

A lock-box with two registered firearms were stolen from Bass’s home Friday night. But as noted by Fox News host Jeanine Pirro appearing on The Five, something seems very off about the story:

“Let me tell you something. She’s got two guns that are registered for which she has no permits, okay? Only two guns are stolen, but they’re “safely and securely in a Brinks lock box.” How did the guy who allegedly is Hispanic that they’re referring to – they didn’t tell us how they got a description since no one was at home. Maybe they had a ring thing, or I don’t know. But how does a criminal not take cash?

“There’s no identification number, no fingerprints? Not take jewelry, not take anything other than a box that you hope two guns are in? There isn’t a glass cover on a Brinks locks box. She has some issues, okay? As it relates to the gun, she only has it registered, she doesn’t have a permit. She’s had it for 40 years and never bothered to get a permit. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll tell you what, all my antennas are up here. Something is totally off. No criminal goes in and doesn’t take cash.”

As John Petrolino noted at Bearing Arms, the segment on The Five included a leftist view that should raise even more alarm bells:

The panel wouldn’t have been complete without the 5th host, or liberal host, Harold Ford Jr. weighing in with some lightly veiled anti-gun rhetoric. Ford’s comment was in support of so-called “smart guns”. While Ford did not outright use the term “smart gun”, his sentiment was received loud and clear by me.

“[I]f we have technology to shut down people’s water and heat and air conditioning, these companies do, we ought to have the same kind of technology to make sure no one can use those guns, but for the person that owns the gun, if your guns are stolen. I mean something good ought to come out of this I hope all the facts come out. I take people at their word. I imagine the Congresswoman has not done anything here. No one is, I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that…”

Out of the entire exchange and story, this was Ford’s takeaway? A sales pitch for “smart guns”? Ford did ever-so-smoothly slip that bit of rhetoric in, and honestly it went either unnoticed or unacknowledged by the other panelists. No one popped up and said that the idea was malarkey.

The non-addressing of Ford’s comment, we don’t know if it was just an oversight or not. I’d like to hope that the “conservative” wing of the show would have picked up on the detail, but they did not utter a peep on it. I would also like to think the conservative pundits would point out how ridiculous and unconstitutional the notion of a so-called “smart gun” would be. The talking point could have been since Bass is of the anti-gun cloth, that’d be an option for her, but we all know that the anti-freedom caucus wants to mandate “smart guns” for all. If these panelists outright ignored the comment for some political reason, then shame on them.

The mystery of Bass’s missing firearms will hopefully be just a blip on the radar, with the absurdity of it being pointed out by her campaign and party before it becomes some further call to restrict rights. Does this have the stench of a publicity stunt? Maybe. Were her firearms actually stolen? Who knows. Regardless, the Five point out both the hypocrisy that Tom noted, the fishiness of the story, and of course the pinko got to slide in his anti-gun rhetoric.

There seems to be an agenda in play. Whenever Democrat lawmakers are involved, that’s never a stretch to believe. But in this case, the various stories being told and speculation being lobbed about what really happened and why it’s happening should make us question the entire narrative. According to ABC7, arrests have been made:

Police later identified the suspects as Patricio Munoz, 42, and Juan Espinoza, 24. They were located in a suspect vehicle in the area of Hazeltine Avenue and Sylvan Street in Van Nuys on Tuesday night, LAPD said.

Police say the suspect vehicle and its license plate number were seen outside Bass’ home during the burglary.

Both men were booked into jail for residential burglary. Munoz is being held on $500,000 bail, while Espinoza is being held without bail.

Even if we look past the hypocrisy of a gun-grabbing Democrat candidate owning her own firearms because she’s obviously above the people she wants to rule, we cannot get around the peculiarities in this case. Why was nothing else stolen? How did the suspects know they would find two firearms? Did they realize they were breaking into the home of a mayoral candidate? Is something very sinister taking place in Los Angeles surrounding a Democrat politician?

At least the answer to the last question is obvious. At any given moment, there will always be something sinister surrounding Democrat politicians.