Shirk After Reading

As they pursue legislation to combat a massive wave of organized retail crime they swear exists, The National Retail Federation (NRF) is revolutionizing how they report major retailers’ inventory losses (also known as “shrink”) in that they’ve decided to not report them at all.

You read that correctly. For the first time in 32 years, the NRF is not going to publicize the myriad of data they’ve collected regarding retail shrink. This decision comes less than a month prior to their Fight Retail Crime Day on which they will once again pressure congress to enact the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) which they have been pushing since January 2023. But will hiding the numbers really help achieve that end? Mary McGinty, NRF vice president of communications and public affairs, seems to want us to think so.

“Organized theft continues to ravage our industry and its cost is often felt by the consumer,” says McGinty who represents the retailers responsible for passing that cost to those consumers, “and the yearly shrink report is an essential roadmap to help our managers traverse this dystopian, lawless hellscape as well as let customers know not to blame retailers for constant price increases. Since the theft is always rising you see, which the data definitely reveals, I just can't show it to you. But rest assured it's quite damning. Imagine how high you think it is, double it, and know it’s actually much higher than that, like way higher.”

She would go on to say that the retail lobby group’s main concern is providing “the most accurate and actionable information possible”, but given that CORCA is more concerned with punishing retail crime than preventing it, we wonder if she realizes just how sinister the word “actionable” is in that context considering that such action has the potential to ruin someone’s life over $16 worth of merchandise.

Mary McGinty, the NRF’s chosen face of “just don’t tell them what the numbers are” plan is, apropos of nothing, planning to retire very soon.

When we asked why they wouldn’t just release the numbers ahead of the future action plan, a representative from the NRF with the unfortunate task of taking our phone call said “Don’t worry about the numbers. You let us worry about the numbers and we’ll just tell you how to react and what to do about it, mmkay?”

Some may remember, although the NRF and business news media seem to think we won’t, that last year the retail lobbyists came under scrutiny for presenting incorrect data in pursuit of CORCA. It even led US Representative Lou Correa (D-California) to tell NRF VP of asset protection David Johnston during a congressional hearing on the matter to “March your ass out of here and don’t come back until you’ve got accurate information!” (not an exact quote) after Johnston had insisted that “nearly half” of all inventory loss was due to organized retail crime when it was, in reality, much lower. And we mean ridiculously lower, about a tenth of what Johnston had claimed.

Despite the fact that David Johnston bandied this figure all over Capitol Hill like a third grader bringing home a math test on which he gotten a gold star, he later claimed that it was Ben Dugan, former president of The Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail, who made a “false inference” which was widely spread as fact by the NRF and many business news outlets.

“That wasn’t our fault!” whined Johnston at the time like a third grader who had been caught putting a fake gold star sticker on a math test he'd clearly failed, “it was someone else’s mistake that was only based on our data!”

Weird when they're misrepresenting or hiding retail shrink data you get Mary McGinty with one foot out the door and Ben Dugan with a fleeting view of the bus’s undercarriage and not someone higher up like CEO Matthew Shay who is normally the face of everything the NRF does.

Equally weird is that a year after being called out for giving inaccurate information they suddenly decide, for the first time in three decades, to withhold that information. Double weird! It’s almost like a willful act of non-transparency. Wait, what’s the opposite of transparency? Opacity? Ambiguity? Lying omittedly?

The fact of the matter (and we mean “fact” in that the NRF says it’s a fact) is that these numbers are important to the retail industry somehow but more importantly to the business news media who need those figures to farm that sweet, sweet social media engagement since the supposed rise in retail crime is a hot-button issue right now. Seeing as the NRF has never missed an opportunity to dump out a bucket of slop for the pigs in the business media to gorge themselves on, it only makes it triple weird that they’d want to keep that information to themselves all of a sudden.

But is the data really all that important? We know you know it’s not, but play along anyway.

Wilson Mitchell has been in asset protection for nearly twenty years and has worked for several major retailers. During his time, he tells us, the shrink information coming out of the NRF has been neither accurate nor useful.

“It’s all based on retailers self-reporting,” says Mitchell. “You can’t even get information from a general manager on what goes on on their sales floor day-to-day, so you really think someone at corporate knows where every piece of missing inventory disappears to? Give me a break! And what even do they think we can do with those numbers to prevent theft anyway? Not a ding-dang thing!”

Mitchell goes on to explain that there are many reasons why this data can be misreported.

“Bias is a big issue. Maybe they don’t like the community their store is in so they chalk everything up to shoplifting. Maybe they don’t trust their staff and blame it all on them. Maybe they’re going through some shit and just can’t deal so they make some numbers up because they’re living in survival mode and they’ll do whatever’s fastest to get them out of that half-windsor noose and into a nice, refreshing bathtub full of I-don’t-give-a-frig-anymore. Who knows why? Suffice to say, you can’t reasonably rely on the information.”

“Really,” concludes Mitchell, “most retailers are guessing at best and making it all up at worst.”

We’d wager most retailers are at worst, but that’s our own bias showing.

So if the numbers can’t even be trusted, why bother to make a big stink about withholding them? You may think that as powerful Washington DC lobbyists they plan to use their formidable clout and influence to push legislation that would tackle the issues that cause retail theft to happen at all, such as a large population of unhoused people, a low median income compared to housing costs, and unnecessarily high prices on essential goods, as self-reported shrink numbers are irrelevant to those issues. But no, we feel they’re shouting out their agenda quite loudly.

The most telling factor is that this is happening so close to NRF’s upcoming Shoplifting Day [Editor’s note: Legal has asked that you not call it that], during which the NRF plans to continue pressuring Congress to pass the legislation they claim will combat retail theft (which in reality only imposes harsher punishments).

While the NRF would say they just want everyone to have the most accurate data, it would be wise to remember that the last time they spoke to The House on this matter they were called out for their inaccuracies. They have now seemingly decided that the most accurate information would be no information at all, also known as the “Just Trust Me, Bro” strategy.

If we were to take a shot in the dark, much like most retailers do when it comes to the NRF shrink survey, we’d say they likely need some time to look at the shrink numbers and figure out how to best skew the data to meet their goals. They are lobbyists of course, and as such don’t represent any interests except those of corporate retailers and their shareholders, so it would behoove them to simply say they've analyzed the numbers themselves and report their findings to the hungry pig sty that is the business media sphere so they'll scare you and, more importantly, your representatives into thinking their plan is the only plan that can stop retail crime and bring those prices back down to a reasonable level.

And really, how exactly CORCA would accomplish that, seeing as most retailers can bring those prices down any time they want and still make ridiculous profits, is just one more thing the NRF is keeping to themselves.