Michael Hiltzik: How the retail lobby sold a $45 billion whopper about organized shoplifting

If you're making a list of big news stories of 2023, here's one you might want to check twice: The surge in "organized retail crime," or gang shoplifting.

I've written before about the news media's fixation on this phenomenon despite the unreliability of retailers' claims about it, and especially when compared with the much more prevalent crime of employer wage theft, which gets almost no coverage.

But there's been a recent development on the topic, which demands your attention. Put simply, the retail lobby has admitted that its most eye-catching and widely publicized statistic about it is a lie.

The statistic, published in April by the National Retail Federation, was that "organized retail crime" — including the videotaped flash mob smash-and-grab events aired in frequent rotation on the cable and evening news shows — came to more than $45 billion a year.

Specifically, the NRF declared that organized crime accounted for in retail "shrink" attributed to theft or "other causes" in