Shoplifting And The Holiday Season

It is not surprising that CVS is once again the recipient of a lawsuit.  The history of legal suits against the chain is not new.  Black and hispanic shoppers are regularly profiled by the chain according to this Daily news report, and now CVS is targeting the elderly.  During the holiday season, stores do hire more personnel for their store to offset shoplifting, but targeting a specific group is a violation of their constitutional rights as United States citizens.  Profiling has been an ineffective practice that stores and in this case CVS keep engaging in, and which brings them no solution to the problem.

For more about this and other stories, follow the links below.

10 bizarre things Americans steal during the holidays

Shoplifting ends up costing the average consumer an extra $50 during the holiday season.

Americans tend to get sticky fingers around holiday time.

Shoplifting is a major problem for retailers around the holidays, says Ernie Deyle, the co-author of the Checkpoint Systems’ Retail Holiday Season Global Forecastreleased in October, and an industry consultant. Indeed, 37% of a store’s annual shrink loss — shrink is the revenue companies should receive minus what they do receive, due in large part to a combination of losses from shoplifting, employee theft and fraud — happens during the holiday season.

There’s more theft during the holidays for a number of reasons: Increased store traffic leads to more shoplifting, and people tend to rationalize shoplifting around this time: “It’s much easier to do so when a child’s Christmas present is at stake rather than an extra bathing suit for the summer,” the report reveals. Plus, stores tend to carry pricier merchandise during the holidays, “so even if the same quantity of merchandise was stolen, the value of the merchandise stolen is higher,” the report reveals.

Grandma and Grandpa, shoplifters? CVS thinks so

Public enemy No. 1 at your local CVS: Grandma and Grandpa.

Seven discrimination lawsuits filed Monday against the pharmacy chain in courts across the city include the revelation that a CVS “Loss Prevention” handbook warns employees that senior citizens on a “fixed income” present a “special shoplifting concern.”

Attorneys from the Manhattan law firm Wigdor LLP brought the suits on behalf of former employees arguing that the policy is “tantamount to an admission of discrimination against older customers.”

The lawyers, Michael Willemin and David Gottlieb, have testimony from 16 whistleblower ex-staffers who claim that CVS stores across the city discriminate by profiling elderly shoppers, as well as blacks and Hispanics.

CVS’s 2014 “Loss Prevention” training guide says that “each store may have special shoplifting concerns based on it’s location, type of customer, etc.,” according to court papers. Sticky-fingered seniors are listed as one “special concern,” the suit says.

Rare to have older kids join adults in shoplifting

When it happens, officers must use discretion

Adult shoplifters employ all sorts of methods. Among the most insidious schemes are those that use children as decoys or unknowing partners.

Most times, the kids in cases like these are too young to understand, let alone participate in, the crime. They are infants or toddlers under whose clothing or strollers the stolen items are stashed.

But there also is a smaller subset: adults who use older kids as outright accomplices in shoplifting. This latter problem became an issue here locally this week when Ocala police accused a woman and her boyfriend of inducing the woman’s 12-year-old daughter to help them steal clothing from the Wal-Mart on Southwest 19th Avenue Road.

The girl had the unusual distinction of being both a suspect and a victim in one single criminal experience: Police arrested the girl and charged her with theft, and then charged her mother with both theft and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.