A recent survey of small business owners across the country showed that 54 percent of them experienced an increase in shoplifting last year, much of it stemming from organized crime.
During an interview on the WCUB Breakfast Club, Neil Bradley, Executive Vice president, and Chief Policy Officer with the national Chamber of Commerce told us, “What they told us is 56 percent say they’ve been a victim of this in the past year and a majority say it’s getting worse. Our good friends at the National Retail Federation tried to put a dollar amount on it. What they found was that for every billion dollars in retail sales $700,000 was lost to theft. That number is up dramatically in the last 5 years.”
In our area, Bradley explained retail theft was such a growing problem in Green Bay, that the police department had to set up an initiative to do something about it.
“It turned out before that they had to pick up somebody at least 4 times for theft from a store before they would refer it to the district attorney’s office for prosecution,” he said. “That’s a pattern by the way we see across the country of people being able to steal multiple times before anything is ever done to them.”
Bradley added, “That’s a lot of what is fueling this shoplifting epidemic.”
