CANADIAN DECLINE: A CONTINUING SERIES?

Yesterday, I splashed a bunch of ink griping about our country and our government’s lack of attention to dwindling economic growth and productivity. Once you write a complaint like that, of course, literally everything seems to support it. Consider these two fresh news items pegged to an announcement of quarterly financials by the supermarket giant Loblaw: one for Yahoo written by Financial Post alumna Alicja Siekerska, and one for the CBC by Sophia Harris.
Siekerska’s piece is a vanilla business item about how a new phenomenon of organized shoplifting is cutting pretty seriously into Loblaw’s margins. Loblaw-owned Shoppers Drug Mart outlets, a company spokesperson warns, are having to introduce new anti-theft measures to prevent otherwise
unpreventable daylight ripoffs by conscienceless criminals. “High-value fragrances in our Shoppers stores have been a target, as well as cosmetics, baby formula and even carts full of thousands of dollars of products pushed right out the front door,” spokesperson Catherine Thomas observed.
Siekerska went to the Retail Council of Canada for a quote, and they confirmed what everyone who lives in a metropolitan downtown knows. Because the police are now about as much use in dealing with property crime as a stuffed armadillo, and nobody is really punished for it much even if they’re caught, urban retailers are having to take their own expensive quasi-policing steps. More guards, more gates and railings, more locked cabinets, more surveillance and random “receipt checks.” Carceral daily life, as the alternative to traditional incarceration.
The “shrinkage” problem is turning the ordinary urban shopping experience into something with a troubling, humiliating resemblance to air travel, as CBC’s Harris took the trouble to document by talking to a few Loblaw and Walmart shoppers. The vast majority of people who intend to pay for the stuff they bought don’t like being treated as shoplifting suspects! One man carps that big stores are “choosing to combat theft in a way that disadvantages the regular customer.” I’m inclined to suggest that this is what, in other contexts, is referred to as victim-blaming.
I know, I know: since Loblaw and Walmart have remained extremely profitable as inflation suffocates their customers, these aren’t the most popular institutions around nowadays. (Walmarts have always had a somewhat prison-inspired design — that’s part of why the goods are so affordable.) But if the big retailers start pulling out of vagrant-riddled, socially collapsing parts of cities, you know the same people complaining about anti-theft measures will howl twice as loud, while the academics identify all the new “food deserts” where nobody can buy eggs and milk without significant, potentially costly hassle.
If you read both of these stories with a little imagination, you begin to see that nobody is treating “organized retail theft” — fearless shoplifting on steroids, perpetrated by lowlifes who have opted altogether out of the social contract — as a problem for the economy as a whole. For business reporter Siekerska, it’s a problem for the bottom lines of big retailers. For vox-populi-gatherer Harris, it’s a problem for touchy Karens. Meaning no disrespect to either reporter, isn’t it obvious that they are taking snapshots of the pointy part of an iceberg?
Loblaw and Walmart have resources to combat unpunished, unlimited theft: they have the required market share to make shopping exactly as unpleasant as necessary for you and I as they need to. It’s not so easy to find and interview the people who lost a business to urban theft and ubiquitous junkie vandalism, or the people who were never able to start one. (If you do want to shoot video footage of boarded-up downtown storefronts, allow me to recommend Edmonton.) Loblaw all but controls last-mile food and drug distribution for Canada; if conditions are bad enough in cities to make life noticeably harder for them, how do you think a bike shop, or a computer repair place, or an art gallery will make out? This isn’t just about retailing, or even about theft alone.
Canadian criminal justice no longer meaningfully protects property of any sort — that’s the world Liberal voters have decided we ought to live in. The consequences are largely unmeasurable but they’re clearly beginning to bite down. I could give you the economist rap about how cities are the propulsive engines of our economy, which implies strongly that it needs to be possible to do business in them. But maybe I ought to play the progressive, ignoring economic growth in favour of distributional concerns, and observe that in an environment of de facto street anarchism and catch-and-release justice, it’s only giant retail chains with juicy fat profit margins and global expertise in shrinkage prevention that can survive. Small is beautiful, but small is easily crushed. And if you’re one of those people who turn up their nose at a Walmart, I suspect you had better start learning to like it.
— Colby Cosh
https://link.nationalpost.com/view/6283b5d31019df9a540cf6c2j6haq.58q/25d65735