• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Sometimes thieves escaping on foot would run into oncoming traffic (or into an innocent bystander). Retailers were responsible for any injuries incurred, and such incidents soon compelled them to take a more proactive approach. In the late seventies and early eighties, many stores began to install closed-circuit cameras and electronic-article-surveillance technology—known as E.A.S. E.A.S. tags, which can be sewn into garments or slipped between the pages of books, contain a small magnetic coil that triggers an alarm at store exits. The technology is still in wide use despite its questionable effectiveness. The problem is not only that false alarms are so frequent (who hasn’t set off an alarm at a store exit and been waved through by a weary security guard?), or that thieves have learned to defeat the system with foil-lined booster bags, but that the alarm sounds only after a thief has passed through the security gates. “If they’ve got a load of goods that they intend to convert to money, they’re going to keep going,” Rogers says—and, because retailers have forbidden loss-prevention agents to give chase, the merchandise is lost.

In 1980, one of Rogers’s detectives at a suburban branch of Strawbridge & Clothier noticed a team of four people stealing men’s shirts off racks. Two people acted as lookouts while the other two stuffed clothing, hangers and all, into large black plastic garbage bags. The thieves fled the store before they could be detained, but the detective got their license-plate number and phoned the police. The cops apprehended the thieves, booked them for shoplifting, and soon released them on misdemeanor charges—typical in shoplifting cases. But the volume of the thefts, and the shoplifters’ brazenness, made Rogers suspect that something more was going on. The following week, a team of thieves using the same method was observed at a different branch, so Rogers enlisted the help of a colleague at the police department and traced the thieves to a tenement in Providence, Rhode Island. The shoplifters, Rogers told me, turned out to be members of a South American gang who were stealing designer clothing from department stores and specialty stores from Boston to Atlanta. “Ultimately, the police had enough evidence to charge them with some elevated theft-larceny charge, beyond shoplifting,” Rogers says. “That caused them to pretty much dissipate.”

IN 1984, WHEN ROGERS JOINED TARGET (then part of the Dayton Hudson Corporation) as the vice-president of loss prevention, it was not widely recognized that big-box stores were also victims of organized retail crime. “And it was not obvious to me right away,” Rogers says. “In department stores, the gangs were hitting brand-name and in some cases designer clothes and accessories, but at Target it was the very popular branded-label goods: over-the-counter analgesics, film, batteries, baby formula, smoking-cessation products, condoms, teeth-whitening strips”—any small, easy-to-resell merchandise. “I couldn’t understand how there was an aftermarket for those items,” Rogers says. “But there obviously was.” Stores like Target, Wal-Mart, and Kmart were favorite stops for retail-theft gangs, who travelled from store to store and state to state, wiping out entire shelves’ worth of products. Razor blades remain so difficult for retailers to keep in stock that stores like Duane Reade display them behind the cash registers; CVS has installed elaborate push-dispensing mechanisms that release only one pack at a time. (Most large retailers today also keep baby formula and teeth-whitening products under lock and key, along with Wii game software and MP3 players.)

By the mid-nineteen-nineties, Target was the fifth-largest retailer in the country, with around twenty-one billion dollars a year in sales. (Today, Target has annual sales of sixty-three billion dollars.) Target won’t release exact figures, but the average shrink rate for retailers is between one and two per cent of sales,