Retail Crime and Inflation: The overlooked connection
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I love cracking jokes about how the Fed and their inability to get inflation under control. I mean, everybody out there was telling me, raise rates 10 times. Yeah, we’re down to what? 45%? Oh, golf clap. Yeah. You take a look at many of the things that have driven inflation higher and gee whiz, the price of eggs goes into a myriad.
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different things. We had an avian flu outbreak and I’m like, what the hell’s the Fed gonna do about that? Call up Dr. Fauci, have him join the Federal Reserve, start putting masks on chickens. Or yeah, the price of oil when it went through the roof due to the Ukraine, but really due to the fact that, quite frankly, you know, we could be energy independent, and we’re not.
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that we’ve also talked at length in regards to regulations and what we pay in regulatory costs and how that continues to go up and how the acronym agencies inside the executive branch of government continue to pour it on. All right, let’s get into it, okay? Let’s get into another thing, another thing that’s driving our prices up. And we told you about this, theft. That’s right, theft.
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I don’t know if you’re aware of this, okay? Target, Target, nice numbers yesterday. Target said that the organized retail crime, about $500 million in stolen and lost merchandise this year compared with a year ago. More, 500 million more, all right? Target’s inventory loss is what they call in the industry, they call it shrink.
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763 million. 763 million. Target is expecting to lose a billion dollars and just people stealing stuff this year. Now, does Target lose the money? Yeah, but so do you if you shop there. So do you.
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Target has to price their losses into everything else. And this is something that goes beyond, again, the liberal mind is not, they’re not deep thinkers by any stretch of the imagination. They’re not, they can’t see how things can actually ripple and cascade and how, you know, a butterfly flaps his wings here and something else happens over there. Well, guess what? Target loses money when people steal shaving cream.
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It’s just gonna drive up the price of shaving cream. That’s all it’s gonna do. They have to pay for those losses and they pay through you. It’s the same bloody concept with corporate taxes for crying out loud. Corporations don’t pay taxes. Their customers pay those taxes in the goods and services that they buy. This is just Target, a billion dollars. I wonder what the shrink is at Walmart.
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and the shrink is at Home Depot. I’d love to get a number, you know, basically across the retail landscape, adding up all of the crap that is stolen every single year. Oh, I know they got the security there at the front door, but they’re not allowed to do anything. And the bad guys know it.
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The bad guys don’t, the bad guys know it even when they’re knocking off, they’re not knocking off targets, when they’re knocking off Christian Dior. The mall at Short Hills, which is a very high-end expensive area in Northern New Jersey. A bunch of bad guys walked into a Christian Dior store, walked out with $150,000 in handbags, walked out of the mall and nobody stopped them.
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Nobody stopped them. Because the bad guys know. The bad guys know they’re not going to stop us. They’re not going to do a darn thing because if they do, we’ll end up suing them. They don’t want to cause any problems. So guess what? Because we don’t want to do anything about criminality, we choose to accept that they’re just going to keep doing it. And we’re going to have to keep paying. Now, Jerome.
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Powell and the folks at the Fed, even though I’d probably like to see them do this, it’s actually a job that they might be able to handle. You’re going to put them, turn them into what was that movie with, what’s his name there? Paul Blart, Mall Cop or whatever it may be. Turn them into security. They can help drive prices down by preventing people from stealing stuff. Let me tell you something. This is another thing. This is how Amazon’s going to continue to win.
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How many people get aggravated? Aggravated when, you understand it, but you’re still annoyed. When you walk into a store to pick up normal everyday products, whether it be razors or whatever it may be, and you gotta find somebody to unlock them.
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Anywhere you go. A toner, at staples, whatever it may be. It’s all locked down. And does that make for a fun shopping experience? Not for me. Hey, again, Amazon, Amazon, Amazon, order, order. It is what it is.
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I walk into CVS because I have to pick up some things and I’m like, son of a gun. I got to, I’m looking around for people working at the place. So I can get myself some razors. This is the world that we chose to live in people. And, you know, I, again, I explained to my kids, it wasn’t always this way. Wasn’t always this way. And in many respects, we’ve lost our way. But again, getting back to the whole inflation. Yeah, this, this is inflation. This is another reason why.
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you’re paying more. You know, quick, I just popped into my head. I remembered this from Hurricane Katrina. This is the mind, this is the liberal mindset. They were showing, during Hurricane Katrina, they were showing people wading through waste high water, carrying stolen, I remember seeing, carrying stolen flat screens from a store. And you know, they were stolen, they were in boxes. Okay, they weren’t wet. They were carrying them through waste high water and…
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that was in the news and I remember Celine Dion going off, Celine Dion from Canada going off, let them steal, let them take it. Hey Celine, let me ask you a question. If some of these people came up to your house and wanted to go in and start stealing televisions or I don’t know, Grammys outside of your house, are you gonna let them steal? No.
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I think so. Okay, anyway, watchdog on wallstreet.com, watchdog on wallstreet.com. We’ll see you.