And yet the average has not increased, and so you must be suggesting that Target and 'other major retailers' have had increased theft, and some equal number of others have apparently been gifted with negative theft.
I'm saying that Target closes stores with high shrink and thus total shrink hasn't changed, because when shrink increases companies take action and close the stores with high shrink. I'm suggesting that a store with above average shrink in a portfolio of many stores will not meaningfully move the overall average in a statistic of all the stores in the entire country or target's entire portfolio.
But I'm not trying to write a defense of Target. You may be correct. You may be incorrect. There simply isn't enough data to accurately draw a conclusion and I'm just offended that journalists inflate stories that give extreme results but very weak foundations instead of you know... doing journalism correctly based on actual real data not suppositions based on a bunch of national averages as though they are accurately depicting actual shrink in a specific store in a specific market.
But then there is no new increased theft problem, there is a bad store or a store in a bad area (which other commenters have said both are the case here). The criticism is exactly that they tried to make business as usual look like some new general problem they suddenly have that they didn't have yesterday.
