Torched

New York City drugstores are so rife with plastic lockup cases that one crook was forced to use a blowtorch to blast one open, making off with $448 in skin care products.
Retailers pile on new tech to deter theft

I'm going to admit that I hadn't seen that one coming. I understand investing in some amount of equipment and going through some amount of effort in order to get one's hands on something, but blowtorching open a display case for less than $500 in stuff (especially given that it won't sell on the street for that much) strikes me as over to top. But I suppose that it shouldn't. After all, whether one sees retail thieves as done in by economic conditions or systems that have rendered them unemployable, or simply too lazy or venal to find honest work, $450 dollars in "free stuff" is attractive all the same. And blowtorches aren't that expensive.

I'm originally from the Chicago area, and I've been in parts of the city that could teach prisons a thing or two about security. It's strange to walk through a neighborhood where literally every window accessible from the ground has heavy bars to prevent people crawling in, or to go into a fast-food restaurant where the counter sports thick, bulletproof plexiglass, with a turntable through which money and food can be passed. Strange, but apparently not newsworthy.

What I think has been driving the current push of news stories about retail theft is precisely the fact that it's spread from benighted and forgotten neighborhoods on the South side of Chicago and out in the suburbs and downtown areas where wealthier people shop. So it's now confronting people who can profess to be shocked and upset by a state of affairs that other people have been attempting to deal with for some three decades, if not more. And shock and upset drive attention.

Personally, this is the sort of thing that calls for solutions journalism, and not simply the solutions of increased surveillance and buying into trading personal data. But a solution to the problem of... I'd say poverty, but I think it's more leaving people behind. Of course, that presupposes that there is a solution to a situation that's persisted as long as it has precisely because it works for people. Or, at least, for enough people that the will to pay the price of fixing it isn't there. Anti-theft technology will do a good enough job at a good enough price to be a viable patch on a difficult problem. It's sometimes disappointing that it's all society asks.