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June 4, 2025
Will a Nationwide Crackdown on Organized Retail Crime Significantly Curtail Theft?
Organized retail crime (ORC) has been a hot topic for those who follow retail news headlines for some time now. The term typically refers to shoplifting involving numerous thieves who work together in planned operations, with the eventual goal of fencing stolen goods for liquid assets, primarily cash.
Now, according to CNBC, authorities across the U.S. appear to be ramping up efforts to crack down on those involved in organized retail crime, with hundreds of arrests being made spanning 28 states last week alone.
Helmed by Illinois’ Cook County regional organized crime task force, the crackdown involved 30 retailers — including Home Depot, Kroger, Macy’s, Target, Ulta Beauty, and Walgreens — across 100 jurisdictions.
Speaking to the news outlet, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart suggested that the crackdown could curtail crimes of a similar nature.
“When you give specific focus to a crime, it reverberates. When they see it is being prosecuted and taken seriously, it deters conduct. They don’t want to get caught,” Dart said.
Retail Crime, Particularly Shoplifting, Incident Spiking in Recent Years
A 2024 report from The National Retail Federation (NRF) indicated that retailers surveyed had experienced a whopping 93% increase in the average number of shoplifting incidence per year in 2023 versus the same behavior just four years prior, in 2019. Furthermore, a 90% increase in dollar loss during that same four-year time frame was observed.
In fact, the NRF noted that more than half of respondents to its poll indicated that ORC shoplifting, shoplifting more broadly, e-commerce theft, repeat offenders, and return fraud of various sorts had all become of increasing concern versus year-prior levels. In particular, organized retail crime was singled out as the issue of most increased concern, with more than three-quarters (76%) of retail enterprises surveyed saying as much.
CNBC suggested that some critics continued to highlight a lack of enforcement, as well as existing felony thresholds, as incentivizing criminals to continue committing theft. Meanwhile, Cook County State Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke zeroed in on the issue as soon as she assumed office in December of last year — quickly enacting changes such as stating that prosecutors would “pursue felony retail theft charges in accordance with state law, when the value of the goods exceeds $300 or when the suspect already has a felony shoplifting conviction,” per the news organization.
Prior to O’Neill Burke taking office, retail theft felonies were only pursued if the overall value of stolen goods exceeded $1,000 or if the alleged perpetrator had accrued 10 or more prior convictions. Since Dec. 1, 2024, her office has filed charges related to 1,450 felony retail theft cases.
Retailers Involved in Nationwide Retail Theft Crackdown Speak Out
While nearly all retailers providing comment to CNBC signaled a continued commitment to working with law enforcement to combat retail theft, representatives from Ulta Beauty, Walgreens, and Home Depot offered up more specific remarks.
“Collaboration is key to making a meaningful impact,” Ulta Beauty SVP of loss prevention, Dan Petrousek, told CNBC. “That’s why we were proud to participate in the National ORC Blitz alongside dedicated law enforcement and prosecutorial partners.”
“Organized retail crime remains one of the most significant challenges in our industry,” Marty Maloney, Walgreens’ director of media relations, stated. “In this most recent operation we worked closely with law enforcement partners across nearly 20 cities and at over 40 locations to help curb this trend.”
A representative speaking on behalf of Home Depot offered a mixed report, however. According to internal data, the company reported that a drop in overall theft was in evidence, but also that incidents of organized retail crime had ticked upward by double digits in 2025, year-over-year.
Discussion Questions
Will the nationwide crackdown on organized retail crime significantly curtail theft? What other options exist to alleviate the root problem?
Should other law enforcement agencies at all levels of government refocus efforts to crack down on ORC? What tactics could be deployed to increase arrests and convictions? What part do retailers play in this equation?
Which retailers are most prone to being targeted by bands of thieves? Are there any loss prevention strategies that would be cost-effective for these stores to deploy?
Poll
Loading …BrainTrust
Nolan Wheeler
Founder and CEO, SYNQ
Christopher P. Ramey
President, Affluent Insights & The Home Trust International
Gene Detroyer
Professor, International Business, Guizhou University of Finance & Economics and University of Sanya, China.
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Retailers have enough pressures and issues without having to deal with the cost of retail crime. Shoplifting and stealing from retailers should not be tolerated and people should be prosecuted and punished. No ifs, no buts. Credit to State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke for spearheading and organizing this crackdown. It needs to be an ongoing effort to show that retail crime comes with consequences.
Local governments helped to spur the recent shrink spree with the decriminalization of theft below a certain dollar amount, so it’s good to see they’re proactively working to help address the problem. Whether this will deter all theft or be more targeted to ORC remains to be seen.
Retail theft increases during times of unrest when certain parts of a society believe they can’t live to their standards and choose to increase their wellbeing with theft. While other issues affect levels of theft, it seems to be primarily a macro-event — a result of factors far beyond a retailer’s abilities. More critically, many steps retailers take to deal with such theft backfire with the customers on which they rely. No. I do not believe this is the responsibility of retailers — but a result of a society with growing inequity between richest and the rest of society. Until society takes steps to resolve that problem, retailers are likely to continue to see the problem.
Growing inequity hits on something important. When people see record corporate profits while their own purchasing power stagnates, the psychological “social contract” breaks down. Organized retail crime isn’t just about need; it’s about perceived fairness in resource distribution.
Well stated. I see it, at least partly, as an escape valve where steam is let go from social problems far larger than retail.
With all due respect to your (somewhat sociological) explanation, I’m having a hard time making the connection betwen inequity and organized retail theft. The Cagney movie where he confesses to a life of crime because the country’s Gini Coeeficient was too high? must have missed that one.
I completely agree. Organized theft is about an absence of basic morality, not an absence of material means. This is also deeply insulting to many people of limited income who live by the highest of moral standards.
Morality is a malleable thing across the whole of society (as opposed to single individuals). Further, beliefs about morality vary depending on an individual’s situation. Throughout history, then, progress is made more by society changing its fundamentals than by individual morality. That’s not an absolute truth but a general one. And there are exceptions. Fundamentally, though, morality is one of many interacting factors which lead to behavior as complexity science reveals. Thus, there is an interaction between how an individual perceives their circumstances and the degree to which they adhere to moral absolutes. We need look no further than the tech billionaires to see this as they place a premium on what they can get away with because their circumstances (making investors happy) train them to prefer big wins to morally acceptable wins.
Under this kind of thinking anything is permissible. Hey, sorry I raped and murdered that lady – but, you know, morality is malleable!
I didn’t suggest this is right or ideal – only that it’s the way the world has always worked.
Laws around theft have been pretty clear for thousands of years in most countries, except when local governments blur the boundaries by communicating “Well, if you think you might want to steal, just keep it under $1,000 and punishment may be minimal to non-existent. All good.”
That laws have been clear but those laws have less impact on theft than societies want to believe. Besides, today retailers are very often the ones telling employees to ignore the theft as they fear for employee safety. Which returns us to my point: What pushes more people to violate laws than less? Whether shoplifting or any other criminal behavior, it always increases when people believe they are threatened. Thus, Trump was elected because he created a feeling of fear among a large minority of the US population. To what degree does his propaganda contribute? We cannot isolate these issues simply to laws — society doesn’t work that way. (And I speak as one whose brother spent years as an elected district attorney making the choices about crimes. We discuss such issues often — though I don’t claim to speak for him.)
I once witnessed an incident where a group of four men carrying power tools ran out the front door of a Home Depot to a waiting getaway van. Store employees were powerless to intervene, and I’m glad they didn’t try.
It’s unfortunate that self-service merchandising (which helps keep prices a little lower for honest customers) also creates a temptation for this kind of organized thievery. Retailers can’t safely intervene, but they can use electronic surveillance to identify professional thieves and aid their apprehension and prosecution by the authorities.
Organized retail theft is not garden-variety shoplifting. The stakes are much higher, which makes the perpetrators more potentially dangerous. Since stolen goods are likely to find their way into online marketplaces or neighborhood flea markets, only a focused law-enforcement effort can find and trace items back to the offenders.
While the term “crackdown” seems a bit harsh, I’d like to think that “certainty of prosecution” would be am effective deterrent. They key is consistent enforcement of existing laws.
Home Depot’s self-service model with power tools is essentially an honor system in a society with declining social trust. Additionally, social media normalizes and gamifies “retail arbitrage” behaviors.
Very few Home Depot stores have open serve power tool sections these days – not for the expensive, branded items.
This is a classic case of treating the visible and painful symptoms rather than addressing the root causes. It’s the more straightforward, direct approach. However, while the nationwide crackdown is necessary, it is insufficient. The 93% increase in shoplifting incidents since 2019 didn’t happen in a vacuum. It coincides with three key shifts: the erosion of social contracts (wage stagnation amid corporate profit growth), the gamification of theft through social media, and retailers’ own operational choices that prioritized efficiency over security. Consider the parallel with return abuse from the other RetailWire article on return abuse. Both issues stem from retailers creating systems that are easily exploited, then expressing surprise when exploitation occurs. The real question isn’t how to eliminate theft, but how to optimize the balance between security costs, customer experience, and social outcomes. Could retailers invest theft-prevention savings back into local communities, creating stakeholder alignment?
Additionally, the $300-$1000 felony thresholds were set when those amounts had different purchasing power. Meanwhile, the legal system hasn’t adapted to organized, tech-enabled crime that operates across jurisdictions.
Thieves are thieves. There are no free passes. Retailers can’t fix societal root causes, nor should they be expected to fix them. That’s why we have laws and police to enforce them.
A national crackdown that includes other law enforcement agencies is exactly what may be needed. Then we need to put the shoplifters away long enough so they learn their lesson. We owe the retailers an aggressive response, for they are the victims.
Anything less emboldens the criminals.
I say this all the time. It’s not popular. But I’m going to ask again. Actually, I have 2 questions:
1) how has anyone quantified the value of ORC related shrink?
2) how will they know if these initiatives are working?
I know I’m new at retail, but I’ve just never figured out how they know…
While the crackdown may lead to a temporary reduction in theft, implementing it could face several challenges, such as resource allocation and coordination between various law enforcement agencies.
Exploring alternative strategies, such as community engagement programs and educational initiatives, could offer more sustainable solutions. Investing in technology, like surveillance systems and data analytics, may also enhance crime prevention efforts.
Additionally, fostering partnerships with local businesses and organizations could help create a more comprehensive approach to reducing theft.
It’s not acceptable to make excuses for not prosecuting. Democrats are already blaming social inequality, poverty, lack of opportunity, and “systemic” racism. Their talking points include community support programs, education, gyms, and other “solutions” that will do nothing to resolve this issue.
Gang theft is more like “organized” crime and is a law enforcement issue. Much of the stolen goods are being sold on eBay.
This is not about making excuses but about finding effective, long-term solutions. Addressing the root causes of crime, such as poverty and lack of opportunity, can lead to a more lasting reduction in theft and other criminal activities.
Defunding law enforcement isn’t helpful, and restricting police from enforcing laws needs to change.
We need to think about this differently. This will sound obvious, but the priority for combating organized retail crime is recognizing it. This is not about people in need stealing things to survive; it’s not about traditional, random acts of theft by individuals. This is organized crews operating in a highly sophisticated manner to steal, defraud, and launder money across jurisdictions and borders. Recognizing it means using tools like AI and entity resolution to connect seemingly random acts as being perpetrated by the same crew. When approached this way, the thresholds for loss increase substantially, to the point where regional and federal law enforcement and prosecutors can invoke real penalties for the bad actors. The second priority is learning to share data about attacks across companies and jurisdictions to help law enforcement build cases and understand modus operandi (MOs), so that retailers can learn and adapt to changing techniques.
The reality is that there isn’t a cure for this; we’re playing Wack-a-Mole with very sophisticated actors who understand thresholds, cameras, and deterrents, and change their patterns as quickly as the good guys do.
These criminal organizations of course cross state lines, so what is our FBI doing?
Oh yeah, bullying and evicting immigrants trying to work through the system and going after Trump’s political opponents. Literally being pulled off cases like ORC, terrorism, smuggling, and corporate theft per the news this week.
The NRF helped elect this administration, and big retailers donated millions of dollars – I guess they got what they paid for.
Controlling organized retail crime makes only a small dent in the total shoplifting problem. Individuals typically shoplift for their own use. 25% of shoplifters are under 18 years old.
Sadly, the problem is cultural, and I don’t see a way to fix it. We have become an “I deserve it society, and can’t live without it.”
This nationwide effort is a strong step forward, but enforcement is only part of the solution. ORC thrives where operations are strained – with limited staff, easy product access, and poor communication on the floor. While retailers can’t solve broader societal issues, they can be proactive by adopting smarter store strategies – like using technology to improve visibility, streamline associate response, and better protect high-risk items.
Losses associated at retail from organized theft are more than just the cost of goods. It’s also surveillance time, installing equipment, meetings, hiring loss prevention, locking up product, burning labor to open locked cases, and the psychological toll on demoralized employees. Exactly how much more are retailers supposed to own in all this? And at what cost… sky is the limit? Are honest customers supposed to pick up all of the tab in inflated retail prices?
For retailers to remain in business at their location they need confidence that local and county government will support law enforcement in showing up quickly to arrest, and that DA’s will prosecute.
ORC is a complex issue that demands collaboration among retailers, law enforcement, industry task forces, governments and communities.
Retailers targeted by thieves include Best Buy (printer cartridges), CVS (pain and allergy medication, razor blades), Home Depot (power tools) and Walmart (cosmetics).
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