Organized retail crime creates considerable harm to individuals, communities, businesses, and society generally; however, many still fail to understand the nature and extent of the harms caused by ORC. To better understand what loss prevention and ORC investigators and managers believe are the greatest consequences of ORC, we asked the “ORC Across the States” survey participants to identify the “most problematic consequence of organized retail crime” in the areas they serve.
Unfortunately, some of the respondents misunderstood the question. These respondents thought the question was focused on the consequences to offenders in the areas they serve. These individuals provided responses such as “THERE IS NO ONE HOLDING THE CRIMINAL ACCOUNTABLE, SO IT INCREASES” (capitalization was included in the original response). Seventy of the respondents provided these types of answers that are inapplicable to the study.
After these were removed, a total of 171 respondents listed 219 consequences of ORC. There are more consequences than respondents because many of the respondents listed more than one top consequence; in each of these cases, the responses were split up into the component responses.
Nevertheless, the five most commonly listed consequences of ORC in the areas respondents serve included: (1) out of stocks/product unavailable to customers; (2) loss of sales/profitability; (3) safety, risk of victimization, or violence; (4) how ORC leads to escalating crime or is related to other types; and (5) merchandise loss/financial loss. Of course, as the table shows, there were many other consequences listed by the respondents ranging from loss of moral standards in society to loss of tax revenue. All the categories of consequences are provided in Table 1 below.
As this report shows, there are many different consequences of ORC. Many of these are related to the financial success of businesses, but many others are affected, including: customers who are inconvenienced with locked up product; communities that aren’t able to collect much-needed tax revenue; retail workers and customers who are assaulted during the commission of a crime; and drug addicted individuals who are exploited by drug dealers who readily trade narcotics for a fraction of the value of merchandise. The public and policymakers need to fully understand these consequences of ORC when choosing how to address the problem.
