A Daily Mail story on July 31, 2023 reminded be of an earlier phenomena.
From the Daily Mail:
San Francisco hardware store owned by same family since 1955 has lost staggering $700,000 in a single year to 'organized shoplifting'
- Dale Hardware's owner Kyle Smith described the helpless situation in Fremont
- Surveillance footage from various days last year show a number of people brazenly walking out of the store holding stolen tools
- The thefts come as the Bay Area and rest of US deal with a spike in thefts - totaling nearly $100billion in losses
....MUCH MORE
One store.
Bringing to mind these stories:
The Atlantic: "The Great Shoplifting Freak-Out"
Something called Popular Information, I'm not familiar with them: "How Walgreens manufactured a media frenzy about shoplifting"
The San Francisco Chronicle: "San Francisco's shoplifting panic desperately needs some context"
And many more, from a dozen sources.
You have to wonder, what was the purpose of denying there was a large and spreading problem? Instead it was a "panic", a "frenzy", a "freak-out" with all the disparaging and belittling connotations those headlines were trying to project.
