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by James Corbett
...forced to close up shop in the face of mounting losses from the spate of increasingly brazen burglaries.
And you'll probably also be aware that the phenomenon is not confined to the US, with businesses in Canada and the UK and France and Australia and elsewhere similarly reporting an increase in robberies and theft since the scamdemic.
And you'll doubtless have heard the various explanations for this phenomenon doled out by the faithful media mouthpieces of the controlled two-party paradigm:
...etc...
Of course, there are grains of truth in all of these explanations, but none of them get to the real heart of the matter.
So,
The answers may surprise you...
THE PROBLEM
Although the reality of a surge in shoplifting is disputed by some, it's getting harder to deny that dramatic acts of retail theft are becoming more commonplace in this era of the Brave New Normal.
Just ask retailers in California, where increasingly audacious acts of looting and pillaging are being committed by groups of thieves - and, in some cases, even organized flash mobs - on a daily basis.
And the robbers aren't just targeting luxury retailers (though they certainly are targeting them), they're also going after mom-and-pop stores and local, family-owned businesses, too.
And it's not just soft-on-crime California where burglary is out of control.
Similar surges in retail theft are being seen in Seattle and New York and Portland and Chicago and Washington, D.C.
Heck, shoplifting has gotten so bad in jolly ol' England that upscale supermarket chain Waitrose is now offering free coffee to police officers in a ploy to boost law enforcement's presence at their stores.
So, what on earth is going on here...?
There are as many explanations for this seemingly global crime spree as there are talking heads and op ed writers.
Broadly speaking,
As usual, there is an element of truth to all of these claims...
But none of these factors are so fundamentally different than they were a few years ago as to account for such a surge in retail theft.
Surely there must be something bigger going on here, right? Of course there is...
One interesting part of this shoplifting pandemonium that is only beginning to get attention is that retailers themselves seem to be adding to the problem.
You see, not only is California's Senate looking to pass legislation to stop employees from confronting shoplifters, but more and more companies are now adopting an official policy expressly forbidding their employees from intervening in the event of retail theft, no matter how blatant.
Indeed, this past summer, Lowe's and Lululemon both made headlines for firing employees who tried to confront shoplifters.
And just last month a Colorado supermarket employee was fired for merely filming a shoplifter in the act (an action for which he was commended by local police).
At the surface level, it's no surprise that big corporations and box store retailers would implement a no-confrontation policy. They're worried about the legal liability they may have if an employee/shoplifter confrontation ends in injury or death.
But there's an even more fundamental question we have to ask if we want to know,
And that question is:
THE REACTION
If you're a regular person, you might wonder how corporations or politicians or law enforcement could possibly benefit from increased shoplifting.
But let's imagine for a moment that you're not a regular, psychologically stable, law-abiding citizen.
Let's imagine instead that you're a psychopathic eugenicist hell-bent on bringing in a technocratic police state, one in which you have total control of the economy and every transaction taking place within it.
In that case, your agenda might be very different from that of the average person.
You may, for example,
And if that's the case, then, boy, is a surge in shoplifting (or even the perception of such a surge) just the solution for you...!
Well, retailers are increasingly deciding to lock up their products, effectively treating shoppers as criminals-until-proven-otherwise and putting a further inconvenience in their shopping experience.
And, as a result,
Other stores are using the shoplifting scare as cover for putting up biometric scanners (for the purpose of identifying repeat shoplifters, you understand).
And yet others are using the threat of thieves as an excuse to expedite their cashless payment agenda, preparing the public for the future (or is that the present?) in which you'll have to download an app or scan your palm print in order to enter a store and all the items you leave with will be automatically charged to your account.
Yes, as usual, the real action in this unfolding drama is in the reaction.
Whether the problem of retail theft is authentic or completely synthetic, whether it's a natural phenomenon or part of a grand conspiracy, whether it's actually happening or just made-up media hype is beside the point.
The point is that once you feel the problem to be real, the would-be social engineers know that they can present their pre-arranged "solution" to this problem to a terrified public and the majority will go along with it.
THE REAL SOLUTION
So, assuming we don't want to go down the technocrats' pre-determined route of increasing surveillance and cashless technology to "solve" the shoplifting crisis,
One of the simplest things to note about the most brazen acts of organized shoplifting is that there is a common denominator to these events:
You don't see flash mobs of dozens of people looting the local luxury retailer in Smalltown, Nowheresville, if only because such rural communities don't tend to have luxury retailers.
So, on the personal level, taking a cue from Jason Aldean's recent surprise number one hit song, perhaps one way to insulate yourself from this problem is to relocate out of the big cities.
But on a broader level, we can (as usual) take our cue about which direction we should be heading in by simply doing the exact opposite of what the Powers That Shouldn't Be want us to do.
So,
You will already know what this peer-to-peer economy entails:
And you will already know how to do this:
This is what the technocrats fear the most:
We know what we need to be doing, so what are we waiting for?
Let's go out there and do it...!
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