Are retail closures caused by shoplifting or other factors? Well, yes.

As you might guess, the “issue” is not really the “issue”; America has not grown more interested in the vagaries of the retail business. Rather, drugstore closings are just a proxy battle in a bigger war over criminal justice. The right likes to share viral videos of brazen shoplifters, and blames store closures on feckless progressive cities that have stopped prosecuting these scofflaws. The left says the real culprit is corporate consolidation.

You would probably like me to resolve this question, but alas, for reasons I will explain, this is probably impossible. What I can do is lay out the evidence for both propositions — and the reasons to be skeptical of the strong claims for either side.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the only people who actually know why these stores are closing — the executives at major drugstore chains — aren’t necessarily going to tell the public the whole truth.

Which brings us to the second point: Many events have lots of causes. The Internet has cut into drugstore sales, and it might be that a number of urban drugstores could survive falling sales or rising shoplifting, but not both. That gives retailers and analysts a fair amount of latitude to say that one or the other is “the reason” a store closed, but we should not be so binary.

And while it would be nice if we could resolve the question by examining shoplifting statistics, shoplifting often goes unreported, because most retail insurance doesn’t cover it (and if it did, the premiums charged would equal the expected annual losses). Both retailers and individuals are probably not disposed to bother filing a report in jurisdictions where the local district attorney is unlikely to prosecute, further fogging up the data. And the coronavirus pandemic had all sorts of odd effects on crime, making it even harder to know whether there is a problem and, if so, how big.

All that said, shoplifting does seem to be on the rise, and lax prosecution has probably made that problem worse in some areas, though other factors are also contributing, such as the opioid epidemic, and the ability to resell goods on the Internet. It would be pretty surprising if reluctance to aggressively prosecute shoplifters had no effect on the number of shoplifters. It would also be surprising if the tent encampments now common in several major urban areas didn’t increase shoplifting. And while the effect on store closures might be marginal, It would be quite surprising indeed if an increase in shoplifting didn’t affect at least some decisions about store closures, because that “shrinkage” flows straight through to the profit-and-loss statement. Both casual observation and empirical data indicate that neighborhoods with higher crime tend to have less retail, presumably because it makes businesses less profitable and scares customers away.

Finally, it’s worth noting that even when the retail stays, crime is bad for the store and the customer. Stores that risk robbery or shoplifting take defensive measures: putting bulletproof glass around registers, pulling higher-value items from the shelves, or locking those items up so that you have to find a clerk every time you want to get new razors. Those actions can depress the profitability of the store, or force managers to raise prices, both of which leave the business more vulnerable to closure. And when businesses close, they can make the neighborhood more vulnerable to crime.

So, for all the energy that has been poured into debating this question, we don’t really need to answer it to know that shoplifting is bad — or that authorities should probably do what they can to keep it at reasonable levels.