Flutterby™! : Retail theft and food deserts

In one of my posts mentioning how much of the shoplifting mania of the last few years was manufactured outrage (and, it's been suggested, a lot of that was managers (presumably getting paid while) looking the other way while stuff disappeared off the loading dock, rather than going out the front door, theft can come from a lot of sources.

So, yeah, it's facile to say "sure, the reasons we don't have grocery stores in poor areas is shrinkage", but... the convenience store at the end of my white upper middle class street used to carry some produce, no longer does, and I'm pretty sure the cause isn't shoplifting. So I decided to dig in a bit. (Quickly) Read a few more than I'm linking to here...

Food Deserts: Evaluating Grocery Stores and Bus Accessibility using GIS in Madison, Wisconsin Masrudy Omri Brian Resch Laura Gundlach and William G. Gartner discusses the issues with mobility in poor neighborhoods impacting the supermarket model.

Do residents of food deserts express different food buying preferences compared to residents of food oases? A mixed-methods analysis delves into different buying preferences in poor neighborhoods, and how time and budget are big factors between the demographics of food oasis vs food desert neighborhoods and, yes, does acknowledge that from a consumer standpoint theft was a consideration.

My take-away is that, yeah, there's shrinkage in stores in poor neighborhoods, but the relationship is quite a bit more complex than that. And the story about shoplifting in the last few years doesn't add upt.