by JUDD LEGUM
A wave of shoplifting crimes is attracting front-page news, while the $15bn stolen by corporations from workers receives no coverage at all
In the United States, only certain types of theft are newsworthy.
For example, on 14 June 2021, a reporter for KGO-TV in San Francisco tweeted a cellphone video of a man in Walgreens filling a garbage bag with stolen items and riding his bicycle out of the store. According to San Francisco’s crime database, the value of the merchandise stolen in the incident was between $200 and $950.
According to an analysis by Fair, a media watchdog, this single incident generated 309 stories between 14 June and 12 July. A search by Popular Information reveals that, since 12 July, there have been dozens of additional stories mentioning the incident. The theft has been covered in a slew of major publications including the New York Times, USA Today and CNN.
In most coverage, the video is presented as proof that there are no consequences for shoplifting in San Francisco. But the man in the video, Jean Lugo-Romero, was arrested about a week later and faces 15 charges, including “grand theft, second-degree burglary and shoplifting”. He was recently transferred to county jail where he is being held without bond.
Just a few months earlier, in November 2020, Walgreens paid a $4.5m settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging that it stole wages from thousands of its employees in California between 2010 and 2017. The lawsuit alleged that Walgreens “rounded down employees’ hours on their timecards, required employees to pass through security checks before and after their shift without compensating them for time worked, and failed to pay premium wages to employees who were denied legally required meal breaks”.
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