Will Fox 'News' Retract Their False 'Retail Theft' Stories?
Remember back when retailers were blaming "disappointing" quarterly earnings reports on a massive crime wave of retail thieves swarming throughout the nation's shopping hellholes?
Whoops. Reuters is reporting that might not be exactly true:
The main lobbying group for U.S. retailers retracted its claim that "organized retail crime" accounted for nearly half of all inventory losses in 2021 after finding that incorrect data was used for its analysis.
A spokesperson for the National Retail Federation said Tuesday that the organization had removed the sentence from its report on organized retail crime published in April. It produced the report in collaboration with private security firm K2 Integrity.
According to NRF spokesperson Danielle Inman, the claim that organized crime accounted for nearly half of all inventory losses was based on two-year-old testimony from Ben Dugan, former president of the advocacy group Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail.
So the original data came from a former president of a group called CLEAR, which is a non-profit (yeah) "encouraging" cooperation between retail outlets and police departments.