The holiday shopping season is also the peak shoplifting season. Stores are launching an unprecedented fight to do something about the $31- to $37-billion-a-year problem.
USA Today points out:
Stymied by police and courts that are often unwilling or unable to tackle crimes they may see as petty theft, the retailers build their own cases against the gangs, connecting crimes that often cross county and state lines. To help document the scope of this organized thievery, investigators for Walgreens, Target, Safeway, Limited Brands and others even follow thieves from their stores to the "fences" where they sell the goods.
The FBI and retail groups expect that by the end of this year, every major retailer will be able to share crime data -- including photos of suspects from their store cameras -- in a computer database. Beall's, a Florida-based chain, and other retailers now track shoplifting gangs using the database, which has already helped link a suspect to thefts of $500,000 worth of goods from 12 retailers. The man is still a fugitive, but warrants for his arrest are out in three states.
"Retailers have now said, 'Enough's enough,' " says Joseph LaRocca, vice president of loss prevention at the National Retail Federation.
Retail theft cost the industry more than $37 billion last year, up from $31 billion in 2003, according to a University of Florida report. It is especially problematic during the holiday season when overcrowded stores make shoplifting more difficult to detect and fraudulent returns easier to conceal. The retail federation said this month that retailers expect to lose $3.5 billion due to just fraudulent returns this holiday season alone.
Forbes magazine reports:
When it comes to retail theft, problems can take the form of both inside and outside jobs. Nearly half of the $37 billion that companies lost last year came from employee theft, including the growing problem of gift card fraud. As an industry segment that's at $18 billion a year and growing, gift cards are valuable sales tools. They can also be exploited by counterfeiters and thieves who steal them and resell them online. Employees sometimes have the access to exchange real cards for blanks, a particular problem at holiday time, when stores hire a lot of temporary help.
When it comes to screening potential employees, most companies are meticulous when it comes to verifying past employment and performing criminal background checks, the NRF found. But they're much more lax on things like driving history and credit checks, two issues known as potential red flags.
Retail theft is also getting more sophisticated. One of the increasingly alarmist trends is what the industry calls "Organized Retail Crime," usually perpetrated by groups of five to seven crooks who know a certain area intimately, and who are well versed in store security procedures.
"They are very savvy about where the penalties are greatest," says Daniel Butler, vice president of retail operations at the NRF. He says educated gangs that know penalties get more severe for thefts of $2,500 or more will be sure to steal $2,400 worth of goods at several different stores in the area.
Return Fraud
A National Retail Federation survey says stores are getting socked by "return fraud." Most often it happens when somebody steals an item, then returns it to the store and gets cash.
The NRF says:
The losses are staggering: according to the survey [PDF], retailers can expect to lose $3.5 billion from return fraud this holiday season. This year, the retail industry stands to lose $9.6 billion from this immoral, and often illegal, practice.
"Retailers have often viewed lenient return policies as a cost of doing business with honest shoppers," said Joseph LaRocca, NRF Vice President of Loss Prevention. "Unfortunately, due to an increase in return fraud, retailers are being forced to strike a delicate balance between servicing loyal shoppers and discouraging opportunistic criminals."
According to the survey, the most popular form of return fraud is the return of stolen merchandise, which 95.2 percent of retailers have experienced in the past year. Retailers say they have also been plagued by returns of merchandise that was originally purchased with fraudulent or counterfeit tender (69.1 percent) and returns using counterfeit receipts (52.4 percent).
Additionally, stores commonly find consumers attempting to return merchandise that has been used but is not defective. This practice, called "wardrobing," has affected more than half of companies (56.0 percent) in the past year and can include returns of everything from special occasion dresses to laptop computers. Retailers often cannot resell this merchandise at face value and are forced to either heavily discount or discard the used merchandise. Also, the unethical practice of wardrobing frequently makes merchandise in the most popular sizes, colors and models unavailable to other customers who would like to purchase the product.
Return fraud has become so rampant in the industry that more than two-thirds of retailers (69.1 percent) said their companies' return policies have been changed to specifically address the issue.
Holiday Weight Gain
There is an old story that the average American gains 5 to 10 pounds between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But a 2000 study by the National Institutes of Health says Americans probably gain about 1 pound during this season -- but we tend not to lose it over time. Lots of gyms are busy on and right after Thanksgiving.
Here is a Web site that helps you calculate how much you would have to walk to burn off the calories that you eat on Thanksgiving. The meal I anticipated would force me to walk 25 miles. I am rethinking my plan.
The Truth About Thanksgiving Turkey
As the Chicago Tribune points out, it is highly unlikely that the first Thanksgiving included turkey:
For starters, there is no evidence that turkey was on a menu that more likely starred venison, ducks, geese and shellfish. There might have been stewed pumpkin, but certainly no pumpkin pie in the then almost certainly ovenless Plymouth Colony. Cranberry sauce was as unknown to the colonists and the Indians, and neither yams nor white potatoes were grown yet in the New World. There is nothing to suggest the Native Americans popped corn and bestowed it on their colonizers. And there likely was no groaning board around which diners gathered.
"Did they even have a table? Maybe," said Elizabeth Pleck, a historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has written extensively on the history of Thanksgiving.
[...] The modern Thanksgiving tradition is rooted in a 165-year-old historical misunderstanding that goes far beyond the question of whether turkey was served. There was no connection made between Pilgrims and Thanksgiving until 1841, when Alexander Young published a book in Boston containing a letter written by Edward Winslow, one of the Plymouth Colony leaders, on Dec. 11, 1621.
The letter includes one paragraph in which Winslow described a three-day harvest celebration attended by the 50 colonists and some 90 Indians.
On his own, Young decided to add an asterisk, a fateful footnote describing the event as "the first Thanksgiving" and dragging in the unmentioned turkey by stating "they no doubt feasted on the wild turkey as well as venison." In essence, Young wrongly conflated the English tradition of a secular harvest festival with the very specific Puritan tradition of observing holy days of Thanksgiving, which occurred primarily in church and only when occasions warranted.
Does Turkey Really Make you Sleepy?
It is commonly believed that eating turkey will make you sleepy. There is some truth to it -- but the real issue may be all of those carbs that come with the meal, plus maybe a little, or a lot, of alcohol.
HowStuffWorks explains:
Turkey does have the makings of a natural sedative in it, an amino acid called tryptophan. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid, meaning that the body cannot manufacture it. The body has to get tryptophan and other essential amino acids from food. Tryptophan helps the body produce the B-vitamin niacin, which, in turn, helps the body produce serotonin, a remarkable chemical that acts as a calming agent in the brain and plays a role in sleep. So you might think that if you eat a lot of turkey, your body would produce more serotonin and you would feel calm and want a nap.
That was the conclusion that led many people to begin taking a dietary supplement of tryptophan in the 1980s as a way to treat insomnia, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned tryptophan supplements in 1990 because of an outbreak of eosinophilia-myalgia, a syndrome that causes muscle pain and even death. The FDA said contaminated tryptophan supplements caused the outbreak.
But nutritionists and other experts say that the tryptophan in turkey probably won't trigger the body to produce more serotonin because tryptophan works best on an empty stomach. The tryptophan in a Thanksgiving turkey has to vie with all the other amino acids that the body is trying to use. So only part of the tryptophan makes it to the brain to help produce serotonin.
Turkey Facts from InfoPlease.com
Surviving Family Stress
Thanksgiving get-togethers can be wonderful and stressful all at the same time. Parents pressure kids about the future, kids might want to visit other folks while they are home, hosts expect meals to look as though Martha Stewart cooked them.
Here are some tips for how to lower the stress and enjoy the day.
And here are 10 tips for a stress-free meal, especially if you are dieting.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting
is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials
from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis.
When the information comes directly from another source, it will be
attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is
fact-checked, but depends upon the accuracy and integrity of the
original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.
I believe you can still buy it in supplement form....
