Organized Retail Theft 101: What Is It and What Can Be Done About It?

Fill me in: Organized retail theft rates have spiked significantly in the past year, affecting communities across the nation. This theft is perpetrated by organized criminal rings that steal large amounts of goods from businesses of all types and sizes with the intent to resell them.

These crimes are not the work of your average shoplifters stealing a small amount for personal use, but the work of criminal groups stealing for greed—skirting the law and often employing violence to steal as much as possible for as big a payoff as possible.

These groups are taking advantage of outdated state laws regarding prosecution and sentencing, which allow their members, in many cases, to avoid any prosecution altogether. These laws allow criminal rings to operate with impunity across county and state lines to avoid prosecution, hitting store after store and accumulating massive quantities of stolen goods.

These stolen goods are passed off as legitimate merchandise and sold in huge quantities on an array of online platforms.

What’s the impact?

• $700,000: Organized retail crime cost stores an average of over $700,000 per $1 billion in sales in 2020–up more than 50% in the last five years.
• 54%: Fifty-four percent of small business owners experienced an increase in shoplifting in 2021.

What can be done? To address this, swift action is needed to close the market for stolen goods and to enable the arrest and prosecution of offenders.

• At the federal level, Congress must act to require disclosure of high-volume third-party sellers in online marketplaces and establish transparency that will minimize such coordinated exploitation of online marketplaces through the Integrity, Notification, and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces (INFORM) Consumers Act (H.R. 5502).
• At the state level, states need to more clearly define the crime “organized retail theft” to provide prosecutors with the legal tools needed to target organized theft rings. States should also take action to aggressively prosecute organized retail theft by passing legislation to enable the aggregation and prosecution of offenses across state lines, and by establishing statewide task forces to take down organized retail theft rings. States also need to adjust the thresholds for the value of goods stolen to trigger a felony charge to prevent thieves from avoiding prosecution and a heavier charge.

What the Chamber is doing: The Chamber is urging policymakers to implement changes to local, state, and federal policy to help curb the rise in organized retail theft.

On March 29th, the Chamber sent a letter to Members of Congress, the National Governors Association, National Conference of State Legislatures, and the National District Attorneys Association on the pressing need for such reforms to address rising retail theft and organized retail crime.

The Chamber has also been engaged with state and local chambers to raise awareness on the issue and advocate in their respected regions.

Additional resources:

• U.S. Chamber of Commerce Urges Action to Combat Organized Retail Crime
• Rising Retail Theft: Here’s What Business Owners Need to Know

Story by Rachel Ledbetter, U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Rachel is a senior manager on the communications and strategy team.