When all else fails, you can always count on CNN to beclown itself on any given day of the week, providing us with fresh reminders of why their ratings remain in the tank even after the numerous layoffs, line-up shuffles, and “leadership” changes they’ve made over the last several years.
These reminders often involve reporting by Jim Acosta, Brian Stelter, and/or pretty much anyone on their weekday morning crew. But this time around, the reminder came courtesy of their consumer reporter Nathaniel Meyersohn, who on Friday tweeted out a link to a story he wrote where he attempted to explain “what happened to the great shoplifting crisis”:
As you can see from the headline, Meyersohn declared that “America’s stores are winning the war on shoplifting.” He claims they’re winning it due to a combination of things, chief among them retailers correcting course on allegedly “overestimating their original losses”:
Mentions of “shrink” on companies’ earnings calls dropped 20% during the first two quarters of 2024 compared with the same period last year, according to an analysis by FactSet.
Shrink has been improving in large part because companies’ accounting of their merchandise has gotten more accurate.
At first, retailers underestimated how much merchandise they were losing. When they adjusted their metrics to compensate, they overestimated their original losses in some cases.
When it came to the actual reasons retailers are turning theft around, Meyersohn incredibly tried to suggest that the solutions they implemented, like locking up merch and reducing self-checkouts, only “may” have helped some:
Stores have also added ways to prevent theft, which may have been effective at reducing the problem, even if they frustrated shoppers. Companies locked up products and removed self-checkout stations.
It was only when you got about midway down the piece that you found out the reason it was written in the first place: to question whether there was ever a shoplifting crisis at all:
The change in retailers’ messaging around shrink this year shows that their efforts to address the problems are working. But it also raises questions about how severe their shoplifting problems were in the first place.
[…]
But the narrative that shoplifting exploded nationwide has been mostly unfounded. In reality, retail crime has not meaningfully gone up nationwide in the past few years, and it has even gone down in many places.
Hmm. I’m sure it was totally coincidental that this article questioning the shoplifting epidemic was published three days after the presidential debate during which GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump talked about the issue of rising crime and then was wrongly fact-checked on it by one of the co-moderators. Totally coincidental.
Whatever the case may be, Meyersohn got an earful from Twitter/X users who weren’t about to be gaslit:
All brought to you by Woke, Inc., something to think long and hard about before you head to the ballot box in November.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY