To steal a shitty beer
Plus: The brewing ballad of Detective Dick Harder!
Correction [12/7/23 5:07pm]: This edition was originally published under the headline “To steal a Steel Reserve.” However, the beer in question is clearly Icehouse, an also-shitty brand that is, indisputably, not the same as Steel Reserve. I’d say this will never happen again, but I don’t even really know what happened; I just mixed the brands up for some reason. I’ve updated all references to Steel Reserve to Icehouse, and the headline as well. Fingers regrets the error more than you will ever know.
Have you heard about the retail-theft crisis sweeping the nation and pushing America’s helpless widdle megacorporations within billions of dollars of missing their quarterly earnings forecasts? Of course you have! It’s dominated the headlines of major media outlets for the past 18 months thanks to relentless kvetching from Walgreens, Target, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and other huge companies, and sensational “reports” from trade groups like the National Retail Federation and the California Retail Association.
Not only are vast shareholder fortunes being erased one stolen tube of toothpaste at a time; our precious norms of unfettered consumption are, too. “Brazen and sometimes hostile shoplifters [and] organized theft rings” are ruining the vibes of shopping in America, argued reactionary dipshit and *sobs* New York Times Opinion columnist Pamela Paul in a thinly sourced dispatch this past August. “Stores simply feel less safe.”
We’ll come back to Spamela’s feelings in a moment. But first, the facts. Shoplifters didn’t seize the pandemic as an opportunity to knock over the nation’s convenience stores and supermarkets, as many retail executives and their fellow travelers would like you to believe. In reality, most of the country saw a net decrease in shoplifting over the past few years: the NRF’s own data clocks average annual inventory “shrink,” which includes theft, at 1.57% of retail sales last year, which is a smidge more than 2021 (1.44%), and a smidge less than 2019 (1.62%). And earlier this week, the trade group quietly retracted an incendiary claim from its influential April 2023 report that “organized retail crime” drove $45 billion in collective losses in 2021, admitting that this assertion was based exclusively on unverified, two-year-old Congressional testimony of another industry advocate. Oops!
Of course, by now, the damage has already been done. In June, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance held hearings on this (exaggerated) “threat to public safety.” In September, California governor and future former Democratic candidate for president Gavin Newsom announced the state would grant $267 million to cities to fight the (mostly fake) scourge of shoplifting. Innumerable Fox News uncles and Facebook aunts have been fed videos of one-off shoplifting incidents and told they’re evidence of broad moral decay that can only be stanched with state violence.1
Most relevant to our purposes: as a result of this searing national spotlight on shoplifting, stores have begun locking up tallboys of Ice House.
Tipster Matt C. recently snapped these photos at a Food Lion in northern Virginia. “First they came for our razors and deodorants,” he texted the FingersTip Line in late October. “Individual lock boxes for $3 tall boys is so out-of-pocket.”
He’s right, of course, and maybe even more so than he realizes. For the uninitiated, the point of these infernal contraptions is to render valuable products within more difficult to steal and/or resell by shoplifters. Icehouse is one of the worst beers that has ever rolled off the canning line of an American brewery, and its rock-bottom pricing reflects that. Beats by Dre, these tallboys ain’t. The margin on this kind of mass-market, bang-for-buck beer is already thin, and may even be erased by the extra labor and materials required to lock it up.2
But there’s a more pernicious absurdity at play here. Return to Pamela Paul’s pearl-clutching take in the Times, which relies on debunked data and vibes-based analysis. The security theater of battened-down beers (or lozenges, moisturizer, whatever) is highly visible and inconvenient to rank-and-file customers. I’m somewhat persuaded by the argument that it makes shopping less pleasant. But for all the whining Paul (et al.) have done about the erosion of the social contract and the shareholder losses that this supposed “organized retail theft” wave has supposedly created, they never seem to have any column inches to spare for the many-times-bigger wage thefts that these same major retail firms carry out in the course of normal business.3
A 2021 analysis by
at of the Nexis news database showed that in the first 11 months of 2021, US publications had run 11,631 stories about shoplifting, and just 2,009 stories mentioning wage theft. “The disproportionately low media coverage for wage theft is partially due to lack of media interest,” wrote Legum, “[b]ut it is also a product of grossly inadequate resources for enforcement.” There are just 765 Department of Labor investigators tasked with protecting 143 million workers from wage theft, according to a 2021 report from NBC News, a laughable ratio that gets all the more outrageous when compared to the estimated $15 billion that firms stiff workers out of annually. Less enforcement leads to fewer convictions, which means fewer headlines. Politicians demand more militarized policing based on splashy shoplifting claims, corporate execs dodge responsibility for bad business decisions, and the rest of us get hosed. Lather, rinse, repeat.I’m not saying I should be allowed to steal an Icehouse whenever I want one, which is never. Shoplifting isn’t great, please don’t do it, etc. But locking up shitty beer sends a clear signal to casual observers that the social fabric is fraying faster than before, and that poor people swiping Icehouse are to blame. That’s misleading by orders of magnitude. Wage theft is a lot harder to see than tallboys tethered to the supermarket shelves, but vastly more harmful to many more Americans, even in the compassionless economic terms in which Paul and her incurious ilk in the chattering class couch their knee-jerk conservatism. What could be more out-of-pocket than that?
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🕵️♀️ The brewing ballad of Detective Dick Harder
Last week we discussed the bizarre saga swirling in upstate New York, where a man named Thomas M. McCorry—who appears to be one and the same with Constellation Brands beer division senior vice president Tom McCorry—was recently arrested and charged with criminal impersonation for allegedly harassing victims as a fake law-enforcement officer named Investigator Richard Harder. Or as he’s known here at Fingers HQ: Detective Dick Harder.
Beer Marketer’s Insights first connected the dots that Constellation’s McCorry was the arrested man in its 11/29 INSIGHTS Express newsletter, citing several unnamed sources and company statement that kinda-sorta confirmed the connection. (Neither Constellation, nor McCorry himself, has replied to Fingers’ inquiries.) More circumstantial evidence has since emerged that suggests the executive responsible for financially facilitating Modelo’s historic ascendance is indeed the guy who cops say has been corresponding with victims as Richard Harder.