Organized crime groups are behind grocery store theft across Canada
The Retail Council of Canada is calling grocery store theft a national crisis, with losses now approaching $10 billion annually across the grocery sector and it’s only growing.
Honestly it sounds more like a crisis for the retail council of Canada rather than a national crisis.
“Eastern European organized crime has certainly been involved, and this isn’t just a big city problem, it’s happening straight across the country,” says CTV News crime specialist, Mark Mendelson.
It’s Canada so of course they’re going to be racist about it as well.
Watch out, Canadians. Eastern Europeans are causing a national crisis by taking advantage of our assault on labor.
“People are running away, going to a car right away and giving that product to whoever’s in the car, in exchange for something. Its either drugs or money,” according to Ottawa Police Chief, Eric Stubbs
Eastern European drug addicts.
This month, Guelph police arrested a man who they claim swapped out expensive products for cheaper ones at self-checkouts. Police claim that the individual in question, would scan items that cost less than one dollar, in exchange for baby formula priced at $97 dollars each.
BABY FORMULA COSTS $97 FUCKING DOLLARS???
They’re right, this is a national crisis.
Just last August, in Windsor, Ont. more than $220,000 worth of beef was stolen from a parked tractor trailer. The large-scale heist is another example of lucrative grocery crimes on the rise.
There are differing opinions on where items like black market beef are ending up. Mendelson and others who spoke to CTV News believe that some restaurants struggling to turn a profit are likely purchasing stolen goods. In some cases, smaller grocery stores and restaurants might not even realize they’re purchasing stolen food for their establishments.
Yeah sure they don’t realize this. They’re honest businessmen, buying misc meat off the back of a trailer in an alley. They wouldn’t be the “organized” part of this crime. Actually, they’re victims.
Fitting for Canada, it looks like they’re pulling a “the brothers Brent and Wayne Gretzky have a combined 2,861 NHL points” misrepresentation. The narrative is presenting self-checkout abuse as a major factor, with the one example being a $97 to $1 item swap. However, if we compare that to the beef heist example later, the individual who exploited the self-checkout would have to successfully pull off that swap nearly 2,300 times in order to match the amount netted from the one beef heist.
Which says to me, they’re conflating small beans self-checkout abuse with larger scale heists to justify loss prevention targeting vulnerable Canadians instead of the organized crime that, as OP alluded to, are more likely to be politically and economically connected.
I bet it’s less this, and more that it’s way easier to arrest and prosecute individual shoplifters than chase organized crime. Only the former happens on camera and usually with at least one witness around.
There’s that, and then there’s the fact that many of the people, families and corpos are connected to said organized crime themselves.