As a guard at the new Toys "R" Us flagship store in Times Square, Alvin Foote has seen plenty of bold thieves this season. There are the children who stuff video games under their shirts. There was the man who wheeled a shopping cart into the store with a large gift box in it and then tried to wheel it out again full of toys without passing the registers.
Then there was the man who tried to steal the giant stuffed giraffe.
"The head was coming out of the jacket, so we caught him," Foote said.
In a year of shopping woes that include plunging profit margins and unseasonably warm weather, add a rising tide of shoplifters to the threats that retailers have had to combat.
The number of people on the make for the proverbial five-fingered discount always surges during holiday times as stores grow more crowded and thieves find it easier to blend in without detection.
This year, however, loss-prevention experts see a convergence of factors, including a weakening economy, psychological stress from the Sept. 11 attacks and the trend toward longer store hours with smaller staffs, that may swell the ranks of shoplifters much more than usual.
Not until retailers do their final inventories in January will the damage done this season really be known, if ever. Major retailers are reluctant to discuss crime in their stores.
"We hate to talk about anything negative this time of year," said a Bloomingdale's spokeswoman, Anne Keating. Several chains including Best Buys and Wilson's: The Leather Experts say they have seen no recent increase in theft.
Losses from shoplifting gradually rose over recent years to about $13 billion in 2000, the most recent figure available, according to the University of Florida Retail Security Survey. More current statistics are difficult to come by because most large cities — including Los Angeles and New York — do not track shoplifting as a separate category but include it in petty larceny.
Chicago police say retail theft is down 10 percent for all of 2001, but have no numbers available for the last three months alone — the period in which retailers noticed more shoplifting.