Walk into almost any retail store today and something has quietly shifted. Merchandise sits behind locked cases, staffing feels thinner, and there’s a tension in the air that wasn’t there a few years ago. Retail workers feel it too — more than 40% say they’re considering leaving their jobs within the next year specifically because of safety concerns, according to research from the Loss Prevention Research Council, a University of Florida-affiliated group, and security company Verkada.
But the industry’s own numbers tell a more complicated story than a straight line toward crisis.
In October 2025, the National Retail Federation reported that shoplifting incidents had jumped 18% in 2024 compared with 2023, with threats or acts of violence during those incidents up 17% over the same period. That report, drawing on 70 companies representing $1.3 trillion in sales, painted a picture of an industry losing ground.
Then, on July 30, 2026 — in a report that got far less attention than the alarming 2025 numbers — the NRF released updated figures covering all of 2025. Shoplifting incidents were actually down 12.4% compared with 2024. Retail merchandise theft fell 8.1%. “After years of rising in-store theft, retailers are beginning to see levels stabilize, driven by investments in technology and employee training,” said David Johnston, the NRF’s vice president for asset protection and retail operations.
That’s not the whole story, though. The same report found that while traditional shoplifting eased, other forms of theft kept climbing: cargo theft, phone scams, gift card fraud, and organized retail crime schemes that increasingly target the digital side of retail rather than the sales floor. Half of surveyed retailers reported issues with repeat offenders; 40% cited organized-retail-crime-related incidents; and 37% dealt with “walkout” or “pushout” theft, where someone simply leaves with merchandise without attempting to conceal it. In Johnston’s words, “significant challenges remain as organized criminals continue to exploit vulnerabilities throughout the retail environment.”
Complicating the picture further: 63% of retailers say they report fewer than half of theft incidents to police, largely because individual losses often fall below felony thresholds or because they don’t expect a meaningful law-enforcement response. That means even the industry’s own numbers likely understate how often theft happens — while simultaneously showing that the specific category of shoplifting the public tends to picture (someone walking out with merchandise) is, for the first time in years, trending down.
For the people working the floor, the distinction between “shoplifting is down” and “the job feels safe” doesn’t necessarily hold. Violence and aggression tied to theft — not just its raw frequency — is what workers describe as the harder problem. That’s borne out in organizing efforts far removed from any security vendor’s marketing: New York passed the Retail Worker Safety Act after the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union brought workers to testify about being followed, harassed, and touched by customers on the job. The law, signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, now requires retail employers with 10 or more workers to adopt a violence-prevention plan and provide annual de-escalation and active-shooter training, with employers above 500 workers statewide required to install panic buttons. The United Food and Commercial Workers, representing 1.2 million grocery and retail workers nationally, has pushed similar legislation elsewhere, including bills addressing chronic understaffing at self-checkout stations, which the union argues leaves lone employees exposed.
At the federal level, the retail industry’s preferred policy fix — the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, aimed at improving coordination between local, state, and federal law enforcement on cross-jurisdictional theft rings — has passed the U.S. House and is awaiting Senate action, with the NRF actively lobbying for its passage.
Maryland didn’t wait on Congress. The state passed its own Organized Retail Theft Act in 2025, creating a new felony that lets prosecutors combine thefts committed across multiple counties — including Calvert and Charles — into a single case, provided they occurred within a 90-day window and totaled at least $1,500. The law took effect Oct. 1, 2025, after Maryland saw shoplifting incidents climb even faster than the national trend: a 25.55% jump statewide from 2023 to 2024, compared with the NRF’s 18% national figure for the same period. “The reality of retail theft, crime in our county, people sometimes don’t understand the victims, and what I would say to you is the victims are us,” Prince George’s County Sheriff John Carr said while the bill was still before the General Assembly.
Southern Maryland has its own version of the pattern the NRF’s newest report describes nationally — repeat offenders hitting multiple stores over time rather than one-off incidents. In Charles County, sheriff’s investigators arrested a 58-year-old Waldorf man in June after tracing a string of thefts across home-improvement stores, optical shops, and other businesses countywide, recovering stolen lawn mowers, ceiling fans, air purifiers, jump starters, and eyeglasses. It’s a small-scale, local echo of what the NRF’s 2026 report found nationally: half of surveyed retailers now cite repeat offenders, not one-time shoplifters, as their central concern.
Retailers, meanwhile, are putting real money behind prevention. Per the NRF’s newest report, 72% of retailers have increased investment in management training and 65% in employee training as workplace-violence-prevention measures, while 61% are investing in risk-intelligence technology. The broader security-technology market reflects that spending: RFID retail-tracking technology alone is estimated at a $14.5 billion global market in 2025, on pace to reach nearly $15.9 billion in 2026. Separate industry surveys of retail executives — including one commissioned by security company Axon earlier this year — found similar sentiment, with 90% of retail leaders calling workplace safety a top priority and more than 4 in 5 favoring increased security spending, tracking closely with what the NRF’s own independent research shows.
None of this adds up to a single, tidy narrative. Shoplifting itself may be stabilizing. But the workers on the floor are dealing with a threat landscape that’s arguably harder to see coming — fraud schemes, organized theft rings, and the kind of aggression that doesn’t always show up in a shoplifting count. The retail safety story, in other words, isn’t getting simpler. It’s just changing shape.
