Shoplifting a life-and-death
problem for bookstores
By Ayako Oguni
Mainichi Shimbun
March 24, 2003
For many struggling bookstores, shoplifting can be the last straw that breaks the stores financially. But the damage that theft causes for stores is often underestimated publicly, and in extreme cases, people have even heaped criticism on the people who have caught shoplifters -- like in one incident in Kawasaki earlier this year.
The case involved a third-year junior high school student who was caught stealing six comic books at a secondhand bookstore in Kawasaki on January 21. When the store alerted police, the boy tried to make a getaway, but while he was escaping, he ran into the path of a train and was killed.
Some people harshly criticized the storeowner for the store's actions afterwards, calling him a "murderer" and protesting that the boy was "merely shoplifting." But Kinya Shimazaki, president of the Bunkyodo bookstore chain and a strong opponent of shoplifting says that incidents like this are forcing stores into bankruptcy. He says a tough stance needs to be adopted.
"At our stores, we report shoplifters to police even if they are only elementary school students," Shimazaki says. "This is to make them understand the seriousness of crime.
"If someone is caught shoplifting, we don't quietly take them to a police box, or have a police officer come in through the back door. We have a uniformed police officer come in through the front door and then we hand the shoplifter over to him. We try to reduce the damage from shoplifting by making our firm stance widely known."
Some may argue that contacting the parents of young shoplifters is sufficient to deal with their crimes, but Shimazaki says that this doesn't work nowadays because of the attitude that the parents often adopt.
"When we contact parents and have them come to the store, some of them suddenly take the offensive and angrily say, 'It's only shoplifting,' or 'You just want us to pay the money, right?' This is the case for about 80 percent of parents. You can't always trust in the parents to properly teach their children."
Shimazaki's low tolerance toward shoplifters goes back a long way -- it was shoplifting, in fact, that got him into the book business in the first place.
"The reason I quit my job at a bank about 30 years ago and started helping out at the bookstore my father run was because the shop was on the brink of going into bankruptcy because of shoplifting," Shimazaki explains. "At the time our store measured about 33 square meters. We employed several part-time workers and when we had one staff member follow each customer that came into the store, we caught about 40 shoplifters in one month. However, most of them were adults and there were hardly any children. That's completely different now. Now a lot of shoplifting is from minors, including junior high school and high school students."
He says shoplifting has been a life-and-death problem for bookstores since long ago, and 'shoplifting bankruptcies' are an everyday occurrence. "If the shoplifting rate reaches 1 percent of all the books a store handles, it won't be able to survive. Shoplifting is one of the main reasons that year by year, about 5 percent of the nation's bookstores go out of business. At our 235 stores, shoplifting costs us about 400 million yen a year. Nationwide, the financial damage to bookstores is estimated at between 20 billion and 30 billion yen a year."
Shimazaki says that the type of thefts has become worse recently.
"In the past, there were a lot of cases where shoplifters would steal one or two books that they wanted to read, but recently people are stealing dozens of books so they can sell them."
A lot of the stolen books are passed on to "new secondhand-book stores" -- stores that sell secondhand books in new condition, says Shimazaki.
"When a new secondhand-book store appears, there is a tendency for shoplifting to increase at the other bookstores in the area," he says. "When the shoplifters are caught, they are usually found with expensive books and photo collections that they normally wouldn't read themselves. The books are sold to new secondhand-book stores that offer to buy them at high prices. These shoplifters will steal an entire series of a comic book. If there is just one book missing, they won't be able to sell the goods at a high price."
In some cases, says Shimazaki, book slips that are usually removed when the books are sold are still attached to the items in new secondhand-book stores, clearly indicating that they have been stolen.
Security labels are one way that some stores have countered the problem often used, but these are sometimes removed by thieves. Shimazaki says that ones that are embedded into books at the binding stage are more effective, but publishing companies are reluctant to take up this option because of the cost. This attitude needs to change, he says.
"It is the bookstores that are victimized by shoplifting, and for the publishers, it's a matter of profits. But recently new publications are being sold in new secondhand-book stores immediately after they are released, which is affecting the sales of the publishing companies as well. It is not just someone else's problem now. Shoplifting countermeasures are an issue for the whole book industry."