It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Clark Howard Show where our mission is to serve

you.

And to power you in knowledge, you can make better financial decisions in your life.

And I want to start out today with something I have noticed lately.

And it's worth some words.

You go into a store and so much of the merchandise you can see, but you can't pick up off the shelf.

This thing of stuff being locked up is a plague.

In quarterly earnings reports, company after company has talked, it's a retail enterprise.

Has talked about the problems they're having with what's called the shrink.

That's things that are stolen either by employees or by customers.

Pretty much all of us would have to be under a rock to have not seen one of the videos

of theft rings coming into a store with shock and awe with 15, 20, 30 thieves.

They've already scoped the store.

Everybody has an assigned area and they grab expensive, resellable merchandise and run

out of the door.

This is such a problem that you and I, the 90, 97, 99 percent, whatever percent of us

are honest people who are walking in a store just to do our shopping, we are being inconvenienced

to a degree that is unreal.

I was in a target store the other day that had underwear locked up.

Okay, really?

There's a run on Haynes underwear?

Yes.

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