RFP Staff/NC Retail Merchants Association
♦ In Rowan County and in Salisbury especially, retailers are being banged hard by armies of shoplifters. Big box chain stores and even small local retailers are watching their profits dwindle due to an almost daily erosion of goods created by pilferage. Many retailers in Salisbury, where pilferage is acutely high, are forced to close their doors in due to the high overhead created by thieves. Who hasn’t seen or read about the organized gangs of shoplifters entering stores with shopping bags or pulling scams by returning purloined store goods and putting them on store gift cards?
Couple pilferage with costly leases (sometimes triple net leases like those in Downtown Salisbury), the area’s high poverty and minimal spendable income, the lack of safety, and you have a recipe for closing and moving elsewhere. A large retailer closing is poison to the city’s shrinking tax base. This new bill needs your support:
