No One at the Apple Store Wants to Talk About Retail Theft

Earlier this month a brazen daytime theft from an Apple Store in Emeryville, CA went viral on Twitter. Here’s the video in case you missed it.

This guy yanks & steals dozens of iPhones from @Apple store at @BayStEmeryville in broad daylight, then casually walks past parked @EmeryvillePD car before leaving in Hyundai Elantra. 📹 courtesy @YayAreaNews pic.twitter.com/JShyutGB0y

— Henry K. Lee (@henrykleeKTVU) February 7, 2024

Three miles away in Berkeley is another Apple store which has also been robbed twice so far this year. Last week authorities announced they had arrested two men in connection with the robberies.

Two men have been arrested in connection with multiple organized retail theft-related crimes from Apple Stores in the cities of Berkeley and Emeryville in four months, District Attorney Pamela Price announced Friday. 

Tyler Anthony Mims, 23, and Undre Deshaun Railey, 28, have been charged with multiple felony counts of commercial burglary, grand theft, and misdemeanor counts of organized retail theft in concert.

Also last week a reporter for the SF Standard went to the Emeryville store to ask employees about the theft. He was not given a warm welcome.

I pulled up to Emeryville’s Bay Street Apple Store on a dreary Wednesday morning and wandered into the store, introducing myself politely to staffers as a reporter. But before I could finish my finely tuned “please talk to me” pitch, workers clammed up, said they didn’t know anything about thefts and essentially ran away. 

Seconds later, a manager steamed over to me, telling me I’d have to email corporate. I already had—Apple’s representatives still haven’t responded. Perhaps they never will?

Reporter Garrett Leahy gave up on talking to employees and tried to talk to customers. Then he was kicked out of the store for “making unnecessary noise.” He got more information at a nearby Victoria’s Secret store where an employee said the store is robbed about twice a month and frequently the value of stolen items exceeds $10,000.

Leahy then went up the road to the Berkeley Apple store and tried again. Skipping the employees he went straight to the customers this time but before he could even get names a manager threw him out. Once again he got more info from an employee at a shoe store next door.

Like at other shops that day, the employee I met said she couldn’t provide her name without corporate approval but said theft is a constant scourge of the Fourth Street Apple Store.

“It happens all the time,” she said. “I see it, like, once a week.”

That’s a lot more theft from this store than the two that made the newspapers. What I still don’t understand is why corporations are so hesitant to talk about this problem.  Are they worried about attracting even more thieves once word gets out that they are used to this? Or is this being hushed up as a PR problem? I feel like it’s the latter but I really don’t get why. They are the victims of a recurring crime. It makes the city look bad and the cops look MIA but how does that make the Apple store itself look bad?

It seems to me we’d be better off if the public had a clear sense of just how often this sort of thing happens, instead of occasionally when there happens to be a video that goes viral. I suspect people would be shocked and then maybe once the collective shock wore off, something would gradually start to change. Instead this kind of theft is treated like a family secret. Even reporters can’t get a straight answer. They are told to call corporate and corporate never calls them back. As a result, most people don’t know how bad it really is and nothing seems to change.