Shoplifters stole from Macy’s in Center City at least 280 times last year, police records show

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The Macy’s store in Center City Philadelphia, set to close in March due to declining sales, has also been a frequent target for shoplifters in recent years, according to Philadelphia Police Department records obtained by WHYY News.

In 2024, there were 280 retail thefts reported to police at the iconic Wanamaker Building store next to City Hall. Each of those thefts were for merchandise worth at least $200 or more, which means the store lost at least $56,000 last year.

It’s unclear how much retail theft contributed to the store’s poor sales performance as store-level data is not available for the national chain, but any stolen merchandise eats into profits, said Jerry Ratcliffe, a professor and criminologist at Temple University.

“That’s a business decision made by the chains themselves but they’re very sensitive to costs,” Ratcliffe said. “So if they are really down, only scraping by on a profit on the margins and then retail theft is increasing and it doesn’t look like it’s going to abate, that may certainly be a major factor in their decision making.”

The available retail theft data isn’t perfect either, as stores have a lot of control over how much is reported to authorities at all, Ratcliffe said.

“Stores can control a great deal of how much recorded crime gets seen by the police department,” he said. “They may increase recording of it if they feel that it’s becoming a significant problem in the city and they want to specifically flag to the city, the police department, the mayor’s office and the district attorney that we have a real problem.”

Macy’s did not respond to an interview request for this news story.

There has been an uptick in shoplifting incidents at Macy’s reported to police: 93 thefts in 2019, 76 thefts in 2020, 46 thefts in 2021, 219 thefts in 2022 and 250 thefts in 2023.

Likewise, retail theft has increased citywide, from just under 7,400 incidents in 2018 to over 22,000 thefts in 2024.

Sometimes, stores report more crime simply because they hired more asset protection staff and security.

“Stores don’t want to advertise their losses because it looks bad to competitors,” Ratcliffe said. “Sometimes their asset protection people worry it sends a signal to offenders that they are a very vulnerable store with the potential for huge amounts of losses.”

In some situations, retailers may tell employees like security guards to not stop shoplifters for their own safety.

“Retailers are always concerned about liability and reputation but mostly the safety of their employees,” said Read Hayes, criminologist at the University of Florida and director of the Loss Prevention Research Council. “They don’t really want them to get involved or engage with somebody that’s carrying merchandise out in garbage bags or being otherwise aggressive.”

That’s because it puts both workers and shoppers at risk.

In December 2023, two security guards were injured — one of whom died from stab wounds — at the Center City Macy’s after trying to stop a violent shoplifter at the store. The family of the slain security guard, Eric Harrison, filed a lawsuit against Macy’s. The shoplifter, Tyrone Tunnell, was sentenced this month to 30 years in jail for the crime.

Critics of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner claim his guidance to prosecutors back in 2018 — to charge summary offenses in retail theft cases if the merchandise is worth less than $500 — caused more retail theft in the city. Krasner’s internal policy has since been reversed.

To combat the wave of retail theft, the Philadelphia’s District Attorney’s Office created the Organized Retail and House Theft Task Force in February 2024. Since then, the task force has announced several theft ring busts in the region.

Macy’s expects to close 150 underperforming stores nationwide over the next two years; the first round of closures were announced last month. That included Pennsylvania stores in Wilkes-Barre, Exton and Altoona, plus two New Jersey stores in Orange and New Hyde Park.

As a result, 128 workers in Philadelphia will lose their jobs by the end of March, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act letter by Macy’s.

The Center City Macy’s store spans 316,000 square feet on the ground floor of the Wanamaker property that was built more than 120 years ago.

At the time, department stores anchored Market Street in Philadelphia and consumer shopping habits were very different, said Vicki Howard, a retail historian and visiting fellow at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom.

“They were known as lavish palaces of consumption and they became these anchors to the central business districts,” Howard said. “Every community had a department store. They were also these social institutions in which people flocked to them not just to shop, just to socialize in various traditions that emerged, like the organ productions in the Wanamaker department store.”

But after World War II, the creation of suburban communities and indoor shopping malls deteriorated the market share urban department stores held, which has been on the decline for decades since.

“Department stores have been under siege for many decades, it’s been hastened by the pandemic but also by the rise of e-commerce,” Howard said. “They have this major investment in real estate and the cost that entails of maintaining these large older buildings, so they’re not really poised in the same way as a purely e-commerce business.”

Such retailers have also struggled to keep up with trends and over the years have stripped down to “become more generic, where they basically just offer apparel and some housewares,” Howard said. “So the difference between types of retailers has shrunk.”

While Macy’s is moving out, there are plans to renovate the Wanamaker Building by its new owner, New York City–based TF Cornerstone, which acquired the first third floors of the 12-story building in 2019. Then TF Cornerstone purchased the debt for roughly 954,000 square feet of office space above the department store in 2024.

TF Cornerstone expects to renovate the building for mixed-use, commercial space below and apartments above.