"What is he even talking about?" people wondered, laughing. "Is he nostalgic for some imaginary time before minorities?" Probably, judging by some of his tweets, but he was also anxious about stores putting in new security measures and was looking wistfully at a time when you could shop safely. It's hilarious though that he thinks the height of safety was 7-Eleven in 1973.
We actually have records on how often 7-Elevens got robbed back then: We had 769 robberies per thousand 7-Eleven stores in 1973. For comparison, the last year we have national stats available, 2019, had 96 robberies per thousand convenience stores (and convenience stores aren't subject to the organized retail theft that we've seen since then).
Those numbers speak for themselves, but you might be interested in how I got the 1973 figures. They're from the background section of a 1975 study. The Western Behavioral Studies Institute of California was testing how to deter robbery, so they compared a control group of stores to ones that implemented a new strategy. That's right—crime was so high that they could run an experiment and they could count on, in the absence of any special strategy, most stores in the control group probably getting robbed sometime within the year.Â
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