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by VDC Staff
In Vermont, a trip to the grocery store is part of everyday life—whether in Burlington or a small mountain town. Yet over the past several years, those familiar aisles have seen a noticeable rise in shoplifting. According to an analysis of FBI data, Vermont recorded the seventh-highest rate of grocery-store shoplifting in the United States.
Key figures for Vermont
- Rate: 80.1 incidents per 100,000 residents—about 1.4 times the national average of 58.
- Average annual incidents (2021–2025): 518, or roughly one to two per day.
- Peak year: 2024 with 793 incidents; the number eased to 696 in 2025.
- Change since 2021: +397 incidents, a rise of about 133% (the steepest increase among the top-ranked states).
Vermont’s small population means a relatively modest number of incidents still produces a high per-capita rate. It has the lowest raw incident count among the top 10 states, yet ranks seventh overall.
How Vermont compares
Here are the 10 states with the highest average annual grocery-shoplifting rates per 100,000 residents (2021–2025):
| Rank | State | Average Annual Incidents | Rate per 100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Mexico | 3,319 | 156.5 |
| 2 | Oregon | 6,170 | 144.9 |
| 3 | Montana | 1,263 | 112.0 |
| 4 | Utah | 3,036 | 88.1 |
| 5 | Washington | 6,861 | 87.3 |
| 6 | Oklahoma | 3,384 | 83.3 |
| 7 | Vermont | 518 | 80.1 |
| 8 | Wisconsin | 4,502 | 75.9 |
| 9 | West Virginia | 1,270 | 71.6 |
| 10 | North Dakota | 556 | 70.6 |
Vermont’s rate is more than four times higher than California’s (17.5 per 100,000), the lowest in the country. It is also roughly 2.2 to 3.5 times higher than rates in states such as New Jersey, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island.
How the numbers were calculated
The analysis used FBI Crime Data Explorer figures for grocery-store shoplifting incidents and U.S. Census Bureau population estimates for all 50 states (excluding Washington, D.C.) from 2021 to 2025. For each state, the five yearly incident counts were averaged, then divided by the average population and multiplied by 100,000 to produce a per-capita rate. States were ranked from highest to lowest by that rate.
Sources
- FBI Crime Data Explorer: https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend
- U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates Program: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest.html
- Research dataset: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NXP2s-_t9zqkLav52mp-58u7mLUimJhEU9vHVx7o5n4/edit?gid=0#gid=0
- Study conducted by H&P Law: https://courtroomproven.com/
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Categories: Public Safety
One factor that will reduce these numbers below actual is when there is a perception of inadequate prosecution, then the stores no longer take the time and effort to report these incidents. One factor that promotes this behavior overall is when our moonbat politicians and advocacy groups keep promoting the concept that food is a “human right”. Those whose economic priorities sway toward satisfying their drug habits naturally regard that as a license to steal. People like to blame Trump for grocery inflation, but dont discount the effect that thievery has on prices. Grocery stores are not in business to give product away at a loss and have to make up for it somehow.
Well put.
Of course grocery store shoplifting doesn’t cause grocery prices to rise.
Chairty Clark, do your fu@&ing job.
Are these numbers of the persons that got caught???? Comment from Richard Day.
I wonder if this isn’t actually portending the future of grocery shopping.
The traditional supermarket model is incredibly expensive to operate, and shrinkage adds another major cost. At some point, grocery stores simply can’t continue absorbing those losses. Ultimately, those costs have to show up somewhere, including in the prices paid by customers.
That makes me wonder whether what we’re seeing now will accelerate a much larger transformation of the grocery business.
Huge buildings that have to be heated, cooled and lit, thousands of products constantly being stocked and restocked, employees spending hours walking aisles and moving merchandise, customers doing the same thing, plus food waste and shrinkage…it’s an incredibly labor-intensive system.
I suspect we’ll gradually see more supermarkets transition into something closer to fulfillment centers. You phone in or place your grocery order online, perhaps for the week or even the month, and you’re given a pickup time, much like the way food-service companies already operate.
And with AI and robotics, eventually much of the picking and assembling of those orders could be automated. Rather than hundreds of people and customers wandering through aisles, you could have a relatively compact warehouse where machines retrieve the products, assemble your order and have it waiting for you when you arrive.
That could also dramatically change the economics of shoplifting. It wouldn’t eliminate shrinkage, of course, but it could become one of the ways the industry responds to a problem that it cannot afford to let continue indefinitely.
Eventually, AI could even become the grocery shopper. Instead of making a list, you could tell it, “Keep my household stocked, stay within my budget, don’t buy things I don’t eat, and let me know if something changes significantly.” The system would learn what you normally purchase and automatically replenish it.
I don’t think traditional supermarkets will disappear entirely, but something as seemingly simple as shoplifting may end up pushing the industry toward that future.
don’t think that isn’t the plan all along, mom and pop run out of business due to theft, then, big conglomerates have total control. And guess what, if you don’t behave and have a good social credit score, suddenly you can’t get anything to eat.
Nefarious beyond belief.
Hopefully, if that comes to pass, they’ll have figured out a better method for removing expired merchandise from their inventory.
Private grocery stores have already moved out of downtown Burlington, like in many democrat-run cities which do not prosecute shoplifting. The co-op store downtown has experienced acts of violence when shoplifters were confronted. Even the stores on the periphery of Burlington now have parking lot security cameras, hired sheriff deputies and they lock some of their front doors after 5pm. Decent, law-abiding people just doing their food shopping are being inconvenienced by this leftist apocalypse because a twisted, ideologically-driven, Soros-supported State’s Attorney elevates her virtue signaling to the level of a spectator sport. Liberalism is a mental disorder.