Where Have All of the Bank Robbers Gone?

Browsing the following FBI statistics, you can see that there have been far fewer bank robberies, burglaries and larcenies in the U.S. (I do wonder though why Tuesday was the second most popular day for stealing money):

Somewhat similarly, during 2022, Denmark had no bank robberies. The reason could be that Denmark has increasingly become a cashless economy. As a result, some banks emptied their cash drawers. I have even heard that in Sweden, a bank robber, faced with no cash, asked the teller where else he could go.

Where are we going? To changing job markets.

Changing Job Markets

It is possible that digital money can make robbery a less attractive occupation.

More definitive, the data on the disappearance of pinsetters, icemen, and street lamp lighters display the impact of technology. In bowling alleys, from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1940s, pin girls and pin boys picked up the pins after they were knocked down. Until the 1940s, many of us needed an iceman to deliver the 25 to 100 pound chunks of ice that chilled our refrigerators. And, as in NYC until electrification, we had lamplighters who lit 200 to 300 gas streetlights an hour. My favorite though is the knocker-uppers that awakened workers by tapping on their windows.

We can look at the BLS for the fastest declining and fastest growing occupations as of April 18, 2025:

Growing Occupations:

Declining Occupations:

Our Bottom Line: Structural Unemployment

Sort of like seismic plates, structural change creates a new economic landscape where old industries disappear and new ones replace them because of technological change. Indeed, with the arrival of electricity, the auto, and the transistor, we had progress as a plus and structural unemployment as a minus until jobless workers were retrained with skills that were more suited to the new economy.

…Even bank robbers.

My sources and more: Here, we got the Denmark update on robberies. Then, the FBI and BLS had more of our data.