PSA: remember, if you see someone stealing essentials like groceries or whatever: no, you didn’t.
Ribbit
stealing essentials
stealing only essentials, you mean.
Steal a bit of food for today, didn’t see anything and the food bank may just be too far. If I’m on the ball, I’ll try and pick up the tab. You touch the earbuds or lego, though, I’m finna report it.
I’m a grocery store worker and I’d rather just lower our stock count by 1 than have to go stand lookout at the exits of the store. Big chain supermarkets budget for theft and it doesn’t affect the workers.
I understand the whole “why should I pay for things when they don’t” dilemma but people stealing non-essentials likely suffer in other ways
The dilemma isn’t why should i pay when others don’t. It’s “do i want to live in a society where people steal?” Because if the answer is yes you have no right to complain when people steal from YOU. Sounds like people on here don’t want to be stolen from but are okay when people steal from others especially a faceless corporation. Grocery stores have thin margins though and have to raise prices for shrinkage, inflating an already inflated index. For what so someone can have some electronics they don’t need?
Yes i am absolutely okay if people steal from a faceless corporation because one of the parties is people and the other is, again, a faceless corporation
So what if i steal from the government because it’s faceless too? Cheat on my taxes etc.
Go for it if you’re anything like most people in the country the money coming in from your taxes vastly dwarves what should be coming in from corporations and rich people.
Source?
According to the tax foundation 42% of all tax revenues come from the top 1% and 63% comes from the top 5%.
https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/
If you mean capital gains tax that’s a different story. Should be raised imo.
FYI here’s the tax mix by type: https://taxfoundation.org/publications/sources-government-revenue-united-states/#:~:text=Corporate income taxes accounted,U.S. tax revenue in 2021.&text=Source%3A OECD%2C “Revenue Statistics,taxes and property taxes.
Corporate taxes are low but the majority of filings are done at an individual. Every corporation distributes its income to shareholders by dividends or capital gains which are claimed on individual filings.
Private property is not the same as personal property lmao.
Also grocery stores are hiking prices to make more profits for execs, not “because of theft”. I actually think stealing from grocery stores is a bad idea for simple practical reasons (the cost of being caught is way higher than what you save by doing it), but I don’t think its unethical <.<
When is it ethical to steal then id love to hear your thoughts? Can i steal from you?
I don’t care that people steal food from a corporation that had 26 lanes only two of which are open. No, I don’t steal but I also make enough money that I want for nothing.
There are food banks, don’t steal.
Sometimes they run out. Or are 2 hours away. Or are in a bad part of town. There are tons of reasons why someone would be desperate enough to steal food.
Nobody’s encouraging it. All we’re saying is this: as a direct result of the deficiencies inherent to our society and the socioeconomic structure it perpetrates, some people need food but can’t get it through legal means. Categorically refusing to make an exception for exceptional cases is implicitly saying that those people deserve to die.
Ribbit
Grocery stores are pretty much the definition of a perfectly competitive industry. The profit margins are always between 1 and 3%. The only reason they raise prices is because they have to.
Thay was true once. It hasn’t been for decades.
Name a grocery store with a higher margin than 3%
Whole Foods has to be. The few times I have been there I was disgusted by the prices. Mother fuckers, I just want some apples. I don’t need certified that some old hippy said they were all natural.
I wasnt disputing your margins report but that it makes for perfect competition. Why are you assuming low margins necessarily lead to better competition? With low margins, volume dictates the winning business in the unregulated marketplace. Big businesses monopolize and then one day have more leverage over their margins than the marketplace itself. Not a problem when antitrust laws are enforced but those laws have had their teeth pulled for the last 30 years.
Fuck the downvoters. This is #trashy. Didn’t realize there were so many teenagers in here. Might go back to Reddit.
This is #trashy. Didn’t realize there were so many teenagers in here.
Says the person using hashtags lmao
There are food banks. Pay for their groceries if you want. If you advocate stealing you have no right to complain if you are stolen from.
Plus we pay for stolen groceries through higher prices. So honest people also hard-done by have to pay more.
I’ve got news for you: they increase prices regardless of theft.
Sure do. But they increase it even more when theft occurs.
Grocery prices spiked by 35% in my area over the course of three months. It wasn’t because of theft, they claimed it was because of inflation (bullshit).
Right after they jacked up the prices, theft went up. So you’ve got it backwards, actually.
You know what the geniuses in corporate office did about the increased theft? Spent $18k per store to install railing to fence the customers in.
Right after they did that, theft went up again.
Prices have fuck all to with theft, and everything to do with the idiotic decisions made by the greedy retards at the top.
Spent $18k per store to install railing to fence the customers in.
Fire codes?
That’s not at all how prices are set in a Market as per all the applicable theories of Economics (and in practice).
Any profit-driven sellers (i.e. all except maybe a mom-and-pop shop with soft hearted owners) will charge the most that they think buyers are willing to pay, so if for example a seller becomes a local monopoly in an essential good, they’ll pump prices up because customers have no other options (with nothing on the cost side pushing it) and will act similarly when cartels are formed.
This is very much proven again and again by observeable reality - market competition goes down prices go up, completelly independently of costs.
Cost pressures will only push prices up in a market with actual competition when it affects every seller (for example if input prices go up, certain taxes go up, or there’s an event that most sellers can use as an excuse to up prices, such as widespread news of inflation in which case they informally act as a cartel would) or if the cost pressure is so large that it will bankrupt a seller that won’t raise prices (so the seller has no option than to raise prices to try and survive, even at the risk that customers will just walk away).
This theory of yours as well as the “if companies pay less taxes they’ll raise salaries” and other such Economically-ignorant theories that ignore basic market principles and causality, seem to be immenselly popular with people with certain political-faiths who have never actually run a business or worked with Markets.
Fuck economists. It is about as accurate as astrology. Except most government officials don’t take astrology seriously so it doesn’t matter as much.
I suggest you read some books about Behavioural Economics.
But yeah, most of what you see out there from Economists is really Politics, not Science.
However those observations about price making are also from Finance, and those are immensely pragmatic people (as they put real money on the line) - you might disagree with their morals (what morals, eh?!) but they certainly are putting their money where their mouth is.
Are they? Because last I checked
A. Those experts are beaten out by random stock picker software over long term.
B. The entire industry requires the government bailing them out, regulating their small competition out of business, huge infusions of cash via the Fed, and a complex legal structure that pretty much limits your investment options to stocks and bonds or your mattress.
C. For people who claim to be able to predict the future they sure need other people’s money a fair amount. Pensions, managed market accounts, 401Ks, trusts. If you really could best the market you would never team up with anyone since all they would do is open you up to liability
D. When those wall street scumbags do take over the management of a company the company consistently fails. It turns out pledging to Skull and Bones after daddy got you into an ivy doesn’t mean you can run a retailer or a tech company. Who knew? Remind me how Toys R US, Sears, and Fluke multisystems are doing.
E. There is a link between growth in finance and poverty for everyone else. Which makes sense since it sucks away people from productive work to unproductive work. As Wall Street grows in the US incomes for everyone else have fallen.
Economics is bullshit lies that aspires to the accuracy of astrology. Economists are shills with zero integrity. Financial bros are conmen.
But thank you for your reading suggestion. If I ever want to read up on mathematical models that have no connection to the real world based on a sociopathic paraody of humans I will. Everything you want to know about the types of people who become economists can be understood if you know who their hero is. Homo economis a being of pure self. Is there any in particular book you can recommend? If so what chapter is titled “fuck the diabetics, let them mortgage their house for insulin”?
I’ll copy the response I used when someone else responded the same way:
Sometimes they run out. Or are 2 hours away. Or are in a bad part of town. There are tons of reasons why someone would be desperate enough to steal food.
Nobody’s encouraging it. All we’re saying is this: as a direct result of the deficiencies inherent to our society and the socioeconomic structure it perpetrates, some people need food but can’t get it through legal means. Categorically refusing to make an exception for exceptional cases is implicitly saying that those people deserve to die.
You say nobody’s encouraging it but have you read the image that is the OP of this post?
I have one I can reuse for that, too:
Do you understand the difference between being amused by a meme and having a nuanced stance on the topic the meme is addressing in real life?
This is just straight up gaslighting.
“We’re not condoning it, we’re just promoting an amusing meme that condones it.”
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Where I’m from you still have to go through someone who makes sure all of the shit in your cart is in your receipt, it adds like 30-60 seconds and it’s a single employee for six checkouts.
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Criminal until proven otherwise for checking that you didn’t miss anything in your cart? That’s extreme, people do make mistakes, if you actually want to steal you can still pocket stuff, the employee likely won’t give two shits since that’s a job for a security guard like it’s always been.
If you’re paranoic about being perceived as a potential criminal that’s fine, you do you, but labeling any sort of basic control as an accusation is not cool, might as well label the presence of a security guard as such.
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What second check?
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My bad, I thought self checkout was when you scan your items yourself
Oh no, they’d rather just raise prices to cover the shrinkage.
If they concluded that they could raise prices to increase profit, they’d do so regardless of theft rates. Those are separate issues.
…Or just raise prices because they want to increase margins and lie and say its because a massive increase in theft or inflation or whatever they want to say and then laugh about it on a public earnings call that you can raise prices however you want because consumers still have to buy certain goods no matter what.
“We have not seen any material reaction from consumers,” P&G CFO Andre Schulten said. “So that makes us feel good about our relative position.”
There it is folks. Straight from the horse’s mouth. They won’t do what’s in the best interest of humanity without “material reaction” (ie; an arsonist or maybe even something more extreme.)
Everyone I go to the checkout, I get followed by the mall cop. I know it’s just me because I don’t see it happening with anyone else as it is too obvious. Thing is I would never think to steal anything. Never will. I know what I want to buy and I know if I have enough or not.
I think they follow me because I’m brown. Oh to have the privilege to roam around a store free and even deal in villany and mischievous behaviours.
I’m a boring white guy. I’ll steal something in your honor.
When you steal the company just raises prices on everyone else to cover what you stole. You aren’t stealing from a shitty faceless corporation, you’re stealing from everyone who pays. As a paying customer, fuck you.
This just isn’t true. Walmart specifically has steadily increased prices, even though they are constantly making money.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/gross-profit
In fact, they believe they can perpetually grow and when they don’t grow they pin it on people stealing.
Walmart loses about 1% of its annual revenue to theft. Sure that is pretty significant, but then you also have to realize that Walmart is typically the #2 company on spending for lobbyists. Usually influencing labor laws.
Additionally, working class wealth has slowed to almost a stop. Since 2008 wealth generation for the average American is increased by about 1% each year. In comparison to the several hundred percentage that the top 1% has increased.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/
You are advocating for a shitty faceless corporation and believing that stealing from them is actually harming others. They have made enough money to not only feed every single American, but also pay them a living wage, yet their employees are barely making that.
If they didn’t have anybody stealing, prices would still be as high as they are, Walmart would just justify it with an excuse.
They have not stopped increasing how much money they take. Every year they make more, charge more, and we don’t move. We stay right where we are and get to watch what was once a liveable wage turn into a nightmarish struggle.
You aren’t the victim of others, you are the victim to capitalism.
I always see self-checkout as outsourcing the cashier’s job to a slow untrained amateur (the client) whilst doing away with paying for that work.
You need to be a sucker to choose to do work for the profiting of others without getting anything at all in return for it (at best, what you get is less slow checkout that the manned tills which they purposefully made worse than before in order to push you into self-checkout, which is not in fact better than what you had before, so not really a “benefit”).
Even in the most purely amoral “greed is good” judgement, it doesn’t make sense to do the work without at least getting a discount.
I get absolute no social interaction from some bitch faced employee who doesn’t even put stuff in my bag so I might as well do it myself.
It’s absolutelly possible to just go through the thing as if the cashier was an automaton, in which case it’s still faster than self-checkout.
Personally I like the challenge of getting a laugh out of a tired cashier (especially if it’s a pretty woman), but nobody forces you to engage that person beyond a purelly utilitarian acting your side of the process you’re part of whilst the cashier acts theirs as if you were both machines.
It’s a weird problem to have not to be able to stand facing another human who doesn’t really care about you enough (or has the time) to engage in small tall, whilst being fine with standing facing a machine with particularly unappealing software which cares not at all for you and won’t engage in small talk ever, but I suppose if using the machine solves your discomfort with machine-like human-action then it’s a valid reason.
I’m gonna be honest, I fucking hate standard checkout. They are slow, there’s always a line and usually only 1 in 4 checkouts is open, at least that’s like it where I live. I know in the US there are like a thousand people working at checkouts and people use the cashiers as therapists or whatever, but that’s not it where I live. Usually self checkouts occupy 1/4 of the space, or even less, than a normal checkout, are faster and are always open.
Even better, where I live they’ve started implementing mobile scanners that you pick up when you enter the store, scan stuff as you go, and then checkout in literally 10 seconds. Just walk up to the self checkout machine, scan the special barcode and pay. There may be random checks where you need to go through a standard checkout and confirm the self scan. I believe they use an algorithm where, if your scans are usually correct, you get less and less random checks, until it’s basically none (or the opposite).
In the main supermarket where I live there are, iirc, 44-46 checkouts in total. 14 are standard checkouts, usually 6 or so open, then there are like 12 or so self checkouts and like 18 self scan checkouts. The standard checkouts occupy more than twice the space as all the others while doing a fraction of the throughput.
BTW, I believe the discount is the time I don’t have to wait in line. If you also want to sneak out something though, you do you, couldn’t care less, it’s not like you are stealing from the poor.
It’s become like a hobby of mine to not pay for a single item every time I check out at Walmart or Kroger. Fuckers have their margins higher than ever and their starting pay is $12-14/hr. If they want to reduce theft then they can hire people to actually work some of the 20 empty check out lanes they have.
Don’t do that, they keep track. When you go over $1k, you get fucked and picked up for a felony.
guys look at me! I am very smart because I steal from walmart to rebel against the evil capitalist overlords! time to get validation for my actions from reddit!
Nah, this is Lemmy
diffrent website, same people
People actually hate these things?
Hufffhhjjbd
Produce all have a code you can just type in instead of having to search. It’s right on the sticker for things that have stickers, for things like sweet potatoes you have to look at the price sign and it will have the code on it, then just write it on the bag with a sharpie.
Yuhnjjjrrr
If you stand in line for 35 minutes with 20 angry folks waiting for the one dude to learn how the self checkout works … yea
Heijdnrbjsjxbd
That’s not self-checkout’s fault. I don’t hate self-checkout. I hate idiots.
True, but the user experience on those things is terrible… so… I dunno it kind of cuts both ways if you ask me.
People who can’t figure easy things out or are scared of electronics/anything newer than a butter churn sure are.
When do we get the employee discount for doing their work?
I really confused the person monitoring the self checkout on one occasion several years ago.
I paid with cash, and was supposed to get something like $2.17 back in change. The machine gave me the seventeen cents just fine, but instead of two dollar bills, I got a one and a ten.
It took a couple tries to get the worker to understand that the machine gave me too much back.
If that was me I was trying to help you lol.
Next time just accept your Bank Error in your Favor card. Corpos ain’t hurting lol
Money is a fake concept anyway. NEVER pay fare. NEVER buy your food. Always steal. It is the right way, the right thing to do, and will steer our communities to communism which is the only system which has ever worked. Except for the psychotic despots. But that’s different.
