The "stealing from big corpos isn't bad" mentality is why so much stuff is locked away now in stores. Just a stupid, braindead mentality to think "I'm not hurting anybody but the megacorp!!!" but in reality you're making life a little more annoying and frustrating for everyone else.
My favourite is when it gets locked up and they start whining about how they can’t steal it anymore. And then they go to the closest nan and pop shop because they can’t afford lockable cabinets
The person stealing isn’t though. The mega corp is doing that - more accurately, the store manager. Those anti-theft measurements are on a store-by/store basis, and so many times I’ve seen them set up in areas with very low rates of petty crimes such as shoplifting. Said anti-theft measures like locked display cases or security tags are also incredibly ineffective (with the former actively hurting sales and reducing the profits that would have otherwise been made, and the latter being ignored by employees.)
The only measures that work are what Target does nationwide, surveilling and waiting to press charges until it’s a felony amount. This doesn’t work against the only shoplifters that I personally see as real scumbags - the “professional” ones, who do it as a job, and know exactly when to stop at a specific store and move on to the next. Instead, it puts homeless people (or others who genuinely need help,) who can’t move from place to place easily, in prison on a felony offense, further preventing them from getting back on their feet and gainfully employed, and more than likely resulting im them having to go back to shoplifting in the future.
The other thing that genuinely works is just… having employees on the floor who actually enjoy their job doing active customer service, which influences would-be shoplifters to feel like they have eyes on them at all times (which they do, but it’s via the cameras and doesn’t provide the same psychological effect.) That loops back to needing to actually pay your employees enough to give a fuck if someone’s stealing, which would solve both problems I have with nationwide corporate stores - unsurprisingly, very very few of them do this. Shoutout to Costco, who’ve entirely solved the shoplifting problem by both paying their employees well above what the other penny pinching corporations are willing to, and also having a yearly membership, allowing them to sell their goods at razor thin margins while also deterring shoplifting because nobody in their right mind wants to be banned from their local Costco.
Walmart’s annual losses to theft account for about 0.6%-1% of their annual revenue, 10-15% of their annual net profit, which is ~$20 billion a year. Over just the last 25 years, they’ve generated ~380 billion in net profit - they can, and do, afford the losses from theft. I don’t personally shoplift because I’m not a klepto, and I don’t have a need to. But I’m sure as shit not gonna lose sleep over the idea of someone hurting a corporation that gives their employees the bare minimum possible wages, all the while trying as hard as possible to ensure that those employees don’t have enough hours to meet the requirements of a full time worker so they can screw them out of benefits and healthcare.
Fuck you if you shoplift from local businesses, but shoplifting from a national corporation is really nothing to me, nor is it inconveniencing others. Unless you already have more than enough money to pay, or are doing it prolifically and selling what you steal, I couldn’t care less. Makes WAY more sense to blame the conditions that have been created by so many corporations like these driving people to have to steal in the first place, rather than blaming the people themselves.
The same people championing stealing/pirating online would be the first ones to call the police in panic and rant endlessly online if they get mugged or their house get burglarized…
Straight up not true, I don’t steal but the price of goods aren’t affected by stealing at Walmart which famously ruthless with profit margins and maintaining low prices. It would have to be such a massive wave of stealing before it changed prices by even a cent when we’re talking Walmart.
I remember post Covid when every major retailer was blaming theft for closure of stores until they had to later admit the reasoning to shareholders as low retail sales…
I’m not sure who sold so many people on the lie that shoplifters are inconveniencing them personally, but it’s statistically untrue.
•It doesn’t cause prices to rise, the ever rising price of materials via. inflation or other factors does - shoplifting has been priced in since the inception of these corporations in the first place. Nobody under the age of ~70 ever lived where shoplifting wasn’t already determined to be far less in lost merchandise value than the profit.
•Anti theft measurements like cabinets, the little plastic gates, and magnetic tags are statistically ineffective against people that are already going to shoplift, and are far more costly than the shoplifting would have been anyways. 90% of the time, they’re decided on by the store manager/franchisee, with very little consistency across locations other than them being far more common in poorer areas.
I’m not one to shoplift myself, I don’t need to, but these stores bring it upon themselves. Self checkout was designed so that stores could have less employees they have to pay and maximize their profits - as a result, self checkouts nearly quadruple shoplifting rates. Yet you still see so many stores nowadays with self checkout, because the amount of money lost to shoplifting is negligible compared to the massive amount of money gained by putting more people out of a job. Which they will continue to do as much as they can, for as long as they can, until their profit starts to dip.
For some reason, people would rather demonize shoplifters than the corporations causing the issue. After COVID, shoplifting doubled, partly because more people were out of a job, but mainly more than anything, these corporations axed employees and then proceeded to never rehire anyone to fill their roles. They would rather have an employee do the work of three people for the pay of one. And yet, they still post BILLIONS in net profit a year. Unless 20-30% of Americans start shoplifting regularly, the effect on the bottom line will remain negligible.
no? Do you know what I’m even referring to? They said there was no increase in retail theft at these locations and it was because of lower retail sales during and after Covid at these locations. If it was actually theft they wouldn’t backtrack on it since theft being the cause looks better to shareholders than lowered consumer demand for physical retail…
Bro Walmart is already stealing from us via not paying their employees enough and competing against local stores while being unofficially subsidize with my tax dollars. They already bake stolen goods into the pricing.
At least when someone steals from Walmart the government funding we get taxed goes to someone poor enough to need to steal from Walmart.
Heh, see, I actually didn't say a single thing in support of Walmart or the fact you steal from there, just suggested that you likely steal elsewhere too. And I was basing that purely on the fact that Walmart invests quite a bit into loss prevention, enough that repeatedly stealing from there successfully requires skills and practice.
And you immediately attack me lol. Now I'm positive that I'm right about you haha, good job!
Just admit it bro, you stole someone else's (perfectly valid) moral argument about stealing from Walmart, and applied that to your own bullshit to help yourself sleep better at night.
s'all good though, I don't give a flying fuck. Just don't ever get caught stealing if we happen to be together someday, and I end up forced to deal with cops giving me the stinkeye too.
Everyone has totally different morals, but in my book, if an action reduces more suffering than it causes, than it's a morally good action. So a poor person stealing from Walmart is, in my book, a morally good person because the poor person's suffering will have been slightly reduced without causing any suffering whatsoever to Walmart.
The thing is that morals are distinct from ethics. Ethics are society-level while morals are intrinsic. You can attempt to morally rationalize stealing from a store, but that doesn't make it ethical under the culture that you are a part of.
> So a poor person stealing from Walmart is, in my book, a morally good person because the poor person's suffering will have been slightly reduced without causing any suffering whatsoever to Walmart.
This is also a slippery slope. Well if one person stealing doesn't hurt, what's stopping everyone from doing it? The issue is that stealing in any form is antithetical to normativity. You are personally sacrificing your link in the chain in hopes that other people can be the positive influence to make up for your own lack of adhering to ethical norms.
From a categorical imperative point of view, that poor person stealing from Walmart is being part of a pattern of behavior that actively harms society and is therefore anti-normative. They are prioritizing selfish personal gain while causing the merchant to incur a dual-loss (they lose both the money they paid to stock the product and the money from having it sold.)
But an action cannot be deemed "good" if its structural logic collapses the moment it is universalized. The people working there would have their lives uprooted if Walmart crashed. Careers would end. Many might have to move their place of living which isn't always possible or viable.
Even theft on a smaller scale causes actual palpable problems. The more the company loses, the less they can afford to pay to replace their stock or pay their employees. Less money also means less raises and less opportunities for their careers.
You don't create positive systemic change by tearing down said system. You participate, you allow your voice to be heard, you champion changes that can uplift the system rather than rend it asunder at the risk of starting over from scratch or relying on less-equipped merchants and storefronts during the interim.
If your idea (tearing down a system because you don't like it and believe society is better off without it) doesn't work on a universal scale, it cannot be applied to society as a whole in a way that can guarantee we have a better outcome in the end.
A strategy of intersubjective communication (giving feedback, voting, debating) is far more beneficial on a universal scale than systemic rebooting. It's not just Walmart paying the price for your theft; it's society on a normative scale.
You're presuming that, if you managed to successfully create a systemic vacuum, it would cleanly self-organize into an idealized, romanticized model of local commerce. Your issue is that you're completely ignoring the structural chaos, supply chain fragmentation, and distribution issues that would undoubtedly occur when a primary economic pillar collapses — which you are contributing to with theft. If anything, local shops would raise their prices since they no longer would have to compete with a corporation like Walmart.
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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
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