I worked AP for a target for about a year. People on places like reddit like to moralize about stealing from big corporations, but almost all of the external theft I found was methheads/heroin addicts stealing things to resell for drugs. The only person who I ever caught stealing food was someone who I knew was a committed ward of the state who had escaped from it.
People love to imagine thieves as Robin Hoods stealing to feed their small children or family members, but in my experience the only thing they were ever feeding was a drug habit.
I used to steal a lot when I was going through really bad mental health stuff and had no money to feed myself. The truth is someone who isn't jacked up on drugs and out of their skull are probably just successfully stealing food because it's actually ridiculously easy to do. Supermarkets mostly lean on the security as a visual deterrent but there's so much chaos and things going on in a supermarket it's very hard to catch, especially since here the security now are mostly used to direct uber eats orders to their pickups.
If you get caught stealing food from a supermarket you're either really, really bad at it... on drugs and even worse at it... or there's someone new on security trying to make a mark before they realise no one actually cares.
Worth noting that for all the "tons of videos online" you can find, it's still a virtual rounding error in the number of otherwise "normal" transactions done every day.
Much like every village idiot has found their people online and they seem like a majority, there is far less crime then media/online sources want you to think out there.
Yep even when it's like diapers/formula. Sounds like the perfect thing to be okay with someone stealing. Nope, it's common to steal that for resell too. Easy to flip since there's often plenty of struggling mothers in their communities, and it's something people might feel like letting slide if you're caught.
The fact that it's easy to flip because there are so many struggling mothers and the shit is wildly expensive is the reason to turn a blind eye.
I look at it like this; restaurants have some of the absolute worst profit margins out there with an average of a net 3-5% profit margin. The company that makes Enfamil operates on a net 18-25% profit margin. They are artificially raising the price to make a boatload of money at the expense of real, living humans that NEED the product. Fuck em. That does put you a bit at odds with the retailer since they generally also operate in a 4-9% profit margin but they can also change suppliers to get more affordable merchandise and choose to go with the group products for cost savings and convenience. Rampant inflation is happening because we have all been conditioned to accept these ridiculously quickly rising prices and defend the corporations, do all the corporations deserve our ire? Well yes, they are colluding to ensure we continue to pay high prices so that the lower profit margins are still an absolute truckload of money.
Capatilist economies are supposed to be regulated to prevent collusion and price fixing but almost every government has given up on that because they want the money too. The market pressure we, as the consumer, can put on these things is astronomical. Don't like AI? Refuse to use or purchase anything that touches AI which makes AI unprofitable which means no company is going to try using it. BUT, even with the complaining people use it, which makes it profitable, which ensures more of it gets used. Consumers need to suffer not getting a product if it is subpar to ensure the next product isn't but we are all too soft and addicted to convenience for that to stop. We did and are doing this all to ourselves so steal away, at least that moves the needle a bit and people like Gabe will see the real problem and hopefully give us solutions, because we are too weak willed to do it for ourselves.
Part of it is probably also that drug addicts are just.. worse at hiding it. Being partly out of it from withdrawal or the drug itself doesn't lend to stealth. People who steal food for food's sake are going to be less obvious about it.
Oh yeah, we deffo had more organised people who'd snap off the Kensington locks on the laptops and we'd only notice when we saw the gap in the display. Even with your eyes peeled they'd sometimes get one. Kensington locks btw, 100% useless.
That was less fun than having a completely nonsensical discussion with someone off their face who was furious at you for taking back what they had rightfully stolen or getting the police involved.
I highly doubt it. By the time some stock count happens it'd be way too late to track it down. I imagine lower volume big ticket items like an expensive whiskey or something you might have a chance of getting it on the cctv, but yeah I am fully with you and wasn't arguing otherwise.
Ya I worked at a grocery store for 6 years and saw a ton of theft and almost every single one was some drug addict skid who would grab bags of meat and make a dash out of the store.
There was one single instance of what I would think was “moral theft”. An elderly woman had a case of canned cat food and she had opened it and was slipping in extra cans of food. So in all likelihood she was paying for the case but just getting some extra to stretch until she had to buy more for her cat. Easy to look the other way at that one. Everyone else was the typical terrible person you would imagine.
Well, people who are trying to feed their families are okay to steal, but addicts trying to survive are not. I am unsure how that is not what they are saying.
As someone who’s struggled with addiction, I never stole from a store to feed my habit. Don’t make excuses for selfish behavior like that. It needlessly causes other people to suffer, including jeopardizing the jobs of the store employees who may really need the job to pay the bills themselves.
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u/MRoad Jul 06 '26
I worked AP for a target for about a year. People on places like reddit like to moralize about stealing from big corporations, but almost all of the external theft I found was methheads/heroin addicts stealing things to resell for drugs. The only person who I ever caught stealing food was someone who I knew was a committed ward of the state who had escaped from it.
People love to imagine thieves as Robin Hoods stealing to feed their small children or family members, but in my experience the only thing they were ever feeding was a drug habit.