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I use to work at a grocery store and for every food item that was stolen, dozens more of the same product was thrown out for being past expiration. Like many companies they want the shelves to be full at all times, which means they over produce and order product. Nothing was recycled or donated, just straight into the trash. If I ever saw anyone stealing while I was working, I just saw it as less work I has to do with taking count and throwing out food later. Plus someone actually got to eat it!
Similarly- my daughter’s last science unit (for some reason) had a big thing about how you shouldn’t waste food to help the environment. And I’m fine with telling kids not to waste food to help the environment. But maybe it should also mention that McDonald’s throws out every perfectly edible burger that’s sat under a heat lamp too long and maybe that should be a bigger concern if we’re talking about food waste and the environment.
Even at the middle school level, they’re blaming the individual when the corporation is so much worse.
Nothing was recycled or donated
How come they never donate? Seems like a no no brainer and it would help out.
My guess is they don’t want to be responsible for lawsuits if someone eats food they had to throw out and it causes a problem. (past expiration date, damage, ect.) Then again I am not a multi-billion dollar business executive so the reason could very well be “fuck the poors” for all I know.
This will reduce demand, which will lead to reduced prices and hurt earnings. Capitalism requires lack, including food.
Here it’s often junkies stealing expensive meats and cheese to sell. I probably wouldn’t say anything but I don’t really give a shit if they get caught either.
Who is buying expensive meats and cheeses from a junkie? That doesn’t add up.
Have you never been approached by a weird dude at a gas station who is selling “fresh” meat out of a cooler in the trunk of his car?
We live in very different places. (Not sarcasm, this has happened to me about a dozen times)
Trunk meat is usually 50% of the sticker price around me, and tide pods are $5 a bag.
Make friends with a “booster” and you can even get custom orders, lol.
I’m not in a position to tell if someone can afford to eat. They might look like they’re employed or be dressed expensively, but people can fall on hard times suddenly
So I’m not going to report anyone for anything except crimes against individuals
Thats what food banks are for. Theft is illegal and unethical.
Yes stealing food is unethical. If someone steals your food you should take it right back off them.
That’s why I do all my shoplifting at the duopoly stores that are currently under government investigation for wage theft and price gouging… and not the community grocer who isn’t stealing from the public.
Let’s see… I’m starving and impoverished. I could steal some fresh, nutritious food or I could go to the food bank and have an expired can of creamed corn.
You’re right, food bank.
Choosing beggar hypothetical.
Hypothetical? I take it you’ve never gotten food from a food bank.
Sounds a lot like projection… How many times have you gotten food from a food bank? Very curious to know 🙂
Let me go check my ‘how many times in my life have I eaten food from a food bank’ tally to make sure I have an accurate count and get back to you.
Ahh so you will avoid the question. Good one buddy
You can forage food for free.
Do tell me where to forage food in February in the Midwest.
It’s the end of April.
The only way you think stealing to live is unethical is if you value property more than life.
In modern society, stealing is almost never “to live”, and even when it is, there are many other options to get food.
Also, stealing is unethical either way, the question is whether that unethical action can be morally justified in the balance (due to the alternative being more objectionable).
Letting people starve is worse, throwing food and faking shortages to raise prices should be punished by death.
I agree as long as the death part is a joke
None of these companies are worried about me when they jack their prices up while people are struggling. I don’t know why I would ever give a shit about them. I’m just here to buy moisturizer and stay in my lane.
Here is some of the Loblaws grocery store markup that was leaked.
Theft does make prices go up though, you know? It also makes stores close in underserved communities.
See you’re assuming they wouldn’t jack up the prices even without theft, as someone who studied business it’s literally taught to see how far you can push before the breaking point. line go up. It does suck in undeserved communities but there’s not much we can do, people in those communities often vote against their best interest.
The breaking point, though, is the point when consumers will look to alternatives, e.g. a different store. As long as there are other options available, competition does usually do a decent job of keeping prices down.
And companies in a free market would never, ever collude to keep prices high in the face of that very competition you think will keep prices down, right? In fact that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now, is prices being kept down by the absolutely healthy competition in the Canadian grocery market, right?
Look collusion is a thing, but it’s illegal. Grocery stores, even the big chains in the US anyways are pretty cutthroat, they aren’t making huge profits they’re fighting to survive vs Amazon and the like. Anyways my point is that the claim that costs don’t affect prices (and therefore losses from theft don’t affect prices) is just silly.
It also makes stores close in underserved communities.
That is corporate PR bullshit that you swallowed hook, line and sinker.
I read through the article and I agree that it is wrong for Target and other companies to blame crime for underperformance when crime isn’t the real culprit. But that was an example involving 9 stores. There are tons of examples of stores closing citing crime if you search for it. I think it’s unhelpful to hand wave all of them away as PR.
If you see someone shoplifting, remember it isn’t your job to deal with it, stores pay security for that. getting involved is providing free labor to the company, and they get enough of that through wage theft.
What?
I’ve watched people shoplift food several times, and they weren’t poor people just looking to eat. I watched someone run out of a M&S store and into an awaiting car with a huge bag full of meat around Christmas time, probably several hundred pounds worth.
If someone was stealing a loaf of bread or something for themselves, I didn’t see a thing, but let’s not pretend that people aren’t stealing to make some money. Lots of people steal stuff to resell, or because they’re just dicks…
Don’t really care about some corporations losing out on their margins after nickel and diming everyone as high as they possibly can. Especially if the end result is someone or multiple people eating.
This isn’t Robin Hood. These are two guys that clearly wanted to steal food at a peak time to sell it elsewhere. The same number of people are eating, possibly less so because these guys are probably flogging their stolen shit in a pub somewhere and will likely dump what they can’t sell.
This place is so weird sometimes. I don’t know if it’s a Lemmy or American thing, but this kind of stuff is pretty common in the UK…
Grocery stores dump hundred of pound of still edible food into the garbage each and every day. And no one is eating less because of thefts from the grocery store. The main reason people are starving right now is because their grocery bill spiked and extra $100-200 for absolutely no reason other than pure greed that they were able to blame on “inflation”.
Your problem isn’t with the addicts, its with the system that is ever antagonistic towards its people. Addicts can be hard people to deal with, but they’re still people. Now obviously if they’re acting violently there’s no excuse for action like that. But if they’re just taking food why should I care?
I watched someone run out of a M&S store and into an awaiting car with a huge bag full of meat around Christmas time, probably several hundred pounds worth.
And yet Google tells me that M&S has a revenue of £11.93 billion.
So why are you caring about them losing a few hundred of that?
but let’s not pretend that people aren’t stealing to make some money.
Perhaps it’s safe to say they’re poor. Poor people often don’t have enough money. Still sounds like a job of desperation.
Desperation to avoid getting a real, legal job, maybe.
Perhaps it’s safe to say they’re poor.
It is not. I’ve seen these scumbags’ subreddit, I’ve seen their Tumblr tags. They’re not poor, they’re just scumbag thieves.
An actual poor person stealing necessities because they have no other choice does NOT have this ridiculous entitled mindset.
“avoid”
It’s amazing, isn’t it, that there are people out there who think that poor people enjoy it for the benefits…
Please, everyone knows the vast majority of you thieves and those cheering them on aren’t even poor, you’re just immoral scumbags who feel entitled to the things you steal. I’ve seen the subreddit, I’ve seen the Tumblr tags. You’re not fooling me, trying to mix yourselves in with those stealing because they have no other way to survive.
Very immoral, unlike those huge moral corporations who just want what’s best for everyone…
The irony is that you try to rationalize it as ‘I’m only hurting the Big Bad Soulless Corporation’, but the fact is that you’re not hurting it, you’re hurting the people who work there to survive, people who probably are much closer to being broke than you are. If shrinkage gets too high, a location isn’t just going to hang around not profiting, it’ll get closed.
let’s not pretend that people aren’t stealing to make some money
When you rob one grocery store of a 10 lb brisket, its called shoplifting.
But when you rob every grocery store of 10% of their net revenue, its called paying your shareholders a dividend.
You can give a shit about two things at once. Imagine that lol.
You don’t know that the person owned the car. Breed is not nutrients rich. People can’t live on breed.
What the fuck are you talking about? They literally ran into a getaway car with their friend to leave the scene of the crime as fast as they could. You don’t steal hundreds of pounds of meat at Christmas because “you need nutrients”…
I knew a very good looking girl, she was a student while I did my B.Sc. her parents paid for her studies but nothing more. She managed to work enough to rent a very basic place.
However, she had no problem asking people for a ride, or to take their car for a ride. She would than shoplift a lot of food, including high quality ingredients. If something went wrong she smiled and cried her self out of the troubles.
And the stolen food? she cooked a lot and gave away most of it.
People are weird, and you don’t know what’s going in other people’s lives. Is it possible they are trying to make profit on the back of others? Yes, can it be something else? Yes.
If I saw someone shoplifting anything I wouldn’t lol none my business
Only time I’ll say something is a mom and pop store. Then the thief is being shitty. Go steal from a Walmart, not here.
Yeah, I’ll start caring about shoplifting as soon as it becomes remotely the same magnitude of a problem as wage theft.
Shit if they’re stealing a TV from major corporate retailer that has pushed out all the local competition: I didn’t see that shit, either.
Oh and people who need baby formula from Walmart: The locks used on those cabinets use a universal key. Obtain one and even if they lock up the baby formula, you can still get it. Even if you intend to pay, it’s a time saver if your Walmart is like mine and nobody ever shows up to assist you at the locked cabinets.
You think you’re hurting the corporation, but you’re hurting its employees. If a location becomes unprofitable because of too much theft, it just closes, and now all those people are out of a job because of entitled thieves’ greed.
Also, the formula is locked up because people steal it to turn a profit fencing it, not to feed anyone who needs it out of the goodness of their heart.
It’s not the thieves fault that people need to sell their soul to a corporation to live.
But it is the thieves fault when shrinkage causes them to have no job at all. Prioritizing your selfish, greedy desire to steal over their well-being is all you’re doing, and it’s reprehensible.
Those people being out of a job could very well be a blessing in disguise. If you work in retail long enough, you know what this means.
Those people being out of a job could very well be a blessing in disguise.
I’d bet anything you don’t have the guts to say this horseshit to one of their faces.
Ahh yes moral licensing. The finest of ethical theories…
The rest of us proceed forward, and you are ignored, as usual. 😎
When there are no real arguments to support your dribble 🙄😬
LOL I am out of microblog memes, seems like too many people here (for my taste at least) coming up with excuses to entirely forgive crimes no matter the context.
That’s the point of microblogging. You don’t have to think about what you’re upvoting for any longer than it takes to read a sentence.
When you’re bootlicking, do you prefer the texture or taste of the boot? Or do you like both equally? Genuinely curious
It’s amazing how ironic and reactionary this is :)
So it’s really more about the humiliation. Gotcha. Well, I don’t kinkshame, so you do you lol
PS: i did call someone a bootlicker recently after their unwavaring support for Zionism and after about 3-4 months into discussions with them after they showed blind loyalty to Israel (a country they are not even from)
But you are calling me a “bootlicker” for refusing to “break Nazi’s arms unprovoked and at random encounters to ‘keep the community clean’” and because I suggested that inflicting trauma on Nazis might cause them to be even more radicalized and cause more harm to the world… or in the case of this post here, you are calling me a bootlicker for wanting to report people who don’t even look poor to the police for robbing my local grocery store… dude. These absolutes are so fucking dumb… “I will report all thefts no matter what” is just bad as an absolute as “I will not report any”.
The only two people in my life who were actively shoplifting never needed to. They did it to “game the system”. I should of course not take this personal experience and derive sweeping conclusions from it. What people need is proper social wellfare so that they never have to shoplift and you never have to make a point about not reporting them.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that you’d be better off not being reactionary in your responses. I don’t know you, you don’t know me, but I think of you did, you wouldn’t call me a bootlicker or whatever else.
Both sides bad hurrdurrrrduhhhh 🤡
Only if you consider '“both sides” to be pushed all the way to the extreme, I guess.
If they’re shoplifting, I’m shoplifting.
Its only fair.
Nobody disagrees.
Yep not my circus not my monkeys
Unless you live where I do, where people steal mass amounts of junk food from convenience stores and then resell it at the nighttime markets to our struggling, marginalized, population of unhoused folks at an exploitative mark-up.
Because that is actively harming me, and the community I live in.
Though even with all that, confronting or reporting them isn’t helpful. But if asked, and I saw it, I would say so.
Hey, this is a thread about supporting shoplifters not price gougers.
In the self checkout I watched a man with his children have his card rejected, so he just walked out with the food.
The security guards came up to ask me if I knew what way the man went.
I pointed up in the air to the security camera dome and said, “he sort of went that way, boys.”
Massive store near me remodeled about two years ago with a focus on tons of new self checkouts.
Recently, all have been closed.
Surprised that so much walked out the doors via self checkouts that it’s cheaper to pay employees and take whatever aggregate losses there might be from higher wait times!
That is to say, the man with his children apparently wasn’t the only one.
UBI now!
Self-checkouts were so convenient, now they’ve had some of them gated and some just closed down because people kept stealing. Sucks.
They’re amazing here, we don’t have proshoplifting communities though it’s generally looked down upon so it’s not quiet the dystopia America seems to be. I love being able to get in and out without pausing my podcast.
I’m from Finland. Things are pretty good here but it still happens, self-checkouts were scaled down because of theft. Teens and junkies being two big groups, from what I’ve heard from people working with self-checkouts. Sucks even more that this isn’t happening because people are stealing to eat or something.
