PSA: remember, if you see someone stealing essentials like groceries or whatever: no, you didn’t.
Remember, if you see someone stealing groceries, they’re not poor, poor people don’t seal.
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?
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’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?
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.
Fuck the downvoters. This is #trashy. Didn’t realize there were so many teenagers in here. Might go back to Reddit.
…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.)
Not an American, isn’t there a limit on how you can raise prices? At least in my country we have "SRP"s (suggested retail price) and whoever exceeds that will need a good reason to do so, and simply citing theft will not be an enough reason.
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.
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.
I’m kinda surprised I’m seemingly in the minority of preferring self check. At least before they handicapped all the regular self checkouts and forced everyone to do self checkout. When it was truly optional, especially when it was “20 items of fewer” style, it was so much faster because I’m usually not buying a huge cart worth of items, and I can bag my own way. However now that Susan with her month’s worth of groceries for her family of 4 is also in self checkout, it makes it less efficient.
Even when Susan is taking a huge cart through, a single queue for multiple service providers (self checkout) is always going to be theoretically more efficient than multiple queues - one per provider (one line for each cashier). The best of both worlds are places that have a single area to corral you into line, and a row of cashiers where you can go to the first available.
I once was that guy who took a cartful of groceries to the self-checkout. The goddamn thing had to call staff no less than 6 times because we couldn’t fit everything on that damn scale.
I’m not doing that again.
Here’s the thing most people don’t understand. It’s possible to bag your shit elsewhere. You can scan your shit, put it back in the cart, and literally go anywhere else and bag it up. Everybody and their mother are taking the time to bag their shit at the checkout and holding everyone else hostage while they figure out where to put their bananas and lube. I routinely take a full cart of shit, scan it all with the handheld scanner, and I’m out the door before Nancy and her 10 shits. The whole point is that the POS is just there to pay for your shit. If everyone just took their shit to the giant area in front of every store, or to their car to bag their shit, no one would be holding anyone up besides the truly inept.
Many grocery stores have scales in the self-checkout bagging area. If you scan a can of soup, you’re going to take that can, put it on the bag scale but not into a bag, scan your other items, put them onto the bag scale but not a bag, and then take all of your loose items and put them one by one into your cart? How is that efficient?
That’s literally what you had to do in Germany in Lidl - even with a cashier there wasn’t even room enough to bag it there at the till and the whole thing was even shaped so that you could park your trolley in such a position that the cashier would directly put things into your trolley.
Not only that but everybody (including other customers) clearly expected you to operate within that system (for example, moving your trolley in a timelly fashion to the right “docking” spot to recieve the scanned products) and, if you paid with cash, get the change, free the area near the till and do the whole “store the change properly in your wallet” elsewhere were you weren’t wasting other people’s time.
You had an area you could go to and bag your stuff or you could take to trolley to your car and transfer the goods to the trunk there (in my case, this being Berlin, I had a bicycle with removeable cargo bags, so took the trolley there and then at home just unhooked the bags and carried them upstairs to my appartment).
I’ve never seen that anywhere else here in Europe, even in other Lidl stores (I’m now in Portugal and after Germany it’s all frustratingly slow and inneficient). I suppose a certain cultural mindset is probably required for people to naturally fit into such a system (were if everybody does their bit, everybody gets to pay and GTFO much faster).
Oh, and there were no self-checkouts there and the cashiers were amazingly fast, which makes all sense: self-checkout is really just using amateur and untrained - thus slow and inneficient - “cashiers”, so self-checkout tills would probably use more space and make the thing go slower.
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.
See what you need to do is act just suspicious enough to keep their attention on you for no reason, and off the people who actually are stealing.
Teamwork makes the dream work!
Their own damn fault for trying to cut corners by eliminating cashier jobs
It really should be 5% off if I have to scan my own crap. Especially the way CVS et al do it. Home Depot is the only one I don’t care about because they just give you a wireless scanner and let you go to town, it’s honestly faster that way and mutually beneficial.
Yeah I really hate it when they give you self checkout but make everything function way way worse than what the cashier uses. I’ve never even considered shoplifting before but I’ve come pretty close on machines that refuse to scan because they’re stuck on something 5 items ago when I’m moving quickly. Especially if it still beeps when I scan new items but refuses to actually scan it because it’s hung up on something that it was slow to get the weight of – really throws me off. It’s not my job to baby your machine for you. I’m not getting paid for it. Just let me scan my shit and go.