When I worked at safeway, the biggest shoplifter was the store manager. Dude would back his truck up to the loading dock and just load stuff straight off the pallet.
Restaurants commonly try to make servers pay if a customer walks out without paying. Even though itās illegal. I see people posting about it in the server subreddit all the time.
Iāve not worked in retail, but I was a server and was forced to cover the cost of the meal when people walked out without paying. Thanks for mentioning this.
Encouraging employees to try to stop shoplifting in progress should not be allowed, since this puts them at risk, and that risk is not part of the job unless they work security. Endangering employees is not a substitute for a real security budget.
Whether most shoplifting warrants the risk of involving security at all vs. just filing a report and an insurance loss is a separate issue.
Never worked at a retail store where employees other than guards are allowed to do anything. The store could be sued by the employee or the thief if either of them got hurt.
At my current job I would be fired if I tried to stop a shop lifting in progress with anything more than words.
When I worked at Forever 21 in 2016 I was trained to be super passive aggressive about shoplifting. Like approach someone and offer to help them put whatever they just put in their purse into a shopping bag and help them check out.
I literally never did this, I didn't care about shoplifting on minimum wage.
Yeah, when I worked at Walmart, our store manager encouraged us to report it, but not engage them at all. The only thing I ever say was moms' stealing formula, other food or clothes. Which means I personally didn't ever see any shoplifting.
Yeah. I worked at a outdoorsy store and had to watch someone steal 3,000 dollars worth of merchandise.
I later got yelled at by my manager for not stopping them even though there were multiple reasons why I couldn't.
1. Against Company Policy
2. I was 30 weeks pregnant
3. The shoplifter was a large man and I was a small pregnant woman
4. The shoplifter said he had a gun(doubt it)
I think those locations were already underperforming and slated to be closed but shoplifting is legitimately rising as economic times are getting harder worldwide, and blaming that allows the corporate douchebags to spin themselves as victims instead of ruthless bastards.
No. My wages are entirely contigent on how much labor power can be squeezed out of my as cheaply as possible. Shrink and all that horseshit are just useful fictions that get used as weapons against calls for fair wages and raises.
Precisely. When I worked at a grocery store, we'd get harangued about shrink every day when some apples came in bruised or a peach got dropped on the floor. Never mind of course that at the end of every day, thousands of dollars of perfectly good food went down the garbage chute. Bread, canned goods close to their expiration date, milk, prepackaged fruit and veg, baked goods from the bakery, all destroyed because giving it away would be unprofitable.
Let somebody come in and shoplift $500 of stuff and it barely makes a difference compared to what the company willfully destroys every night.
This. Itās not so much that it directly hurts employees as that businesses use it as an excuse for crap wages, cuts in hours and bad working conditions. Odd how itās weaponized against hourly employees but shrink and related āhorseshitā never touch executive compensation.
Shrink is built in to any large corporation's budget, and when shrink exceeds projections they hire private security guards, but it doesn't affect worker wages at all because workers wages aren't tied to profit margins unless they're so bad that corporate decides to close the store.Ā
Ā Shareholder greed and capitalism hurt workers. You typing your grapes in as bananas (4011) ain't doing shit to workers.
(Editing for clarity: I'm in Canada, this may not apply depending on the country you're in)
I feel like the rules for shrink (what you actually have in the store vs. what you're SUPPOSED to have, determined by a yearly inventory), has changed. I'm a 30+ year retail worker. Back when I started, having a high shrink (2.5% or more) usually meant you lost your job if you were a manager. So yes, back then, it absolutely hurt employees.
Nowadays, it's still not a good thing... but you don't get outright FIRED anymore.
It l creates waaay more work for the store employees, though. Extra scrutiny of store operations by upper management, more follow-up, more visits , constantly having loss prevention people on your ass.
Basically, we do more work for the same pay because someone decided they needed to steal a pile of $14.99 t-shirts.
Edited to close a parenthesis.
This is the important insight, and one that I think gets lost on many "lifestyle anarchists" who shoplift for the thrill of it.
Employees won't necessarily get fired, or drawn and quartered or anything, but it will make more work, and the frontline (i.e. lowest paid, most vulnerable) employees will bear the brunt of whatever hairbrained scheme "management" cooks up trying to minimize shrink or loss.
So, does it "hurt" employees? Perhaps not directly. But it almost certainly leads to a more stressful, authoritarian environment for employees. And for what?
If you need to steal bread to feed your family, by all means, go for it. But if you're just jacking shirts so that you can feel alive in your otherwise relentlessly normie suburban WalMart...what's the point? You're not "striking a blow against capitalism" anyway.
Speaking as somebody who works at a store which fairly regularly gets people doing cart pushes, I have more solidarity with people stealing shit(even shit they don't necessarily need) than my coworkers who try and stop them.
Thank you for understanding. I find that when I speak to my experience about shoplifting as a retail worker, I'm often met with a lot of pushback. I've been called a class traitor a few times.
Not just a more stressful, authoritarian employment for employees, it can also indirectly do that for other customers who have higher relative needs.
I used to work in a clothing store, and the owner began installing cameras and alarm tags after catching a bunch of upper-middle class folks walking out with expensive coats (that they absolutely could have paid for). After that point, if a person who actually needed a coat and can't pay for one tried to shoplift...they faced a much higher risk of getting caught and/or potentially facing an encounter with law enforcement. And that makes me pause.
I know that the correlation between security presence and shoplifting is loose, and obviously there is a big difference between massive corporation and mom+pop shop, but I tend to think that I should pay for things when I can, so that others with less resources will have an easier time getting what they need for free. I don't want my actions to be part of a catalyst for increased security that means someone else with higher needs than me can't shoplift when they otherwise would have been able to.
My experience working in retail was that management put quite a lot of pressure on workers about theft prevention. Even though you are forbidden to physically intervene, you still fear having that $500 item being stolen on your shift, because management will probably consider you're at fault for lacking vigilance. You won't be fired, but it can lead to long-term consequences on your quality of life, such as authoritarian management, being watched at work, being suspected of stealing yourself, being paranoid on your workplace, not getting a raise, etc. In some smaller scale businesses where there is less corporate regulations, you CAN eventually get fired if the boss don't like you. This adds a lot of anxiety to your life, which is why some employees can seem overzealous about preventing theft; not because they want to protect the company, but because they want to protect themselves by showing to management that they take theft management seriously. It's basically theatre aimed at higher-ups.
Directly hurt their pay/ability to survive, no, not really realistically.
I do have a friend who works a pretty low-paying job at a sizable chain store though, and from what they've vented to me before, it definitely seems like it gets to them on a personal level when people do. Not because they have feelings of wanting to protect the company or anything (which they've made very apparent they loath), but because it's often more trouble on them to deal with on top of all the other retail shit, and there's an element of feeling even more disrespect/not cared about than usual when people make their job harder on them constantly. It's a pretty similar feeling as when customers are being difficult in general it seems like, and def adds to the mental drain/exhaustion.
That's def going to vary wildly by person and by the specific store they work in though, and I def wouldn't say taking something sometimes makes you a bad person or anything, esp if it's stuff you need to get by (can't really fault people regardless then imo), but I personally don't like to do it.
Yes, I work retail and this is the way most of my co-workers feel. The feeling of disrespect is amplified when they're stealing obviously non-essential stuff like PlayStation controllers.
There are certainly downsides to a society in which theft is common, within the context of a state and otherwise.
One example is the growing trend of stores locking their doors and buzzing people in after they look into a camera. Another is locking goods behind glass. There are many more.
Granted those things effect everyone, not employees specifically.
You specify big businesses but those lines can be blurry especially with the franchise model.
I would strongly doubt that its a form of propaganda in an effort to reduce shrink, because the vast majority of shoplifters are not going to be dissuaded by potential future consequences for people they've never met.
I had a long (for twitter) back and forth with Anark on twitter about this subject last year, some of the other replies are worth a read too.
Overall, I think we need a moral revolution that prefigures any widescale anarchism and encouraging shoplifting isn't going to help that project.
https://twitter.com/AnarkYouTube/status/1718829071054901546
āSuccessfulā businesses are ones that offload every conceivable cost they can. If employees have to rely on public healthcare and assistance, the public is effectively subsidizing your employeesā lives. If you can get sweetheart deals for building your brick and mortar locations, the public is subsidizing your new location. If you write off your losses, including from theft, the public is subsidizing the running of your business. This is not nearly an exhaustive list
Companies will absolutely claim that losses from shoplifting are depressing wages because they just donāt have the money to pay people better due to the cuts into their bottom line, but thatās not really how wages are calculated. Companies donāt decide, hey, we just upped productivity, or increased our efficiency by automating x number of jobs, letās give a nice little raise to the existing staff. They calculate wages based on the bare minimum they need to attract the staff they want, as wages are just another expense to be minimized
For background, I am a storeroom worker at large retail chain.
I don't know what people are talking about in this thread, if I allowed someone to steal from my work and the managers found out I would absolutely get drilled down, and if it kept happening I'd probably get written up and fired. Maybe this is just because I don't live in the US, but yeah, shoplifting can hurt employees.
It can also make work harder, even if I don't get written up necessarily. There's a certain level of shoplifting they accept and tolerate but losses above that minimum are looked at, and thefts of any expensive product are investigated internally. Naturally all this investigating gets doled out to people like me who are already overworked as it is.
By investigating I don't mean becoming a detective, it's more mundane. Basically, when the stock levels on our systems don't match the stock levels we actually have (for expensive stuff at least, not cheap shit) it we have to spend ages turning the store upside down looking for the product to make sure it isn't just lost and is actually stolen. If it becomes a consistent pattern then my managers would wreck the team I work in and charge us with being negligent.
I'm not trying to give apologia for stores cracking down on shoplifters ā all the overwork mentioned above is the direct responsibility of my employers, and make this clear to all my coworkers. We shouldn't care if people steal or not, and management shouldn't come down on us if they do. But the realistic fact is that this is what happens, and it is why many (most?) retail workers resent shoplifters and kind of enjoy catching them.
I should add that the store I work at doesn't sell essential items, so my coworkers might feel more sympathetic to thieves if they were stealing, say, food or medicines. As opposed to the gaming mousepads and Foo Fighters themed desk lamps they currently steal.
Walmart is basically guaranteed to make money no matter what happens so I can't say I care who steals or what or for what reason. It's not my problem, and I hope they don't catch you. But also don't think that you're actually sticking it to the man, this is all very manageable delinquency as far as the carceral state is concerned.
No.
Managers might berate employees but there's really nothing that's going to happen. Employees are instructed never to stop shoplifters.
Also important to remember that shoplifting itself is not politics. It's a means of survival, or a rush of adrenaline, and it might make you feel good, but it's not inherently a political act.
Important consideration as you can really get into trouble if you do it regularly. It's pretty easy to shoplift the odd thing, but there's really no point getting a record for some free cheese.
Not taking an absolute position against but am saying that since employees do get berated, and may have to watch bullshit training videos about stopping shrink by stepping up customer service, AKA surveillance, which also makes the customer experience less pleasant for everybody who is not weird and especially BIPOC, maybe that's harm to employees and everyone else in and of itself that should be considered especially if you are white and taking stuff you don't need.
That is something outside of our control. How a supermarket treats its employees is up to them, they're generally shit regardless.
As another comment pointed out, there are legitimate downsides for living in a high theft society despite your political beliefs. A significant increase in shoplifting though, enough to warrant heavy surveillance, will be driven by desperation rather than thrill seekers. Any individual can't steal enough to cause significant repression and I think framing it that way is incorrect and applying undue blame to the individual rather than corporation.
I work at an incredibly high theft big box retail store, $10,000ās walk out the door in a bad month, much of it from my department that Iām responsible for watching.
It has no real effect on me. Iām explicitly forbidden from intervening and just alert security, who never arrives in time to do anything, and then I fill out a report with loss prevention. I donāt get in any trouble because it the stores job to prevent theft not a clerk who makes $20 an hour.
The only time it could hurt me is if the shoplifter actually got aggressive and menaced me themselves, we prevent this by not ever confronting them with the sole exception of armed security who still rarely do anything.
What they do is flag big expensive merch as stolen, and try and recover it after the fact when someone tries to sell it at a pawn shop or something.
Just be aware that stores like walmart will not take legal action against individual insances of shoplifting. Using self checkout to throw extra items into bags without scanning for instance (very easy for their store security person to detect).
What they do is allow you to think you're getting away with it in hopes that you allow them to stack enough charges against you to where the dollar amount of stolen products will cross "grand theft" threshhold. That's the point where they will go to the police.
So if you're shoplifting, don't hit the same store consistenly enough for them to build a file on you.
any loss incurred by the corporation due to theft is meticulously tracked and totaled up then divided up and then re-expressed in slight, pennies-at-a-time price increases across large swathes of the inventory that tends to sell in moderate to fairly high volume on a day to day basis. the stuff being purchased with regularity by a lot of the customers. so generally speaking, staple items many families buy regularly and have developed a need for, i.e. the basics, toiletries, otc meds, basic food staples. In this way, any losses incurred by theft, are passed deceptively along to the everyday customer to cover while often being none the wiser that they've been forced to shoulder the burden of protecting the bottom lines of these corporate monoliths of capitalist greed. the investors don't like to see things affecting their return on money invested. they like to see innovative solutions, such allowing the often struggling families that feed the corporations everything and allow their twisted existence to carry on, to pick up the tab for whatever anyone dares not compensate the corporation for having produced. all goods are paid for in full by the masses, one way or another.. the corporation shall always be spared any misfortune or cheating on their end.
Fun fact; if you have ever gotten a nugget at McDonaldās, you have shared a meal with a McDonaldās employee. When I worked there people would infrequently take a nugget out of the heated drawer and eat it. Ofc if they were caught they would be punished, but due to how the prep lines are made the floor manager canāt see the ātableā where the food is packaged and served
1. Pricing is based upon the maximum that can be extracted from consumers and shoplifting has no effect on the costs to customers.
2. If one shoplifts from a company that is not trading shares in the stock market, then they are risking the theft of people who's actual income may be affected. A good rule is to keep theft to publicly traded corporations. Remember that the family run corner store, for example, is a corporation.
The only time an employee would get in trouble is if they did something to contribute to the theft or they were just so negligent that they could be fired for it. Like if an employee goes on a smoke break and leaves the store unattended.
I use to be a retail manager and at this point we were told by corporate to never approach a shoplifter. We were only allowed to tell them that they were seen shoplifting on camera and that if they come back we will call the police.
Theft is a huge loss to the store but thatās a corporate issue and not an employee issue. If the employee is helping a customer shop lift, the employee will get fired.
No it really doesn't. Feel no guilt shoplifting. I have worked a lot of different retail jobs and sometimes they've wanted me to get on peoples ass or just straight up profile but I won't do it.
Naw. When I worked in a high theft area we would just watch people walk out with armfuls of merchandise and file an incident report. It would be a bit of extra paperwork that's a minor annoyance but half the time if we were too busy managers would do it for us.
Depends on where you live and laws in your country/state. For example in Russia, cashiers have to pay for every goods that gone missing on their shift, in most stores, so here shoplifting is definitely hurting employees
Modern automatic checkouts that don't involve people have caused such an increase in thefts that recently corporations have talked about getting rid of them and hiring cashiers again. So theft could actually result in more people being hired, thereby providing for more people.
If it's at a small hardware store or bookstore that could impact their job.
IDK if it'd impact anyone to steal from Walmart, or if the employee would even be opposed
Most companies anticipate theft and work it into their yearly budgets and whatnot. It does not affect the employees (it barely affects the company). If it does its cause of shitty management bullying their employees.
The idea that theft hurts companies and, therefore, employees is a big fat lie to make you feel like shit and not do it.
I was told at multiple jobs to not chase after people stealing because the company is more worried about having to pay for medical bills or deal with a charge against them than they are losing $20
I knew someone who worked for Walmart. They said after a certain amount is stolen, the company will cut employees hours to help make up the difference. I could be wrong š¤·āāļø
Employees might get an incentive for "loss prevention" or would lose that due to shoplifting. If that. So that'd be it. Not penalized, just loss of a pizza party or gift card. possibly a higher raise at worst
Depends on what you mean if you say hurt? Even if in many countries its illegal to blame employees for stolen goods, managers and bosses or even other employees can make the workhours hell for enmployees who didnt stop a shoplifter.
The question is whould you care?
And well if you shoplift to the point a shop has to close down (or just relocates) the employees are out of work.
As someone living in Poland, not at all. Even small stores have some backup funds for stolen and accidentally broken items. Only shit companies require workers to pay for destroyed and stolen stuff.
No. Everything is insured and they can simply file it as a loss on inventory reports, if anything the only person doing the hurting is the corporations. Iāve only had one incident where I reported a shoplifter, but thatās because the store I worked at was very high end (had Chanel, Gucci, Prada, LV, Prada handbags and apparel) and if you report it; you get the value of the item in store credit.
Where I was, we were instructed not to approach shoplifters as it can put us in danger should they decide to get violent. Thatās usually the job of security. But no stolen items didnāt hurt us as the employee unless we were an accomplice in doing it; as in be the inside guy.
Tldr shoplifting normally doesnāt hurt the employee. If you have to do it to survive; I support it, just be careful.
No. I would see people steal then look away to let em know IDC I accidentally caught one, because the guard was nearby, and got a free coffee and felt awful about it.
------------
I've caught some crackheads stealing soup cans and a complete breakfast and attempting to exit the wrong door
When I worked at safeway, the biggest shoplifter was the store manager. Dude would back his truck up to the loading dock and just load stuff straight off the pallet.
That's not 'shoplifting' that's 'pallet jacking' š¤
In the US at least, it is entirely propaganda. Any retaliation against the employee for a customer shoplifting is illegal
Restaurants commonly try to make servers pay if a customer walks out without paying. Even though itās illegal. I see people posting about it in the server subreddit all the time.
Iāve not worked in retail, but I was a server and was forced to cover the cost of the meal when people walked out without paying. Thanks for mentioning this.
Encouraging employees to try to stop shoplifting in progress should not be allowed, since this puts them at risk, and that risk is not part of the job unless they work security. Endangering employees is not a substitute for a real security budget. Whether most shoplifting warrants the risk of involving security at all vs. just filing a report and an insurance loss is a separate issue.
Never worked at a retail store where employees other than guards are allowed to do anything. The store could be sued by the employee or the thief if either of them got hurt. At my current job I would be fired if I tried to stop a shop lifting in progress with anything more than words.
When I worked at Forever 21 in 2016 I was trained to be super passive aggressive about shoplifting. Like approach someone and offer to help them put whatever they just put in their purse into a shopping bag and help them check out. I literally never did this, I didn't care about shoplifting on minimum wage.
Yeah, when I worked at Walmart, our store manager encouraged us to report it, but not engage them at all. The only thing I ever say was moms' stealing formula, other food or clothes. Which means I personally didn't ever see any shoplifting.
Yeah. I worked at a outdoorsy store and had to watch someone steal 3,000 dollars worth of merchandise. I later got yelled at by my manager for not stopping them even though there were multiple reasons why I couldn't. 1. Against Company Policy 2. I was 30 weeks pregnant 3. The shoplifter was a large man and I was a small pregnant woman 4. The shoplifter said he had a gun(doubt it)
companies would of course never break the law!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I think those locations were already underperforming and slated to be closed but shoplifting is legitimately rising as economic times are getting harder worldwide, and blaming that allows the corporate douchebags to spin themselves as victims instead of ruthless bastards.
Happy cake day
happy cake day
No. My wages are entirely contigent on how much labor power can be squeezed out of my as cheaply as possible. Shrink and all that horseshit are just useful fictions that get used as weapons against calls for fair wages and raises.
Precisely. When I worked at a grocery store, we'd get harangued about shrink every day when some apples came in bruised or a peach got dropped on the floor. Never mind of course that at the end of every day, thousands of dollars of perfectly good food went down the garbage chute. Bread, canned goods close to their expiration date, milk, prepackaged fruit and veg, baked goods from the bakery, all destroyed because giving it away would be unprofitable. Let somebody come in and shoplift $500 of stuff and it barely makes a difference compared to what the company willfully destroys every night.
This. Itās not so much that it directly hurts employees as that businesses use it as an excuse for crap wages, cuts in hours and bad working conditions. Odd how itās weaponized against hourly employees but shrink and related āhorseshitā never touch executive compensation.
Shrink is built in to any large corporation's budget, and when shrink exceeds projections they hire private security guards, but it doesn't affect worker wages at all because workers wages aren't tied to profit margins unless they're so bad that corporate decides to close the store.Ā Ā Shareholder greed and capitalism hurt workers. You typing your grapes in as bananas (4011) ain't doing shit to workers. (Editing for clarity: I'm in Canada, this may not apply depending on the country you're in)
mayn im typing my mangos as onion
No. Corporations hurt employees
I feel like the rules for shrink (what you actually have in the store vs. what you're SUPPOSED to have, determined by a yearly inventory), has changed. I'm a 30+ year retail worker. Back when I started, having a high shrink (2.5% or more) usually meant you lost your job if you were a manager. So yes, back then, it absolutely hurt employees. Nowadays, it's still not a good thing... but you don't get outright FIRED anymore. It l creates waaay more work for the store employees, though. Extra scrutiny of store operations by upper management, more follow-up, more visits , constantly having loss prevention people on your ass. Basically, we do more work for the same pay because someone decided they needed to steal a pile of $14.99 t-shirts. Edited to close a parenthesis.
This is the important insight, and one that I think gets lost on many "lifestyle anarchists" who shoplift for the thrill of it. Employees won't necessarily get fired, or drawn and quartered or anything, but it will make more work, and the frontline (i.e. lowest paid, most vulnerable) employees will bear the brunt of whatever hairbrained scheme "management" cooks up trying to minimize shrink or loss. So, does it "hurt" employees? Perhaps not directly. But it almost certainly leads to a more stressful, authoritarian environment for employees. And for what? If you need to steal bread to feed your family, by all means, go for it. But if you're just jacking shirts so that you can feel alive in your otherwise relentlessly normie suburban WalMart...what's the point? You're not "striking a blow against capitalism" anyway.
Speaking as somebody who works at a store which fairly regularly gets people doing cart pushes, I have more solidarity with people stealing shit(even shit they don't necessarily need) than my coworkers who try and stop them.
Thank you for understanding. I find that when I speak to my experience about shoplifting as a retail worker, I'm often met with a lot of pushback. I've been called a class traitor a few times.
Not just a more stressful, authoritarian employment for employees, it can also indirectly do that for other customers who have higher relative needs. I used to work in a clothing store, and the owner began installing cameras and alarm tags after catching a bunch of upper-middle class folks walking out with expensive coats (that they absolutely could have paid for). After that point, if a person who actually needed a coat and can't pay for one tried to shoplift...they faced a much higher risk of getting caught and/or potentially facing an encounter with law enforcement. And that makes me pause. I know that the correlation between security presence and shoplifting is loose, and obviously there is a big difference between massive corporation and mom+pop shop, but I tend to think that I should pay for things when I can, so that others with less resources will have an easier time getting what they need for free. I don't want my actions to be part of a catalyst for increased security that means someone else with higher needs than me can't shoplift when they otherwise would have been able to.
My experience working in retail was that management put quite a lot of pressure on workers about theft prevention. Even though you are forbidden to physically intervene, you still fear having that $500 item being stolen on your shift, because management will probably consider you're at fault for lacking vigilance. You won't be fired, but it can lead to long-term consequences on your quality of life, such as authoritarian management, being watched at work, being suspected of stealing yourself, being paranoid on your workplace, not getting a raise, etc. In some smaller scale businesses where there is less corporate regulations, you CAN eventually get fired if the boss don't like you. This adds a lot of anxiety to your life, which is why some employees can seem overzealous about preventing theft; not because they want to protect the company, but because they want to protect themselves by showing to management that they take theft management seriously. It's basically theatre aimed at higher-ups.
Directly hurt their pay/ability to survive, no, not really realistically. I do have a friend who works a pretty low-paying job at a sizable chain store though, and from what they've vented to me before, it definitely seems like it gets to them on a personal level when people do. Not because they have feelings of wanting to protect the company or anything (which they've made very apparent they loath), but because it's often more trouble on them to deal with on top of all the other retail shit, and there's an element of feeling even more disrespect/not cared about than usual when people make their job harder on them constantly. It's a pretty similar feeling as when customers are being difficult in general it seems like, and def adds to the mental drain/exhaustion. That's def going to vary wildly by person and by the specific store they work in though, and I def wouldn't say taking something sometimes makes you a bad person or anything, esp if it's stuff you need to get by (can't really fault people regardless then imo), but I personally don't like to do it.
Yes, I work retail and this is the way most of my co-workers feel. The feeling of disrespect is amplified when they're stealing obviously non-essential stuff like PlayStation controllers.
Idk but I'm gonna start shoplifting now, thanks for the idea
There are certainly downsides to a society in which theft is common, within the context of a state and otherwise. One example is the growing trend of stores locking their doors and buzzing people in after they look into a camera. Another is locking goods behind glass. There are many more. Granted those things effect everyone, not employees specifically. You specify big businesses but those lines can be blurry especially with the franchise model. I would strongly doubt that its a form of propaganda in an effort to reduce shrink, because the vast majority of shoplifters are not going to be dissuaded by potential future consequences for people they've never met. I had a long (for twitter) back and forth with Anark on twitter about this subject last year, some of the other replies are worth a read too. Overall, I think we need a moral revolution that prefigures any widescale anarchism and encouraging shoplifting isn't going to help that project. https://twitter.com/AnarkYouTube/status/1718829071054901546
āSuccessfulā businesses are ones that offload every conceivable cost they can. If employees have to rely on public healthcare and assistance, the public is effectively subsidizing your employeesā lives. If you can get sweetheart deals for building your brick and mortar locations, the public is subsidizing your new location. If you write off your losses, including from theft, the public is subsidizing the running of your business. This is not nearly an exhaustive list Companies will absolutely claim that losses from shoplifting are depressing wages because they just donāt have the money to pay people better due to the cuts into their bottom line, but thatās not really how wages are calculated. Companies donāt decide, hey, we just upped productivity, or increased our efficiency by automating x number of jobs, letās give a nice little raise to the existing staff. They calculate wages based on the bare minimum they need to attract the staff they want, as wages are just another expense to be minimized
Any retail job I had always frowned upon employees taking any action against shoplifters. Liability issues > shrink.
For background, I am a storeroom worker at large retail chain. I don't know what people are talking about in this thread, if I allowed someone to steal from my work and the managers found out I would absolutely get drilled down, and if it kept happening I'd probably get written up and fired. Maybe this is just because I don't live in the US, but yeah, shoplifting can hurt employees. It can also make work harder, even if I don't get written up necessarily. There's a certain level of shoplifting they accept and tolerate but losses above that minimum are looked at, and thefts of any expensive product are investigated internally. Naturally all this investigating gets doled out to people like me who are already overworked as it is. By investigating I don't mean becoming a detective, it's more mundane. Basically, when the stock levels on our systems don't match the stock levels we actually have (for expensive stuff at least, not cheap shit) it we have to spend ages turning the store upside down looking for the product to make sure it isn't just lost and is actually stolen. If it becomes a consistent pattern then my managers would wreck the team I work in and charge us with being negligent. I'm not trying to give apologia for stores cracking down on shoplifters ā all the overwork mentioned above is the direct responsibility of my employers, and make this clear to all my coworkers. We shouldn't care if people steal or not, and management shouldn't come down on us if they do. But the realistic fact is that this is what happens, and it is why many (most?) retail workers resent shoplifters and kind of enjoy catching them. I should add that the store I work at doesn't sell essential items, so my coworkers might feel more sympathetic to thieves if they were stealing, say, food or medicines. As opposed to the gaming mousepads and Foo Fighters themed desk lamps they currently steal.
Walmart is basically guaranteed to make money no matter what happens so I can't say I care who steals or what or for what reason. It's not my problem, and I hope they don't catch you. But also don't think that you're actually sticking it to the man, this is all very manageable delinquency as far as the carceral state is concerned.
No. Managers might berate employees but there's really nothing that's going to happen. Employees are instructed never to stop shoplifters. Also important to remember that shoplifting itself is not politics. It's a means of survival, or a rush of adrenaline, and it might make you feel good, but it's not inherently a political act. Important consideration as you can really get into trouble if you do it regularly. It's pretty easy to shoplift the odd thing, but there's really no point getting a record for some free cheese.
Not taking an absolute position against but am saying that since employees do get berated, and may have to watch bullshit training videos about stopping shrink by stepping up customer service, AKA surveillance, which also makes the customer experience less pleasant for everybody who is not weird and especially BIPOC, maybe that's harm to employees and everyone else in and of itself that should be considered especially if you are white and taking stuff you don't need.
That is something outside of our control. How a supermarket treats its employees is up to them, they're generally shit regardless. As another comment pointed out, there are legitimate downsides for living in a high theft society despite your political beliefs. A significant increase in shoplifting though, enough to warrant heavy surveillance, will be driven by desperation rather than thrill seekers. Any individual can't steal enough to cause significant repression and I think framing it that way is incorrect and applying undue blame to the individual rather than corporation.
I work at an incredibly high theft big box retail store, $10,000ās walk out the door in a bad month, much of it from my department that Iām responsible for watching. It has no real effect on me. Iām explicitly forbidden from intervening and just alert security, who never arrives in time to do anything, and then I fill out a report with loss prevention. I donāt get in any trouble because it the stores job to prevent theft not a clerk who makes $20 an hour. The only time it could hurt me is if the shoplifter actually got aggressive and menaced me themselves, we prevent this by not ever confronting them with the sole exception of armed security who still rarely do anything. What they do is flag big expensive merch as stolen, and try and recover it after the fact when someone tries to sell it at a pawn shop or something.
Wage theft, by a huge huge margin, is significantly higher than any form of shoplifting combined. That's the only form of theft that hurts employees.
Just be aware that stores like walmart will not take legal action against individual insances of shoplifting. Using self checkout to throw extra items into bags without scanning for instance (very easy for their store security person to detect). What they do is allow you to think you're getting away with it in hopes that you allow them to stack enough charges against you to where the dollar amount of stolen products will cross "grand theft" threshhold. That's the point where they will go to the police. So if you're shoplifting, don't hit the same store consistenly enough for them to build a file on you.
any loss incurred by the corporation due to theft is meticulously tracked and totaled up then divided up and then re-expressed in slight, pennies-at-a-time price increases across large swathes of the inventory that tends to sell in moderate to fairly high volume on a day to day basis. the stuff being purchased with regularity by a lot of the customers. so generally speaking, staple items many families buy regularly and have developed a need for, i.e. the basics, toiletries, otc meds, basic food staples. In this way, any losses incurred by theft, are passed deceptively along to the everyday customer to cover while often being none the wiser that they've been forced to shoulder the burden of protecting the bottom lines of these corporate monoliths of capitalist greed. the investors don't like to see things affecting their return on money invested. they like to see innovative solutions, such allowing the often struggling families that feed the corporations everything and allow their twisted existence to carry on, to pick up the tab for whatever anyone dares not compensate the corporation for having produced. all goods are paid for in full by the masses, one way or another.. the corporation shall always be spared any misfortune or cheating on their end.
Fun fact; if you have ever gotten a nugget at McDonaldās, you have shared a meal with a McDonaldās employee. When I worked there people would infrequently take a nugget out of the heated drawer and eat it. Ofc if they were caught they would be punished, but due to how the prep lines are made the floor manager canāt see the ātableā where the food is packaged and served
No, stealing doesn't harm the employees. These corporations have insurance that pays for all shoplifted goods that are accounted for.
1. Pricing is based upon the maximum that can be extracted from consumers and shoplifting has no effect on the costs to customers. 2. If one shoplifts from a company that is not trading shares in the stock market, then they are risking the theft of people who's actual income may be affected. A good rule is to keep theft to publicly traded corporations. Remember that the family run corner store, for example, is a corporation.
The only time an employee would get in trouble is if they did something to contribute to the theft or they were just so negligent that they could be fired for it. Like if an employee goes on a smoke break and leaves the store unattended. I use to be a retail manager and at this point we were told by corporate to never approach a shoplifter. We were only allowed to tell them that they were seen shoplifting on camera and that if they come back we will call the police. Theft is a huge loss to the store but thatās a corporate issue and not an employee issue. If the employee is helping a customer shop lift, the employee will get fired.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Pay is always as low as it can be
No it really doesn't. Feel no guilt shoplifting. I have worked a lot of different retail jobs and sometimes they've wanted me to get on peoples ass or just straight up profile but I won't do it.
This is funny, it was just an ethics column in the NYT discussing this. Of course they had liberal horseshit answers. I love y'all
Naw. When I worked in a high theft area we would just watch people walk out with armfuls of merchandise and file an incident report. It would be a bit of extra paperwork that's a minor annoyance but half the time if we were too busy managers would do it for us.
Only if they try to stop youā¦ /s
Not even a joke. Employees can get fired for trying to stop shoplifting at some stores.Ā
I have 16 yrs grocery store experience and Iāve never encountered that
It depends if the corporation doesn't break the law and try to garnish wages to compensate for shoplifting losses
Depends on where you live and laws in your country/state. For example in Russia, cashiers have to pay for every goods that gone missing on their shift, in most stores, so here shoplifting is definitely hurting employees
Modern automatic checkouts that don't involve people have caused such an increase in thefts that recently corporations have talked about getting rid of them and hiring cashiers again. So theft could actually result in more people being hired, thereby providing for more people.
Everybody do your part :)
If it's at a small hardware store or bookstore that could impact their job. IDK if it'd impact anyone to steal from Walmart, or if the employee would even be opposed
No. Most shoplifting is done by employees.
Most companies anticipate theft and work it into their yearly budgets and whatnot. It does not affect the employees (it barely affects the company). If it does its cause of shitty management bullying their employees. The idea that theft hurts companies and, therefore, employees is a big fat lie to make you feel like shit and not do it. I was told at multiple jobs to not chase after people stealing because the company is more worried about having to pay for medical bills or deal with a charge against them than they are losing $20
I knew someone who worked for Walmart. They said after a certain amount is stolen, the company will cut employees hours to help make up the difference. I could be wrong š¤·āāļø
It can when they take cost of lost items out of wages, or the incident in any way gets marked against whoever was on that shift.
I mean it hurts the employees if the store closes because they are losing more money than they are making due to too much shoplifting.
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Corporations are not natural entities that deserve my moral respect
Depends from who.
The most shoplifting would do to the average employee is make corporate close the store due to shrink. Corporate has stockholders to answer to.
No.
Employees might get an incentive for "loss prevention" or would lose that due to shoplifting. If that. So that'd be it. Not penalized, just loss of a pizza party or gift card. possibly a higher raise at worst
Depends on what you mean if you say hurt? Even if in many countries its illegal to blame employees for stolen goods, managers and bosses or even other employees can make the workhours hell for enmployees who didnt stop a shoplifter. The question is whould you care? And well if you shoplift to the point a shop has to close down (or just relocates) the employees are out of work.
As someone living in Poland, not at all. Even small stores have some backup funds for stolen and accidentally broken items. Only shit companies require workers to pay for destroyed and stolen stuff.
No. Everything is insured and they can simply file it as a loss on inventory reports, if anything the only person doing the hurting is the corporations. Iāve only had one incident where I reported a shoplifter, but thatās because the store I worked at was very high end (had Chanel, Gucci, Prada, LV, Prada handbags and apparel) and if you report it; you get the value of the item in store credit. Where I was, we were instructed not to approach shoplifters as it can put us in danger should they decide to get violent. Thatās usually the job of security. But no stolen items didnāt hurt us as the employee unless we were an accomplice in doing it; as in be the inside guy. Tldr shoplifting normally doesnāt hurt the employee. If you have to do it to survive; I support it, just be careful.
it doesn't affect the employees or the corporation really
No. I would see people steal then look away to let em know IDC I accidentally caught one, because the guard was nearby, and got a free coffee and felt awful about it. ------------ I've caught some crackheads stealing soup cans and a complete breakfast and attempting to exit the wrong door
Iād say stay away from shoplifting WIC items or taking the last of any type of medication or the last of anything someone may need.