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We are forced to live in a system that steals from us daily, Kill snitch culture.
Important things to keep in mind!
– never take from ‘mom and pop’ type store. Its likely you’ll actually harm them, whereas taking from a walmart wont effect much.
– never take items that a worker is assigned to monitor (usually super expensive items), theyll be in trouble for it. and its usually a minimum wage worker and usually they lose hours or pay, or they even get fired.
– similar to the above, never take things that are usually locked up for the above reason
– if its a store you know gives their near-expiration products to workers/charity, try to avoid taking the near expiration products.
– if youre taking clothing, avoid leaving hangers. it sounds weird, but itll make it seem like it was more likely an error in the computer than a theft, since the empty hanger sitting there will seem suspicious.
– also for clothing, try not to take more than one item at once, as it will look suspicious if theres 10 medium shirts missing, and it won’t be written off as just a stocking error. and it will lead to workers being penalized
– basically just always consider ‘will this harm a worker’ and if the answer is yes then dont do it
like i was homeless for a while when i was younger and i tried to follow those guidelines to avoid doing harm to people who were probably not much better off than me while trying to get food for myself.
Holy crap, is there like an unspoken thieves code or something?!
it’s a thing. I won’t even lie. I watched someone slip a nursing exam book in their bag at the store I worked at. She made eye contact with me and the blood drained from her face. I simply gave her a sympathetic nod and walked away.
I live in a small town and I knew she was a waitress at a hotel my sister works at, and people at that hotel don’t tip well during off season. Nursing exam books are 50+ bucks. Being a med student myself, I didn’t even breathe a word, and when inventory came up later and the book was missing, I suggested it was likely a mislabel, and the manager wrote it off.
Sometimes, thievery is a necessity. Don’t send people to jail over petty things.
theft for many is survival in this system and taking away from multi-billion dollar companies that are a part of the oppressive capitalist system
I love this post so much. Like, an unbelievable amount.
And they say there’s no honour among thieves.
This. Also dont steal things you dont need. This post is clearly about stealing things you cant afford like foods or supplies. This is obviously not about you stealing expensive make up those shiny earings you saw at the store. If you need those i am sure you can ask a friend or someone for it (also there are stores runned by one or two people that look “fancy”. Always check first
My husband used to work as a manager for a very popular supermarket chain. I mean, he worked in some of their best stores, the ones that would make 150k a day easy.
This one time, security brought this woman to the back because they caught her shoplifting. They call my hub to the room where they’re writing up a report and getting ready to call the cops. When he gets back there and asks what she was stealing, they tell him “bread, cheese, and a carton of milk” and my husband flips his shit on them, hands the lady the items after he pays for them himself and after she leaves he tells security to never bother him when someone is trying to feed themselves.
Okay let me explain something of how the supermarket I work at works.
Because this is all very noble-sounding saying “yeah! If you do what you want to do you’re sticking it to capitalism!” But in practicality, Capitalism has thought of that.
Foods that go missing enough in a store eventually have a price hike to compensate.
Instead of just taking the cut in profit usually you start to see compensation in the price. (You can see this with chains where despite sales being the same throughout a chain, a higher theft store will have higher prices on some items comparatively.)
A store that takes a cut in profits and has part time employees will often cut the hours to the store that’s making less. That’s fewer hours overall for the pool the part-time crew draws from, and a lot of frantic struggling on the part of the full time crew to compensate for the lack of help with the same load of work. If the crew gets efficient enough at it, does the price of the missing- let’s assume it’s food? Does that food go down?
No.
Instead the company gets to cut its hours further and schedule the more efficient team. The store makes higher profits because it now has a more efficient crew but the compensating price for the theft generally stays the same.
So the cost of what you take not only comes out of your neighbors, who have to pay more for what you cost that company, but also out of the employees whether by salary or by hardship, whether they report you or not.
If you’re stealing pricey items to return and get credit in the store for, what happens is if enough people do it the policy changes, and the people not stealing suffer.
The solution is not to steal. The solution is like above: to pay for one another where you can. Especially for things that are staples.
As a cashier, before setting up or keeping track of tills was part of my job, I used to have a specific fund I’d bring with me to cope for things like unexpected tax, or price hikes for my customers.
My best managers have had quiet personal funds for people whose trays were only very occasionally short so they could avoid write-ups and pay-free suspensions. You know. Things that would mean their employees couldn’t pay their bills because of an honest mistake.
Theft isn’t the solution you think it is.
Ask one another.
Help one another.
Capitalism exists as a system of greed. We fight it not by doing what’s best for ourselves citing our poverty as justification, but by refusing to turn on one another or ignore one another’s burdens.
We’ll never be successful in tearing down this system for good if we don’t establish a baseline of caring for one another first. Instead we’ll all be thinking of how what we don’t have justifies what we’re doing and how it’s actually good.
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