working at a grocery store this is something i was so worried would happen, i cant stop someone from trying to feed themselves.
but it literally hasn’t happened. people steal fried chicken and pack steaks into a duffel bag. or they have me write on cakes for their coworkers birthday and run out the door with it. they eat chicken and dump the bones on a shelf they pay for the rest of their “groceries”.
i’ve never once seen anyone steal bread, or fruit, or vegetables, or cold chicken
Same
We have free purified water but no they steal soda
so you’re saying it people are trying to feed themselves
How dare poor people eat things they enjoy rather than bland staples, the only thing they deserve
A little disappointed that this didn’t become a site-wide week-long discourse topic/meme fodder because it’s a discussion we’re way overdue to have
Like, let’s set aside the practical concerns, like how “unhealthy” food has more calories while taking up less bag space, people can’t survive on nothing but bread and water, many poor communities are food deserts where fresh food isn’t even available to steal, and many people (including the explicitly unhoused man in the meme) don’t have a way to prepare frozen chicken. Let’s set all that aside, because poor people aren’t required to justify every single action to you specifically
Instead let’s talk about the sheer undisguised hatred of the poor on display here. “The fried food at the grocery store is for me, because I’m a good special boy with money, if the filthy poors want to steal they can steal the dried gruel powder because that’s all they’re good enough for. Or they can have meat, I suppose, but only if it’s frozen meat that they’ll have to go heat up themselves to prove to me that they’ve earned it. And make sure they grab some raw vegetables that they’ll have to chop and cook themselves too, that’ll be a good use of their bountiful time and energy. If they wanted not to be miserable, they should have tried not being poor, like me!”
There is literally no justification for this shit. If you believe that stealing bread from a chain grocery store is a justified act that hurts no one, why the fuck would you feel different about steak? Why are you even thinking about this shit? Why are you sitting around fuming at the thought of poor people having anything that makes life worth living? What does it fucking matter to you?
How can you be heartless enough to look at a society where people have to steal in order to feed themselves and their families, and your biggest concern is about policing what they steal?
“They only steal the expensive stuff, then they go and PAY for the cheap stuff???”
Gee I wonder why that would be…
I wonder why you’ve never seen someone with no house steal raw chicken before. There are just some mysteries that can truly never be solved
For the record, I was homeless for a while - or at least, I lived in a motel by the highway. And luckily I had access to a mini fridge - and it was the kind of motel where people just *lived*, which I discovered when they served Thanksgiving dinner in the lobby to everyone and asked us if we’d like to come down for it. (I cried. A lot.)
That mini fridge was a miracle, but I didn’t have anything like a hot plate or a way to prepare food - just a pot for coffee/hot water. Mostly what I ate was peanut butter and jam sammiches, apples, and lunch meat and cheese if I could get it, because it was expensive. I never got to the point of stealing… but it wasn’t because I thought I was too good to steal. The smell of the fried chicken in the grocery store deli was murder. I just didn’t think I could get away with it.
If I didn’t have that mini fridge or a way to keep my food cold and safe… yeah, I’d probably be stealing that fucking chicken.
So as a retail worker who has five years of experience, I’d like to put my two cents in. While most people advocate stealing if you can’t buy food(which I do understand and completely empathize with), you must remember that you aren’t just stealing from the corporation, you are in fact stealing from the employees themselves. So many times I’ve asked for overtime and have been denied it bc our shrink is too high. Ever wonder why there aren’t enough cashiers? Cutting hours bc we need to recoup on our shrink. Also, on another note, the things I see people usually steal are high value electronics(like $70 fans, tvs, earbuds), makeup, and like $50+ toys. So while I empathize, please don’t steal. You are literally taking money out of employees paychecks, and depending on the corporation itself, you could actually get them fired for not catching when people steal.
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actually very easy to believe some people are shitty
@flower884 and everyone else in retail, I’m sorry, but you’re misassigning blame here.
The people stealing from your corporate overlords aren’t the ones choosing to understaff your workplace, cut your hours, pay you empoverishing wages much less than true value of your labor, nor fire you because they think the store’s shrink is too large: Your corporate overlords are the ones doing that and they blaming John val John hoping you and everyone else believes them so you don’t organize and demand concessions: and you’ve swallowed that pill like a potassum supository.
You’ve been in retail for five years; do some fucking organizing, form a union, fuck your boss’s wife, and don’t be the snitch that gets John 6 years hard labor for stealing some bread to feed his family.
It’s not that hard*, just do what Chris Smalls do: he led a win against Amazon. FUCKING Amazon. Successfully unionizing, or even failing to unionize but scaring the shit out of the corporate overlords that you might succeed will have a lot larger, more positive effect on your material conditions than bitching on the internet about poor people wanting necessary or nice things they can’t comfortably afford.
*Don’t misunderstand me, it’s hard work, organizing. Chris Smalls fought for over two years and a wrongful termination to acheive the win for fellows, but you’ll more likely to find success in unionizing even against the most notorious union buster than you are to baulk even one person from theft of either necesity or pleasure on the basis of, in my opinion, a critically flawed moral argument**.
**I view the so-called property rights of corporations as illegitimate***, so ‘stealing from a store’ is to me morally nonsensical even as I’m forced to recognize its legal reality. The point of this footnote being that I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with freely taking what ought be freely available to you, and you’d never convince me against 'shoplifting’ using a moral argument, least of all the consequencialist one you’re making because, as previously stated, you’re misassigning blame. Again, unionize and fuck your boss’s wife, yeah?
***As a property abolitionist, I also view a lot of 'property rights of individuals’ as illegitimate too, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion.
Also; what? It’s very sweet, actually, to steal a cake for your coworker 💖
Also-also, corporations have a budget explicitly to handle stolen product. All the poor people stealing food so they can not starve are not running them dry to the point that they have to fire employees. If they were at that point, they would already be shutting down so they didn’t go bankrupt.
Tl;dr:
i worked at ross dress for less for a year or two. they checked our bags at the end of every shift. a girl was fired for allegedly stealing some makeup.
they made us do half an hour of cleanup after we’d all clocked out or we’d be penalized for not ‘clocking out on time’ but also ‘not finishing facing’. half an hour of work at minimum wage was about 3$, multiplied by 5-8 employees per shift, multiplied by about three shifts. per year. forever.
they’d hammer on and on and ON at us about loss prevention and shrinkage, while skimming off 45$-72$ from their own employees in wage theft. every day. plus the hours of free work managers put in. but whenever we were denied raises or bonuses or pizza rewards or whatever it was always because of ‘all the shrinkage this quarter’ and they’d blame thieves, for their shitty secondhand crap they bought in huge remaindered job lots anyway.
my manager cried in her office once, for a company that extracted hundreds of dollars worth of free work off its employees every month, and then blamed the poor for our abuse.
you’re not being overworked and underpaid because your grocery chain is being robbed blind by filthy savages and fucking walmart or wherever needs to pinch some pennies. your bosses are fucking you over specifically because they can.
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As a retail worker, if you blame other poor people or homeless people for your low wages, you’re a fucking bootlicker riddled with propaganda.
A corporation is not a person, the people stealing even expensive things are living, breathing people.
You want to know why people steal non-food items? Because we live in a society that operates on profit. Electronics like TVs and Headphones, expensive jewelry, shitty brand expensive clothing, etc. Are all valuable items that can be sold. That money can go to fresh meals, phone bills, campsite fees or hotel fees, or a common one is Fines, because it’s rare to be homeless and not have a cop cite you some bullshit, hundred dollar violation for something like sleeping on a bench, or your car having a missing brake light, and thats if you’re lucky and said cop doesn’t beat you or steal what you have on you.
Corporations are not people. Corporations are a infinite money glitch cycle so some rich fucks can horde money like fucking Smaug and convince the employees that oh we could pay more if Homeless Susan didn’t steal that $25 package of diapers.
If you are a retail worker, you are closer to being that homeless person stealing a bucket of security cameras than to even your District Manager, and yet the rich have you convinced that you are somehow better than your fellow humans.
As a retail worker, you are not allowed to be punished if someone steals in front of you and you don’t stop it. In fact, and actual retail workers will tell you this, we are advised to literally let people walk out because if we jump in we could open the Store up for lawsuits or workman’s comp claims, so they’d rather eat the shoplift than pay for the medical bills of an employee who got hurt.
And even if you get a talk down from your manager, I’d say that’s better than living with yourself knowing you just helped the Cops arrest a starving person who was just trying to get some food, clothes, or money so they could live another day.
Corporations aren’t humans, they have no loyalty. That homeless person who just stole a flat-screen is more likely to give you support if you can’t pay your rent and find yourself evicted, than a Corporation. A Corporation will not show you the loyalty you show it, a Corporation will throw you on your ass if your performance suffers due to illness, disaster, grief, disability etc. Because a Corporation is. Not. Human. And they will not be there when you fall.
Don’t let the King convince you that the peasants are holding him back from paying you better. The only thing holding him back is greed. You will never see a share of his gold that you protect so loyally.
Hi disabled person and ex-thief. Do you know what happens if you are disabled and cannot work a traditional job but also do not have any of the support to get disability benefits? You can’t pay rent!
When you say oh stealing food is fine, but there is no reason to steal and sell fine art supplies, all I read is that you can’t imagine I exist. Or you think I shouldn’t.
I paid rent with art supplies specifically several years ago because there was no other way. Should I have lost all my pets and been forced to live in my car instead? So Hobby Lobby doesn’t suffer? Yeah ok
It’s actually terrifying to see folks who have never had to do the math required to survive in capitalism
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