Western rightoids (particularly Americans) really do have the mentality of superstitious serfs
Western rightoids (particularly Americans) really do have the mentality of superstitious serfs
Milord has no choice but to take measures against the other peasants who have been possessed by woke transgender demons to steal from him 😔
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I worked in retail for years right up through the pandemic, in grocery and drug stores, and it's really illuminating to experience that environment when you've already been inoculated against these taking points. Because there has been no increase in shoplifting.
Shoplifting has always been easy and commonplace, it happens every single day and it always has. The only thing that has changed is that people who work these jobs are being fed this narrative of a shoplifting crime wave, and have become more paranoid and hostile as a response.
In response to this cultural pressure, this propaganda effort to obscure and deflect awareness of drastically plunging buying power and general impoverishment, petty managers seeking a sense of control over perceived attacks on "their stores" (nonsense serf logic) are chaining everything to the floor. And this of course only worsens their declining sales, because why bother even trying to buy something in the store if you're doing to do so legitimately if you have to ask someone to get it for you? You might as well have it delivered tomorrow by Amazon!
This is were the Judge Dread PUNISHMENT complex just gets in the way of effective business management.
There will always be some amount of shoplifters, and they generally fall into two categories: shoplifters of necessity, and shoplifters of thrill. Shoplifters of necessity tend to only engage in shoplifting for as long as it is the only option. Looking the other way and eating the (marginal, minuscule, rounding error) loss gives customers a chance, albeit as small one, to find their footing and return to normal shopping habits.
Thrill seekers tend to think of about shoplifting tactically; they target small, easily concealable products and mask the theft with another purchase. If you own or manage a shop, you oughta think about it like a [high risk/low reward] loss leader for your customers -- a bonus secret all-the-time sale that, while decreasing inventory, still brings in more money than it looses.
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I know this is preaching to the choir on hexbear, but fuck me if it isn't frustrating that i - an idiot pinko liberal communism believer - have a better business sense about this than most owners/managers
they generally fall into two categories
You're forgetting me, shoplifter of principle, coming out of the store with as many stolen goods as possible as both protest of and action against the commodity form
To avoid statistical error, Shoplift Nagarjuna, who shoplifts over 10,000 products each day, has not been included in the compilation of this analysis.
Recent increase of shoplifting rhetoric is due to the inclusion of hexbear.net/c/Nagarjuna
In the last drug store I worked in, about 3 years ago, before I quit they went through the makeup department and put hanger locks on every single item in the department. A massive about of extra effort for the already laborious task of stocking that section.
The result? Makeup continues to get stolen, but now no one buys any either, because the department never gets restocked. It's too time consuming. So the section always looks barren. Everybody just goes to sephora instead.
I could have told them this, but who would listen to some girl with no business degree to wave around?
I've heard managers complaining about shit like "every week this lady comes in and steals half the baby section and I'm not allowed to do anything!"
Like, dude, listen to yourself.
It's been my experience that they calculate it all stupid, then react to that miscalculation in a dumb way, and inconvenience everyone as a result.
Suppose they have a product they buy for $8 and sell for $10. They get the number of all that got bought but not sold, which may include ones that weren't actually received or that were damaged during shipping and stocking or just left out and went bad or accidental "theft" or actual theft, and they multiply that number by $10. So now on paper they have "lost" a bunch of money to theft, even though they actually lost 20% less than the number they came up with AND they have no way to know how much of it was theft versus other shrinkage.
Now that they have this exorbitant number, they can use it to justify buying a million anti-theft devices. Which reduces the amount people buy because those things suck, but they can blame that on shoplifters too because it's all their fault that the anti-theft devices were "needed." And in the end none of it matters anyway because 1 theft is not the same as 1 lost sale to begin with.
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Whatever you think about Valve/Steam, Gabe was right when he said "make buying easier than stealing, and people will buy instead of stealing"
chaining everything to the floor. And this of course only worsens their declining sales
and requires them spending more and more of their budget on needless security devices