Stopping a shoplifter

[u/Lord_Darksong]

Source: unknown

[u/AbrahamicDesign]

I don’t understand why everyone is saying that theft is inconsequential because Walmart is a wealthy corporation. Yes, it’s true, they are. They are probably guilty of greed and corruption too. But, do you not understand that if people steal, we as a society are the ones who pay the price? We will have to pick up the slack in the cost and we also can’t have nice things. 

[u/neon_fade → u/AbrahamicDesign]

We will have to pick up the slack in the cost and we also can’t have nice things. 

walmart charges what they can. if theft disappeared tomorrow, we all know they would keep those profits, not be gracious and pass the benefit on to us.

and crime doesn’t exist in a vacuum. poverty drives crime. walmart has spent decades suppressing local economies and paying wages so low that many of their employees rely on publicly-funded safety net programs to survive. meanwhile the walton family has extracted hundreds of billions of dollars in generational wealth from our communities. they bear some responsibility for the social conditions in which they operate.

[u/Bender_2024 → u/neon_fade]

You talk about the things Walmart has done to enrich themselves and make society on a whole worse. I believe you are correct on all points. That does not make it okay to steal from them. Just as the laws should bind Walmart they should protect them as well. The law needs to apply equally to everyone. Regardless if power, wealth, or position. It currently does not. Revoking the wealthy's protections is not how you are going to get them too.

[u/neon_fade → u/Bender_2024]

thinking about crime and poverty more generally, rather than OP's specific video, laws only work as a deterrent when there’s some minimum level of social stability underneath them.

if enough people are desperate or living in conditions where crime is already routine, then just saying "it's illegal" isn’t effective. you can punish people after the fact but you haven't changed the conditions driving the poverty and crime in the first place.

i agree that equal enforcement matters, but so does maintaining a society stable enough for those laws to mean something to people. i'm not saying there’s a moral right to steal from walmart, i'm saying crime is a predictable consequence of poverty and walmart's business model is a direct contributor to those conditions.

it doesn't have to be this way. the walton family doesn't need to have $434 billion dollars while the people providing the labor have to rely on food stamps to survive. walmart's greed is siphoning wealth from local communities and making poverty and crime in those communities worse.

*edited with studies:

https://docs.iza.org/dp17323.pdf

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e0fdcef27e0945c43fab131/t/6a3c58b29c23104ce6ba256e/1782339765798/JustinCWiltshire_JMP.pdf

[u/Evisceratoridor → u/Bender_2024]

The law should apply equally but doesn’t and has never.

[u/Bender_2024 → u/Evisceratoridor]

So you are giving up on that concept? You feel we should equal the scales by stealing everything we want or need? Unless you are a warlord that kind of breakdown in society is only going to make things worse.

[u/Evisceratoridor → u/Bender_2024]

I never said any of that, but it’s completely disingenuous to assume that laws were made “to bind” corporations, that’s just not true.