121–124 of 124 posts
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Someone want to explain to me why my tax dollars should go towards protecting target and Walgreen’s inventory? When they have one security guard in their entire store? When police could instead be spending that time finding the driver of the truck that smashed into my car and drove away?
Because Walmart also pays taxes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Are you really so focused on just this one sort of crime, or does your opinion extend equally to all other crimes? In the US, there are thousands of crimes on the books, which are not enforced and are ridiculous [1]. So no, I do not think that all crimes should be punished. >So why must all shoplifting by punished, with the police doing most of the work at the store? This is a loaded question. I don't think the poli…
When I set up a public-facing web server, I take every precaution to make theft of my data (and my customers) as difficult as possible for thieves. Firewalls, frequent security patches, defensive programming, etc. Walmart and others seem to do the opposite. They fire cashiers and install self checkout lanes that are so hard to use that even honest people end up shoplifting accidentally, I can’t even imagine how much…
As I said in another reply, there is nothing a store can do against theft if the police, DA and courts do not enforce the law. Private business cannot arrest and punish criminals.
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No one is going to argue against using common sense to validate statistics and their underlying assumptions. But replacing statistics with “common sense” is just nonsense. Humanity has come to the point it is now, not by following “common sense” but by following science. And that’s more often than not basically statistics.
> Humanity has come to the point it is now, not by following “common sense” but by following science What do you mean by "following science" here? As in, making your own observations, testing your own hypotheses? I'm not arguing against that, if anything I'm arguing for making that the norm If you're saying "give other people's statistics prevalence over my own recorded ones", why call that science if it isn't anywhe…
As far as I am concerned, "give other people's statistics prevalence over my own recorded ones" is not science, and I never said this.
Science is following a process, sharing your results, and then to let others confirm or falsify your results.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I set up a public-facing web server, I take every precaution to make theft of my data (and my customers) as difficult as possible for thieves. Firewalls, frequent security patches, defensive programming, etc. Walmart and others seem to do the opposite. They fire cashiers and install self checkout lanes that are so hard to use that even honest people end up shoplifting accidentally, I can’t even imagine how much…
I am pretty sure Walmart does the same with their webservers. I am also pretty sure that your home is less secure than a Walmart store, for one Walmart has armed guards and your home does not. Will you apply your reasoning to yourself and won't complain when your home is robbed eventually? As I said in another reply, there is nothing a store can do against theft if the police, DA and courts do not enforce the law. Pr…
The point is, they don’t make a serious attempt to stop shoplifting, because they want it to be as frictionless as possible for their customers. In theory they could lock up every item in the store and require an employee to unlock a cabinet every time a customer wants something, but obviously that creates so much friction that it would greatly reduce sales. So it’s a trade off. They’ve chosen the end of the sliding scale where almost all merchandise is freely available for customers to take off the shelves with very limited oversight, coupled with self check out lanes so they don’t have to hire as many cashiers. They know full well that some people are stuffing merchandise into their pockets and not scanning everything at the check out lanes and that tradeoff is clearly working for them because their annual profit is higher than ever:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/gross-....
So no, I don’t think Walmart and others have any problem with shoplifters whatsoever, and I certainly don’t think that my tax dollars should go towards trying to catch every last person who steals a tooth brush from Walmart when they have little to no interest in making any kind of investment in curtailing shoplifting themselves.
It sounds like you’re in favor of Walmart maximizing their private profits by making it as easy as possible to buy their merchandise (so easy in fact that you can find yourself stealing something accidentally!), making no effort whatsoever in theft prevention in their stores, and then putting the burden of enforcement on the public dime, which is a curious position - are you a large Walmart shareholder?
If there’s a particular store that is having too much stolen from them by shoplifters, they are more than welcome to shut it down and make way for a local business who I can assure you will be way more careful with its merchandise. I am 100% in favor of that.
When we’ve solved every murder and violent crime, then we can get to Walmart shoplifters.