What to do when you see a person shoplifting at a NZ Supermarket and other responses for the modern post covid crime world
I was at my local Supermarket a few weeks ago and two very flamboyant Whanau from the street were performing this wonderful modern ballet where one would lash out at curious onlookers and nervous staff members as if the attention to their over the top attention seeking actions and accusations to the security cameras that people were looking at them as if they were thieves WHILE their companion quietly shoplifted food under their jacket was as Prince once put it, ‘a sign of the times’.
They then barged through the self check out and staff angrily called out to them, but they know the laws and the rules and no one can touch them.
The saucy confidence of the louder one who attracted the attention and the shameful down head shuffling of the person doing the shoplifting were a yin and yang of modern inequality.
A few of the other male shoppers looked at me as this occurred to see if I was going to do something. I’m assuming this was because I was the largest of the males there and they were looking for agreement and leadership to intervene, but I have very clear rules on this sort of thing, and I shrugged and said to them, “Some people are pretty desperate these days”, and wheeled my shopping trolly away.
I have zero interest in damning hungry people stealing food.
Right now we have the highest food inflation in 30 years, people are desperate and shameless inn their desperation. The Supermarket duopoly price gouge the bejesus out of us, and I’m sure as fuck not going to fight for the profit margins of the NZ Supermarket duopoly!
Now this equation changes immediately if these two scamps had in fact stolen something from an individual who was in the supermarket.
In that case, you have an obligation to step in and demand the item back from the individual they stole it from, but a company?
Fuck the company.
Likewise with ram raids. I’m not getting in between Micheal Hill Jewellers and some desperate kids, but if they are attacking a Dairy owner, then I think you have an obligation to step in or call the Police and then film the event so there is evidence.
The same is true in public, if people are attacking someone else, you have an obligation to step in to halt the violence, our call the Police and then film things with your camera for evidence.
We should not tolerate crime, but I think we also have to be very clear on our reasons for stepping up to it.
Hungry people stealing food from greedy Supermarkets? I’m not lifting a finger to stop them.
Desperate people stealing from a large retail chain? I’m not directly stopping them, but I’m calling the cops and filming it for the cops.
Desperate people stealing from a large retail store hurting people? Oh you have to step in at that point, to stop violence.
Desperate people ram raiding a dairy? I’m not directly stopping them, but I’m calling the cops and filming it for the cops.
Desperate people ram raiding a dairy and physically hurting staff? Oh you have to step in at that point, to stop violence.
Dickheads starting violence in public? Call Cops and film evidence but if you are physically able – step in and stop it, because we have obligations to each others safety when we are in public.
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San Francisco is now such a lawless hellhole that many large chain stores are simply packing up and leaving the downtown area for good.
The downtown Target store there has enclosed most of the shelves behind locked perspex doors.
Locally, David Jones, Arthur Barnett and H. & J. Smith have all left for good — leaving only two cities with a mainline department store. A sign of very bad economic times (and neglect by the politicians).
Back in the days of actual customer service, everything was behind a counter, and every row of shelves had an assistant to fetch it for you. Of course, the monopolies are too stingy to consider bringing that back!
Wish there was something we could do for the States, maybe send in the troops to liberate them from these horrors, bombard them with freedom and democracy, or even sanction their kids to show how much we care.
Problem is that making shop lifting an acceptable practice means the end of shops. If everyone gets “desperate” what chance a shop staying open and replenishing the shelves for the “desperate” to be able to feed the kids tomorrow?
Ransack a shop today and where will you get your food tomorrow? And why stop at food? Need new clothes? Shop lift. Need a new TV? Shoplift.
A lesson in shop closures being learned in Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles and elsewhere.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/06/walmart-to-close-remaining-portland-stores-as-city-faces-shoplifting-crisis/
Super markets are an example of ‘choke capitalism’ where the supermarket is both a monopolist and a monopsonist’ (Monopoly buyer) in control of paying for goods and pricing of sales.
This is where it ends:
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/300888716/youths-who-beat-78yearold-in-home-and-left-him-for-dead-avoid-jail–heres-why
Martyn I don’t agree with your article this time.
Your readers have a better understanding than you on this matter.
No offense to you Martyn but that’s how I see it.
Would they still steal if the product s we’re cheap ? Probably yes. Its actually as much about as having respect for the staff. They are not rich like the owners and company executive s.
You’re all wrong.
One of the essential tenets of neoliberalism, as Thatcher once put it, is there is no such thing as a community. No one has any obligation to help anyone else and we’re all the authors of our own problems.
Apart from assisting corporations and government departments (especially the Police) the great unwashed are simply expected to slave away for fuck all and pay all the taxes that God sends, and obey the laws that get put down to protect the wealthy.
Thirty years of this jungle bullshit has effectively destroyed whatever community we may have once had.
Get used to it if you put National/ACT into government…
J S Bark There is a community, and it exists in spite of the government, and it subsidises the government, by providing for the poor and needy, who, often through no fault of their own, are trapped in poverty, and described as bottom feeders and rivers of filth by the fools on the hill so detached from reality, that they have no idea that they are. In my town it’s the Salvation Army and church groups who provide free meals, and tables of food for all comers, and volunteers working in charity shops, and the shoppers who donate to the charity bin in the supermarket, and without them bleak lives would be bleaker than they are, and government departments like WINZ have the nerve to direct their “clients” to the free food banks, because they know that without them some would struggle to put food on their cold tables or into their car boots or aunty’s chilly garage or cold shed.
The biggest crime is capitalism, as analysed by marxists for a number of years. Private (ie.–elite minority) ownership of the means of production and finance capital robs people every day of their life.
At work “surplus value” as Marx and Engels put it, capitalism’s dirty little secret, means you have generated your minimum wage in possibly a couple of hours depending on industry or service. The boss then appropriates the rest of your days labour even though you think you are paid by the hour! Of course in Aotearoa NZ there is a huge aspirational SME, small business and self employed sector who would just love to be a 1%er but are in fact subservient to the banks.
I would never dob in a shoplifter hitting a corporate or chain enterprise. I have intervened for local markets and artisans who are the smallest of traders.
If people need to steal food does that not say something about our society?
I may be misquoting but didn’t some leader say capitalism is bad but the alternative is worse .
Setting yourself up as judge and jury is a small step in the slide to civil unrest that will undermine authority.
As is so often it seems, the replies to this piece are more revealing of their authors’ than of any discourse on the topic. From price gouging corporations at one end to shoplifting kids at the other, Capitalist society is based on theft of one sort or another. But the worst theft is that of our ability to empathise and to see aberrant behaviour for what it signals. Today’s shoplifters are the pickpockets of yesterday’s Oliver Twist, and just as those discarded children were products of the terrible times in which they lived, so too are today’s miscreants. And if we can’t at least consider that likelihood, and start to seriously discuss its root causes, we’ll soon see more and more Bill Sykes’ roaming our communities.
Yes. Ildiko Matskassy, a deceased colleague, finally decided to leave her husband, Ivan, when he had their schoolboy son Rocky, stealing to order. Ivan’s then restaurant on Courtney Place, was the selling and receiving place. At this point Ildiko was murdered, found floating in Wellington Harbour, and Ivan was acquitted of her murder, went to Australia. Since then Rocky was been killed in Australia, shot I think, but I don’t really know the circumstances. The Courtney Place restaurant was arsoned, and appeared on that police television program, never solved. The Hungarian lady who was with Ildiko when she bought the duvet cover found near her body, had her flat in Mt Victoria arsoned also. Very sad all round, because Ildiko was a good and proud mother.
Yeah they’re doing this type of model of San Francisco and New York, where you can steal anything up to $950 without any chance of prosecution (effectively the legalised theft that you are promoting in this blog entry). Crime of course is down (since stealing up to $950 is no longer a crime). It doesn’t create the sort of utopia you think, since no business can survive it for very long.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-francisco-shoplifters-theft-walgreens-decriminalized-11634678239
Plenty of dickeads about. Young dickhead was trying to buy a fight with an old crone. They don’t realize that its allon the camera’s the buses have….
Such people are not stealing from supermarkets.
Such losses are just part of trading costs and are simply passed on to customers and consumers.
They are stealing from you and me. If you are fine with that, well, i won’t argue, maybe you view it as an act of charity on your behalf or just another tax you bear.
But keep in mind, it’s a non consensual activity, those absorbing the cost of theft have not necessarily consented.