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Comment by sidlls | Hacker News Reader

What was the cost difference? Did the shrink reduction exceed the $3/hr raise in value but not by enough? Or was the raise not offset at all by the reduction?

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In the end who cares, everyone would have been way happier without resorting to big brothery solutions and solving anyway he problem. But no, we gotta chase that additional profit at the cost of any other metric!

I mean, the business cares how much profits they make. If it was cost effective, it is easier to justify moving it to other stores.

That's my point. Businesses care only about profit, even when its clearly detrimental to everyone else. There's no consideration for happiness or quality of life and no ethic if you only chase profit. For how much we've been pushed to believe this is perfecly normal, to me it's insane.

You know what would quickly increase happiness and quality of life for a whole bunch of people? If you would just donate your entire life savings to charity tomorrow. Your not doing that is clearly detrimental to all those people you would have helped. Please consider happiness, quality of life, ethics, etc, and stop chasing profit.

Yeah, the ceo of charity would be really happy.

Why doesn any argument about "a LITTLE less profit" must be countered with reducting to absurd? I really would like to know why did you make such argument.

Oh please, do a favour to yourself and use your intelligence before engaging in discussion. I as an individual have barely what I need to survive. My choice is not between huge profit and slightly less profit, but between paying the rent or ending on the streets. Businesses on the other hand have proven again and again that they will do anything to increase the profit even when already largely profitable.

you guys are cynical but lets take this one step further. the real reason the OPs plan wasn't implemented was because some cto or ceo had stock or got a kick back from some surveillance company ;-)

Or does this simply show a cultural problem among upper-management types, where they exclusively use the stick over the carrot because it makes them feel powerful, important, and morally superior?

It's it just the management types? Plenty of users here in HN defend abusive practices like these just to save some money.

Agree on this...

I only had one quarter to measure. We were on track to show a massive reduction, just under the cost of the raises. Had we stuck to it for two quarters or even a year, the trend was that we would've broken even around month 8, and showed a positive return after one year.

I bet the bigger problem was that the raise went into operating costs, whereas investment in surveillance goes into capital costs. The corporation doesn't get to list any money it pays out to employees on its balance sheet, but that Orwellian surveillance system is capital and counts as an asset the corporation can leverage for a higher valuation.

It's all part of how Capitalism reduces humans to a drain on the system in favor of material.

Capital depreciates. It's an expense.

But it still shows up on the balance sheet, so it doesn't look like you're bleeding money the same way an operating expense like a raise does.

> What was the cost difference?

Doesn't matter. I bet it adversely affected someone's bonus and that was why it was scrapped.

What if instead of an extra $3/hr, the differential pay were an extra $10,000/hr? Obviously then the cost difference would matter. So, there must be a cutoff somewhere. Is the cutoff more than $3 or less than $3? We don't have enough information to know, nor do we have enough information to know whether upper management were just being comic book villains or whether their decision was based on crunching the numbers.

Might be the type of cost.

Outsourced = expense Salary increase = fixed cost can only write-off %.

It's probably the other managers who don't have the issue not wanting to increase their wages. Or explaining why the worst employees were paid more etc.

> explaining why the worst employees were paid more

except they were likely only viewed as 'worst employees' because of the theft. stopping theft - internal and external - would normally be chalked up to 'best employees', who would be quite deserving of raises (in a hypothetical world).

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