More Americans are shoplifting food
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
In my locale, it's an open secret that most retailers will not detain you if you shoplift. And it's widely known that you wouldn't be prosecuted if they did anyway.
So yeah. Shoplifting is up.
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-tide-black-market-2013-1
Find me more groups that want to/are helping with this problem - let's go help our fellow Americans.
Mortgages, rent and utilities are all suspended almost everywhere, so are student loan payments. So hopefully people won’t be evicted and not have to worry about bills right now.
But I wonder if an instacart app for food bank delivery would be a good idea. Kind of like meals on wheels. Dunno.. it would beat queuing in cars for miles.
Maybe there’s a way to do crowd funded UBI... it could start around grocery stores maybe with grocery store gift cards..
Food deserts are a big thing though. It makes me think that there should be way to instacart deliver food to people.
No, they are not. Not even close to almost everywhere.
Evictions are theoretically suspended in many places, but rent is definitely not and many suspect land / property owners are evicting people despite moratoriums on them due to local governments that are severely underfunded, understaffed, and/or overwhelmed that are not enforcing the moratoriums.
Ultimately, this situation can almost entirely be laid at the feet of the anemic and mismanaged response by the federal government. Most of this could likely have been prevented if stricter measures had been taken immediately. And even if they hadn't, most people could be far better off if it wasn't for the extreme levels of obstructionism and denial being exhibited by parts of their federal government.
Financial assistance should have been sent directly to individuals across the country instead of being absorbed by corporations that just wanted free money.
In smaller communities, it's not uncommon for the local government to enforce their own interpretations or rules placed at the state and local level.
In short, evictions are happening, even if they shouldn't be in many cases. And as moratoriums expire in the near future, we should expect many more Americans to become homeless or evicted due to the failure of primarily the federal government but some local and state governments as well.
Washington State, as an example, has publicly spoken out about unlawful evictions and has warned to pursue legal action against property owners that violate the state's moratorium on evictions. For example, just one example from April 2020:
https://www.q13fox.com/news/washington-attorney-general-dire...
Washington State's moratorium is currently set to expire in December:
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/states-eviction-moratorium-...
Wait, seriously? I haven't been following events in the USA during this COVID year, but I assumed that things are like in most other developed countries with regard to things expected of people. In most European countries you still have to pay your rent and utilities every month, in spite of the noticeable economic slowdown.
Anecdotal: the food pantry near my home is often busy now; much, much more so than last year.
Pretty sad state of affairs we have in the "developed" world.
I'm very interested in getting the BeWelcome community involved in helping out with food, as well as shelter.
How can we reach the people who need it most?
I have an idea: everyone with over $20 million liquid splits the cost between them of expanding food banks and keeping them stocked. Call it a temporary COVID-19 tax and let them deduct it from their next IRS bill. [I know, I'm dreaming.]
This Walmart has at least 10-15 checkout lanes that are always empty and instead have a handful of people "Keep watch" of the self checkout lanes in an effort to keep the bare minimum amount of people employed.
Most of the time they are too busy authorizing Alcohol and helping people to actually notice if anyone isn't scanning sometihng. In fact one time one commented to me that "They don't pay me enough to care about shoplifting" after I "accidentally" forgot to scan something.
I don't really feel any pity for Walmart though, they have a bad system and have taken into account that the amount of money lost through shoplifting is less than it would cost to employ more people.
Inequality is one thing, but when you're forced out on to the street to starve to death and there's nothing you can do to improve your situation that's totally different.
It just blows me away that (part of) Congress has stonewalled any attempts to get people money, given the lockdowns. Reportedly there are millions of people going on public assistance soon. This could get really, really ugly after that.
Gotta be pretty damn desperate to risk a felony for a little over an hour's wages, especially when that theft requires actual work.
Source; fellow 08 Prius owner.
Socialist is a toxic insult in the GOP party, and it's how they painted the Democrats in Florida, as well as AOC and Bernie.
A reminder that Nancy Pelosi turned down a $1 trillion+ stimulus offer from the White House.
Trump makes $1.8 trillion economic relief offer, but deal with Pelosi remains elusive (Oct 09 2020)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/10/09/trump-ec...
Nancy Pelosi blasts the White House's $1.6 trillion stimulus plan, saying it's not even 'half a loaf' (Oct 01 2020)
https://www.businessinsider.com/nancy-pelosi-blasts-white-ho...
OSHA regulations and “census worker relief” need to be tied into this specific funding bill? Really?
Meanwhile they have grandkids so I don't really understand why they wouldn't support environmental policies. They're basically brainwashed by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's talk radio show.
Starve to death?
I've been there, decades ago, and that's not how it went down for me.
Senate. House has passed stimulus packages. IMO further delineation is deserved, but contentious, so I'll leave it at that.
https://www.newsweek.com/pelosi-says-she-backs-smaller-stimu...
Oh, except for a hearing pushing hydroxychloroquine in November, months after multiple studies had shown it ineffective, and a hearing promoting an anti-vaxer just last week. And I guess a bunch of hearings a few months ago wherein various GOP senators heaped ignorant abuse on public health officials.
If your favorite small business goes under, if your local hospital collapses, if your town goes bankrupt, etc., the institutional GOP and its donors are to blame.
We can all keep our fingers crossed for Georgia Senate runoffs, and for some real leadership come January.
It was politically driven: Democrats were afraid of giving Trump a win. Perhaps it was good politics, since it seems to have worked.
From Newsweek: "Despite a refusal for roughly the past six months to advance a smaller aid package that she deemed 'half a loaf,' House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now willing to support a bipartisan stimulus bill worth less than half her previous demand thanks to, in part, Joe Biden's victory.
It didn't pass it, unlike the House and HEROES. The Senate could have acted on the passed House bill. The House had no bill from the Senate to take up, since the Senate bill died in (Republican-led) committee.
The House is the only one on the dance floor.
And Nancy Pelosi may have opposed the Republican position in negotiations, but Nancy Pelosi has no control on what the Senate passes.
Suddenly, after the election, Pelosi is fine passing the same amount she opposed before the election as only half what was necessary.
This isn't some right-wing talking point -- Bernie Sanders has sad as much. This was a political game.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fact-check-did-berni...
Actually, its often a significant part of the political process of building popular and, thereby, legislative support for a solution (which will ultimately often be a compromise from the DOA proposal.)
And, in a bicameral legislature, taking up a measure on an issue that is unacceptable in the form the other house passed it in, and amending it to the form that you think is better and sending it back (or to conference to resolve the issues) is a way of moving forward that is generally more effective than sending an alternative bill to die in committee and then ignoring the issue.
To me it looks like a bad-faith effort and a waste of everyone's time.
After the successful repeal vote in the House in May 2017, the GOP threw big celebratory parties. You can see pictures of representatives smiling and laughing about the prospect of significant numbers of their own constituents losing coverage. They really relished the idea of taking away millions of people’s healthcare, and were profoundly disappointed when it didn’t work out.
As for the dozens of repeal votes while Obama was still in office: those were a quite effective partisan posturing effort. GOP-aligned media spent years on false propaganda about the effects of the ACA, trying to trick a public who largely didn’t understand the law or the healthcare system more generally. (To the point that e.g. in Kentucky people like “Kynect” while “Obamacare” is extremely unpopular, even though they are two names for the same thing.) GOP politicians were electorally very successful campaigning against the ACA while trying to sabotage it in every way they could. Much easier than even pretending to come up with a plan of their own.
Since the GOP Congress during Obama’s second term had no constructive agenda, essentially all of their time was spent on stuff like ACA repeal and Benghazi hearings. You are right that it was a bad-faith effort.
I would have said it the first time, at least.
The House didn't pass HEROES dozens of times.
Putting even the milquetoast HEALS act up for a vote would have put some of their members in a conflicted spot trying to both appear to care about the crisis while still appeasing hard-liner donors/supporters.
If the Senate had brought the HEROES Act as passed by the House to the floor, it might well have passed. But McConnell & friends didn’t want to see a relief bill passed, so they were satisfied to leave it off the agenda altogether.
Gee, I wonder what happened in November for her to change her mind...
I'll stop responding now; it's pretty clear a number of folks on HN think that only one party can play political games and this has gotten trite.
It was milquetoast, but not primarily because of the dollar amount (which is, though, inadequate as anything other than a partial stopgap and bridge), but because of substantive provisions.
Nancy Pelosi is surely also upset that we can’t do something more aggressive, but anything at all would be better than nothing (and we might still be stuck with nothing this year). We’re in an extraordinarily severe crisis, and people, small businesses, and state/local governments have been in urgent need of relief for months.
Even jaded political veterans expected some action from the Senate these past 7 months, under the circumstances. But what we have seen again and again in recent years is that even when we lower the bar down to the floor, they still manage to trip over it.
Correction: slither under it. They don't get over it, even by tripping.
> takes two to tango
Indeed, without any action from the Senate, the House is stuck. Again, we should all be hoping for good results in the GA runoffs, or Congress will remain unable to address any of our serious challenges ahead.
The 2 years from 2009–2010 were pretty much the only substantially functional Congress in a generation, and would have accomplished a great deal more if they hadn’t also had to deal with a worldwide economic crisis.
Perhaps because the GOP literally called[0] for that? Just a crazy thought.
[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/news/529195-arizona-gop-asks-if...
The situation may be bad, but not as dramatic as you paint it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/coronavirus-food-banks-are-c...
I didn't grow up poor, but did have some time in my life when I was destitute, homeless and without prospects.
I'll tell you a few things about that:
1. It's hard to hold a job when you have no place to shower or keep your belongings;
2. Homeless shelters are frightening, dangerous places and many (myself included) preferred to sleep rough than risk their lives in one of those places;
3. Food banks/Soup kitchens, etc. are few and far between. I shoplifted and ate out of garbage cans when I had to do so;
4. If you have no fixed address or documentation, it's hard to get stuff like food stamps or other assistance.
It's been 35 years since I was in that situation, but it's an experience I will never forget. No one should be put in that situation. Ever.
You have no idea what it is to be penniless and homeless. And for your sake, I hope you never have to learn the hard way.
Unfortunately, because of the callous, calculating disregard of the US Senate, many folks in the US have and many more will learn the lessons I did.
More's the pity.
And food insecurity could quickly turn into deadly famine if we ever have an interruption in the food supply, especially with our "just in time" supply chain mentality.
1: https://www.cleveland.com/community/2020/12/lorain-woman-wit...
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/10/06/major-san-franc...
And since then, many other cities have followed suit.
Contrary to popular belief, almost no one is actually in jail for small time drug possession, so reducing “mass incarceration” means reducing or eliminating penalties for real crime.
or have something vaguely spherical roll off of the absurdly tiny flat space you're supposed to stack everything, with no walls
I swear I'm starting to buy big white vegetable cabbage instead of green cabbage now, just because it doesn't roll.
Was that a cherry (11/lb) or a potato (0.69/lb)?
They're probably banking on people being honest in most cases, which thankfully seems to be a correct assumption.
Supermarkets are pretty easy to spot bad management in in particular.
Stigler diet
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16524061
Subreddit on eating healthy on a cheap budget
https://old.reddit.com/r/EatCheapAndHealthy/
For anyone who put themselves through college, this is much more a shrug than a clarion call for revolution. You can eat cheaply and well with a little effort and creativity. Good training for starting out with a young family, if any of you ever get to that point.
If you haven’t learned to cook, now is a good time. Electric pressure cooker, slow cooker, etc.. Learn to manage your time to make time for meal prep and cooking. Lots of folks take it as a challenge and love to share tips. Shop carefully, share car trips to the cheaper stores, share a Costco membership. The sharing economy isn’t just about obscene IPOs.
As an extreme anchor point for calibration,
.5 kg/day of dried corn to meet RDA calories for adult
http://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/calories-in-corn.php
->
200 kg/yr to meet RDA calories for year
Corn is 4.30/bu spot price US
A bushel of corn is 25 kg.
So $40/yr to meet caloric requirements for an adult for a year with a car trunk full of dried corn. Some of us have heritages that basically did that.
[Not recommended as a strict diet unless you are a fan of diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia and death. Limewater is your friend. Webpage not for the squeamish...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra]
Now add/substitute soybeans, cabbage, carrots, bulk spices, vitamins. Beans 27 kg for 11.50 nowadays. You are in the
$100-200/yr
range without adverse health effects...maybe healthier than what you are eating now. There were times your ancestors would, and did, kill for the chance at such a diet.
(And the CCP couldn’t even manage that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine )
Unsheltered? The problem is shelter...basic food for a year is less than three months of utilities, much less rent.
I've seen (obviously stolen) soap being peddled by apparently homeless addicts on multiple occasions. In some locales, they've been locking up the soap for a long time.
1. Drug addicted vagrants are ubiquitous because the city doesn't enforce laws and instead enables this lifestyle by looking the other way. These addicts very often steal things like food that are easy to fence and barter for drugs.
2. Our city and county prosecutors don't actually bring charges/accountability against criminals.
3. The police department has far fewer officers per capita than comparable cities, and simply cannot spend time on investigating and catching suspects.
The revolving door of people committing low-level crimes is so bad that Seattle businesses have released reports on this problem (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5752913-SYSTEM-FAILU...) and written letters to politicians asking for help (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5752914-Prolific-Off...) only to be ignored. Unfortunately the growing problem of low-level crimes with no consequence for criminals has also jaded residents to the point that they don't even bother reporting most property crimes - after all, if criminals don't face consequences and insurance requires a deductible, there is simply no benefit to spending time on reporting things.
I don't doubt that some number of people who are shoplifting food are trying to be productive members of society, displaying personal responsibility, and just need some support to get back on their feet. For them, I hope we can improve programs like SNAP (https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/supplemental-nutrition-assista...) to provide more benefits (higher spending limits for healthier food) with less red tape (less stringent eligibility requirements).
But around me and in other West coast cities I've been to, those committing these crimes are very often not deserving of sympathy and are willfully not being good citizens. To bring the constituency on board, we need to address both sides of this equation. We need to start enforcing laws and holding criminals accountable, while helping those who are deserving and in need. Otherwise, the rest of us are not going to be onboard with simply allowing criminals to commit crime.
People stealing food to survive while the super wealthy and rich becoming richer and richer[1]. What a great time to be alive.
[1](https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/11/18/elon...)
EDIT: I don't particularly dislike Elon (the man has done alot of good), but he was the easiest example I could think of. Stock market is a better indicator of rich people's wealth.
Does the US not have a government and state-level and federal-level representatives whose job it is to take care of their citizens and keep them out of starvation? Elon Musk and his pals seem like a convenient distraction from holding accountable people whose job it is to protect their constituents.
Also, the responsibility of feeding children has fallen upon schools in some areas. When SF closed schools in March 2020, one of the issues they had to address was "how do we feed the kids?"
https://www.sfusd.edu/about/news/current-news/sfusd-provide-...
The better question might be, why do they think they can get away with it? Why do they get away with it?
(By the way, note that this is not just a problem with one party...)
It’s patently obvious that no, the US does not.
The cumulative pressure by major companies on congress is probably the single main reason why congress does not enact stronger protection. We got corporate tax cuts because of this over say better employment protection laws.
Disclosure: am a Tesla stockholder.
A lot of talk about building a healthy middle class but we've lost track of that goal decades ago.
So has our productive capacity fallen to where we can no longer feed everyone? Or are we producing enough food and then just trashing the excess when people cannot be afford it? It just doesn’t all add up for me. I am a novice at economics though.
And meanwhile, in the other America:
> When Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump start building their new home on the 1.8-acre lot at 4 Indian Creek Island Road that they purchased for $30 million, they’ll have plenty of equally famous neighbors to get to know.
> Indian Creek Island, sometimes called “Miami’s Billionaire Bunker,” is home to an eclectic group of some of the world’s wealthiest, from singers to hedge fund managers, inventors to developers — even the founder of a company dedicated to collecting blood donations.
> Just how pricey is Indian Creek Island? According to the village’s tax rolls, the median assessed value of homes on the island in 2019 was $13.6 million. Taxes from real estate jumped 6.4% in 2019 to $87,234, along with a city property tax of $63,000.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article247709685.h...
I don’t say people are wealthy or eat enough. I’m saying your statement about survival is untrue, and as any false statement does not help to resolve the issue.
Fixed that for you.
Funny you mention "food banks" and "food stamps" during a time of unprecedented services shortage due to a pandemic. Some people are still waiting on unemployment checks from 6 months ago. Stomachs can't wait that long.
An inability to use reasoning while also remaining heavily opinionated indicates you have never faced a severe economic hardship like homelessness and feel the need to shift the blame to others to avoid confronting systemic issues.
I am sympathetic to people who don't have enough; I know several for whom food stamps and the local food shelf / food banks were thr only ways they got by, either as children or adults.
However, the persistent theme running through the comments here that people are dying in the streets of starvation and noone is doing anything about it is just a myth. Blaming rich people for it just makes it worse, as if the world were so simple, black and white.
Food insecurity implies potential for violence, and urban food deserts are practically unprecedented. One may call it a unique American achievement in urban planning.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0276146715612550
This promises interesting times when just-in-time delivery inevitably arrives a day late and a dollar short.
Just kidding, the USD is the first forever currency of the USG, the first forever empire. What's the worst that could happen?
Cities such as Baltimore and Detroit have already seen the process play out. It makes for interesting reading, from a safe distance.
Like a slow-motion forest fire, as the conflagration spreads outwards, new growth sprouts defiantly from the charred center. I wouldn't call it a natural process, but it resembles one.
Do the inner cities of other countries lie in ruins for decades, or is that an American thing?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
and household debt service costs are lowest in recent history:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP
People have received thousands of dollars in stimulus checks. Thanks to extra $600/$300 that the feds have added to federal unemployment, those that lost their jobs received in many cases significantly more that they were originally making, especially those making around minimum wage. At the same time, there are fewer avenues to actually spend that money, and the result of all of this is increased personal savings.
No, shoplifting is not increasing because people lack cash. Rather, people do it because they can, as the justice system declines to prosecute and punish people for it. Crime rate is significantly up, and for property crime it's even worse than stats imply, because people don't bother reporting, as there's no point -- you can see that by comparing car theft rate to other property crime. Car theft is much higher, because people report most of them, as they need police report for insurance claim.
All of this is, of course, entirely unsurprising.
Yes, people that can afford to save are saving more. The people that can't afford to save are still not saving, but the people who had a surplus now have a bigger one.
> People have received thousands of dollars in stimulus checks.
No, people have (per person) received a maximum of either $500 (to their parent, for children under 17) or $1,200 (for adults) in stimulus checks.
> Thanks to extra $600/$300 that the feds have added to federal unemployment, those that lost their jobs received in many cases significantly more that they were originally making
Yes, when the $600 boost was active, that was true mostly for people making below the average state minimum wage because they live in low-CoL, low-minimum-wage states, because the additional amount was designed to move the average unemployment check nationally approximately up to full replacement. That’s true of even fewer people with the $300 boost which replaced it months ago.
> No, shoplifting is not increasing because people lack cash. Rather, people do it because they can, as the justice system declines to prosecute and punish people for it.
If people had equal or better ability to afford food but were just taking advantage of a law enforcement withdrawal to shoplift more food, you’d expect surveys of food insecurity, charity food lines, and other indicia of actual hunger to be unmoved and the food shoplifting to stand alone. And you would not have expected a spike when the $600 unemployment boost ended, since available money is not the issue. But those expectations would all be wrong, suggesting that money actually is the issue:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/25/long-food-lines-signal-need-...
If they were stealing clothes or laptops, your argument makes sense. People with money in the bank do not steal food.
The appropriate statistics aren't savings rate, but poverty rate, unemployment, workforce participation, evictions (mostly though not all ilegal or undocumented presently), and similar indicia of how many people and families are living beneath sustainable fundamental minima.
If there's clearly a problem yet your indicator, diagnostics, or data don't indicate a problem, the failure isn't reality, the failure is your indicator.
Rising poverty + rising savings rate -> rising net inequality QED