people are going to blame this on inner city crime and while that may be a factor, in general, I have observed, in my lifetime, a degradation of societal trust and increase in blatant shoplifting, even in my smallish city in my red state. I first worked as a cashier at Walmart around 2009, for a couple different stores in the state over the course of a few years. then I moved away, moved back, lots of stuff happened, and I was once again out of a job, so I returned to working at Walmart as a cashier in 2018, at a newer store in my hometown. the older store is in "the bad part of town" that has gotten worse over time—but even at the newer Walmart, in a "safer" part of town, I saw more blatant, brazen, non-petty shoplifting than I ever had seen before.

I'm not talking like, take some merchandise to the restroom, remove the security packaging, leave it in the stall, and walk out with the stuff under your sweatshirt. I'm talking like, just walking out of the store with plural heaping cartfuls of large quantities of food, valued at several hundreds of dollars per cart. and there was nothing we could do about it. I almost got fired for trying to stop a guy from stealing stuff one night, and I really should have been, according to policy, as we got in a fistfight and he almost domed me with a maglite.

obviously, even as a then-employee, I didn't give a single shit about Walmart as a corporation, its bottom line, or anything like that—obviously I knew all about the concept of "shrinkage" at that point. but what actually concerns me is this general degradation of societal trust and cohesion we're experiencing, even here in my hometown of ~76,000 people.

when my mom went to school at the same high school I later attended, kids would leave their hunting rifles and shotguns in gun racks in the back of their pickup trucks in the school parking lot, and nobody gave a shit. the year I was born, someone brought a sawed-off to that high school and held up a classroom. (nobody ended up hurt or killed.) when I was a senior in high school, a kid got a felony for leaving a paintball gun in the (locked) backseat of his sedan from a weekend excursion to the woods, in the parking lot of the high school across town, while all schools in the district, including mine, were put into lockdown for about an hour.

I'm not sure where we went wrong, or even what exactly is happening in general, but it's clear that times used to be better with regards to societal trust and cohesion, both here and just about everywhere, and it only seems like things continue to get worse over time.