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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

What kind of policies are enabling this?

This seems to be a problem unique to large cities

The liability for a company when an employee intervenes in theft is too high. It’s much easier to let your employees stand by the wayside and replace the item. Most big box stores will punish employees who try to get involved. You gotta replace a lot of items before it’s more expensive than a multi million dollar lawsuit from the family of an employee that dies in a petty theft gone wrong. And these corporate policies shape the world.

A corporate policy that says don’t get involved or stop a theft is one I can certainly back. A retail employees life is not worth the goods being taken.

Also you’ve gotta be an idiot to try to prevent theft in an American store (especially one you don’t own). It’s a really good way to get shot and killed for no reason at all.

This stuff will get gnarly as it invades the more armed parts of the country, both for perpetrators and for people trying to prevent it.

I suspect there was some adjustment to insurance norms behind the scenes also, given the recent covid-19 lockdowns and resultant drop in foot traffic.

We have the same thing happening at the top end. Companies just ignoring paying rent, arbitration fees and deferred prosecution is the biggest scandal, "promise us you wont do it again and we will forget about it". The goal of any larger company now is to get too big to prosecute.

Wage Theft is the largest form of theft by miles, but we don't see endless news articles writing about how it represents a failure of law and order. Curious.

Wage theft doesn’t create the same kind of fear as someone shoving a gun in your face and taking your property.

I don't know about you, but I'm way more afraid of falling homeless and into that spiral of despair than any possible person with a gun.

> I'm way more afraid of falling homeless and into that spiral of despair than any possible person with a gun.

Said the person who's clearly never had a gun pulled on them.

trauma's no fun. I'm grateful I've never had that happen to me. have you? how was it? how did you process it?

Called the cops, described gunman and weapon, replaced the watch he got. Continued to walk late at night, tried to woolgather less.

Nobody is shoving a gun in people's faces in these stories about retail crime. People are just taking stuff off shelves and not paying for it.

What I find curious is how often comments like these are made without posting a link to any kind of source. I’ll just admit I have no idea what wage theft is, and I’d argue most people don’t know either. Can you enlighten me, or provide a source that explains it? And if you feel so strongly, why not post something to HN about it so we can all discuss?

Wikipedia has a pretty good description, sources, and recent US-based examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

Wage theft is self correcting in the bigger picture. People with better options will go for those options. People who perform better than they are paid will tend to have better opportunities.

Focusing on wage theft also fails to account for all the cheating employees do like slacking during lulls instead of being productive as expected.

Then why hasn't it self corrected?

Why do you assume it hasn't?

Because wage theft remains common.

You're missing the point entirety.

I don't believe that's true.

I think it's more uh, consumer side changes than anything else. Just like the Internet has really changed the way people play games and do hobbies, it's changed crime- there's more knowledge, better strategies, etc.

In the end there is a cost to petty crimes. It's not the policy makers that could just push through and make it work as they wish. The business will show that whether it's viable

It's a tough situation from what I've read about it.

Someone steals $500. What do you do?

Charging someone alone costs thousands.

Putting them in jail costs tens of thousands per year and has some serious negative externalities (what happens if they have kids? what if this knocks them off the economic treadmill and they're forced to continue stealing as the only option to them?)

And then you have organized crime organizing hundreds of people to commit the same petty theft. But they're hard to find and catch.

I think the resolution won't be laws changing, so much as stores changing to be harder to shoplift from. Already places are experimenting with more of a fast-food style order at the front on a tablet, and the clerks will bring the goods to you from the back. Or a shift to more of an online ordering world, where shoplifting is close to non-existent (though package theft and credit card fraud are problems).

The problem is organized crime, and it’s worth pursuing even though it’s hard.

This organized crime happens throughout the distribution chain, from the docks to store shelves. Changing store layouts or ordering online won’t fix the problem.

Law enforcement is the correct tool to combat organized crime.

As far as laws changing, there’s a bill to create a national center focused on coordinating responses to this theft between local, state, and federal levels: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/140...

Totally agree going after organized crime is key, and didn't mean to imply otherwise.

Defer it until they reach at threshold and then charge them every time or at minimum detain them for a few hours period. Crime follows a pareto distribution like everything else.

We just need to make convictions profitable. If justice remains a cost then it will be done incompletely. I would sell the organs from convicted shoplifters.

The ability to re-sell it on Amazon for profit.

There are more factors than Policy alone. Education, Culture, Policy, Behavior, Reward, and Punishment should be considered.

Povrty

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