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Comment by hotpotamus | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone knows what the solution is

Well, maybe everyone except me, because I don't know. What are you going to do, tackle the dude walking out with a $3 burrito? What if you break their arm and it ends up costing $50K in hospital bills? I'm sure you'll say the establishment isn't responsible which makes sense, but someone is going to eat that bill and I doubt it's the guy who couldn't afford food.

And what if the thief has a gun that they're constitutionally allowed to carry? That can get real messy, real fast.

I think things are the way they are for a reason.

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You seem to be falling prey to the binary thinking flaw of security thinking. This is basically the normal way people think about security without education on the subject- "It's either completely secure or completely insecure"

In reality, security works through modifying the probability and impact of certain outcomes.

So if the store had another employee who could walk around, watch, and talk to customers the social pressure alone will decrease the frequency of theft. It would also reduce the impact (size) of the thefts because someone couldn't carry as much as possible out the door, the employee would be able to knock some of it off the stack, etc.

And yes! It wouldn't stop someone who was willing to kill for convenience store food. But events like that are less common and potentially not worth the cost of prevention.

GP made it sound like the cashier is already watching this happen, but yes, I've been the one walking around and observing customers for my Grandmother's estate sale business, but that's because it was helping my grandmother out; I doubt you'll find many people willing to do that for minimum wage. And I also doubt many store owners want to pay the wage and health insurance costs for an employee to hang out and observe/chat with customers.

I doubt any even fractionally-rational human goes into a store willing to kill for food, but shit can go sideways instantly when you start engaging in physical confrontations, particularly in a country where firearms are trivially obtained and carried; it's a latent threat in nearly any situation in the US.

There's always plenty to do in a retail store - things to the tidied on shelfs, floors to swept, and so on. You're not asking a poor suffering retailer to pay someone to do nothing while getting shot all day.

I don't have exactly legal knowledge of this.

But it's my understanding that a place like Target will track you if you shoplift and not do anything until you exceed the felony threshold of good stolen in terms of monetary value.

Then they will drop the hammer on you.

Of course, if you are young/ under 18, I don't know how that impacts the calculation/ policy

> The owners keep it understaffed.

The 2nd sentence in my post is the identified problem. There are a few ways to fix it. The store owner is not doing any of it.

> And what if the thief has a gun that they're constitutionally allowed to carry? That can get real messy, real fast.

You aren't constitutionally allowed to carry a weapon to commit a crime. That shoplifting charge with a 50-100 community hours conviction turns into a 10 year mandatory jail sentence.

These aren't even hardened criminals. These are normal people who realize they will not be caught nor punished for such a petty crime as stealing a hotdog. This is on the level of stealing extra candy from the Halloween pumpkin bowl.

And given that the current employee is simply watching as people shoplift, what do you imagine that more staff will do? I'll admit I don't know all the rules about carrying guns, but I know that quite a few are out there and not everyone behaves perfectly like they're supposed to - it's one of the reasons I don't yell at people in traffic, for instance. The threat is ever present.

It's amazing how many people see no contradiction between

"having more employees will stop shoplifting" and "lol of course employees won't do anything about shoplifters, are you risking your life for minimum wage?",

or between

"obviously criminals don't reply to increased punishment" and "of course they won't escalate to assault, that would massively increase their punishment".

Witnessing a theft of food I'd be sooner to resort to violence on behalf of the starving man than the capitalist

You've never known middle-class shoplifters? Admittedly, by their 20s become risk-averse. But in high school and college, they might not be.

Don't be surprised when those capitalists you hate stop providing you the goods and services you want at prices you find affordable then.

I mean the great thing about the free market is there is always someone else.

If you hate capitalism so much, what are you doing on a forum for startups?

Commerce != capitalism

GP was definitely attacking capitalism. For someone throwing drive by accusations of fallacy around you sure could improve your text comprehension.

I'm fully aware of this. I'm saying you could be against capitalism and still be interested in starting a business and networking on a forum like this one. People start businesses for many reasons, not only the pure accumulation of capital.

I don't like the smell of sewage, but I still have to shit.

If you hate being exposed to differing points of view so much, what are you doing on a forum?

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