we do not have to accept this decision to reduce staff and raise prices as a matter of course. plus, if you see somebody stealing food, no, you didn't.
People are responsible for their own actions. If you think shoplifting is morally acceptable, don't try to tell me that I didn't see it.
So free everything because homeowners didn't bother to secure their stuff!/s
Growing up our house physically did not have a lock. Keys never left vehicle ignitions. A frequent experience was buying a farm machinery part and picking it up after hours out of the back of somebody's truck.
Living in low trust societies sucks.
I've had friends bring people over to my house who just randomly stole things. I've dated women who stole money out of my wallet or if it'd leave $10 on the table they'd just take it.
Casual theft is just gross as is the need to constantly feel like you need to defend yourself from everyone you meet, but moreso the casual attitude people have towards it.
It does, but that trust is established top down. If businesses in this country act lawlessly with impunity, why would you expect people, especially if they are suffering because of some company's greed, to be the chump who acts nobly while seeing a society that rewards theft?
That is not a normative moral defense of this behavior, just a descriptive one. Why would anyone expect a normal person to see a company receiving a tariff refund for a tariff that person paid and then view stealing from them as a continuation of the theft that the company itself engaged in by not paying them back?
When do these people that glorify their stealing interact with actual low-trust-society events from corporates? Almost never. They just hear about it on the news and social media influencers sharing stories.
These are people who have no idea what being shaken down for a bribe is like, have always benefitted from strong consumer protection laws, generous refund policies, and all around honesty in most every corporate interaction and the complaints they have are minor compared to their proud theft.
How often are you short changed at the store? Lied to about the weight of something you were sold? Received an adulterated or diluted product?
If I see someone stealing food, yes, I did. It's immoral for you to do otherwise.
Don't tell me, in your view the cost of shoplifting is begrudgingly covered by those evil rich people who own everything, right? It's not passed down to customers, and therefore affects those who obey rules, and especially those who are in a precarious financial situation to begin with, right?
Or perhaps it will go the way of smoking in restaurants. Some people definitely preferred it, but in the US anyway, it's pretty hard to find, if it's even legal anywhere.
Like what is the alternative? Businesses sell things they sell those things for more than they make and then they use that money to pay people to work for them. People agree to work for them expecting they will be paid primarily from the money made by the business saling things to customers.
Like what is the alternative businesses pay their employees from some magic pool of money that you get the key too when you file articles of incorporation?
At the end of the day the customer is always paying the wages of the employees, that's literally how it worked since ever. Which is honestly an improvement where the local lord would take 30% of whatever you grew and in exchange would give you diddly and squat.
Just that there's not so much difference between tipping a gas station attendant and paying the employer of a grocery checker.
These separations endured well into the 1960s, as secretaries were trained women who could type and take dictation, and their bosses would generally shout into their ears and/or a tape recording device to get their work done. "Diane, take a letter!" was a common trope in the office of yesterday.
When home computing, personal word-processing, and desktop publishing came on the scene, suddenly we had to learn how to type. Suddenly every high school student who needed to write a paper, we all needed to know how to type in order to produce research papers. This was unprecedented. Then with word processing and WYSIWYG, we needed to know fonts, and bold/underline/italic conventions, and this was also unprecdented, because previously this was done for us, behind the scenes, by professionals.
Ultimately all that page layout, and design and visual aesthetics, even finding clipart and adding it appropriately and tastefully, all of that skilled knowledge and labor fell upon the shoulders of the one who was writing a newsletter for a non-profit, or writing technical documentation, or designing an album/CD cover or something.
Eventually those specializations and skills became so democratized that everyone knew them but we all knew them badly. We could do a half-assed job of desktop publishing, whereas a Gutenberg publication in the 18th century could have been a true work of art that was replicated many times.
Now even the em-dash is vilified as a signifier of low-skill slop, when some of us actually took the time to read manuals of style and understand when/how to properly use hyphens, en-dash, and em-dash. But never mind that; elegant grammar and perfect spelling are now the hallmarks of a shitty LLM prompt and HN commenters can just tear down any article by falsely claiming it was AI-written, and you can sic your fake "AI-writing detectors" on anything and 99% tear it down because of your stupid faulty em-dash hueristics.
That makes it okay?
"It is not considered wrong"
By WHOM? I go out of my way to avoid self-checkout when I can, because I consider it 'wrong.'
But let's see if I can explain it in a capitalism friendly way, I guess.
I have a preference for cashiers checking my stuff out for me, so that's how I select. Partly because I like the convenience, partly because I like knowing more people are having jobs.
And here's the important part; I personally actually have significant control over this, which makes it different from your silly argument.
GuinansEyebrows's opinion was that businesses are wrong for implementing self checkouts. Presumably, ryandrake agreed with GuinansEyebrows.
I do not think that a business's decision to use self checkouts is wrong, and in fact the business is consistent with all of us, as we all choose to use automation/technology how we see fit.
Maybe it is suboptimal for some people, but why would a business be wrong for trying something that reduces their costs? I try to reduce my costs all the time. For example, I like restaurants where you order at the counter or on a device and self bus. I don't like waiting for a waiter. Is that business wrong?
F off
They just cut worker hours and raise prices. The owners don't see a difference.
The richest person they're hurting is the store manager earning $200k missing some of their bonus.
But no, most people in the US aren't stealing from grocery stores to feed their kids, they're stealing from stores to resell on black markets.
These are not the people bragging about scamming the self checkouts.