I started doing this after I watched a whole tray of pink lady apples go in a skip because they brought new produce out.
The same is true of a lt of retail establishments. Old stock is destroyed to keep prices up.
I live in a poverty stricken area. The supermarkets shove the following distribution of fruit out (I know this because my wife works in one as well):
- 20 bags of 5x apples for £1.89 each. 20% go in the bin.
- 100 pink lady apple at £0.75 each. 80% go in the bin.
- 20 cheap apples (one tray) at around £0.12 each. 0% go in the bin.
Now, why should I take the last single cheap apple which instantly prices out the poorer people which is clearly the intention of the supermarket which is to upsell to the pink ladies or bags of apples?
Fuck 'em to hell. There is no honour or integrity in capitalism. Trample over everyone to make profit.
I'm not selfish.
I'm not lacking integrity.
I'm not lacking honour.
Perhaps lacking in faith and respect for rules but that is my only crime.
If you don't spill it you pay for it.
Do you go back to the register and say you spilled it?
My parents taught me to be wary of both.
To be clear: there are many businessmen who are greedy selfish exploiters. However, the purpose of capitalism is to take these natural human tendencies and make them into a force for good.
You could say the same thing about democracy. It's a game whereby people can seek power and influence without having to kill each other or their subjects. If you doubt that democracy is an effective solution, just read up about all the Wars of Succession that Europe has witnessed when those countries were monarchies. Elections are practically love-fests in comparison.
On learning of such a trait in someone I ask 'what if you get caught?', but actually it is not them getting caught that matters. Think of the people that work in that shop and the position they get put in having to deal with petty cheats. Also, would you really want to be banned from the store you get your groceries from? That would be a big inconvenience.
When capitalism pushes profit margins, some losses are insignificant not to invest in otherwise they will hurt the margins they are trying to protect.
Also if they gave a shit, they'd have staff on all checkouts and not use self-service checkouts. Staff are more expensive.
They know; they just don't care.
They know; they just don't care.
While I agree that the stores "deserve" the amount of the theft through fraud that comes with replacing human checkers with automated checkout systems, that doesn't make your behavior in explicitly taking committing that fraud any more ethical.
Scan something wrong by accident, that's the store's fault for setting up the system to allow such accidents. But to intentionally exploit their system, that's on you.
I personally make it a rule to never go through automated check-outs because I think the stores that use them are not holding up their end of the social contract. I've even abandoned a few carts when I got to the check-out and found they had no human checkers (I found out the hard way that some grocery stores around here go 100% automated after 10pm).