Also Remember, stealing from publically traded corporations is stealing from sociopathic thieves that have no problem hurting vulnerable people to get what they want, in the name of insatiable greed "rational self-interest."
They dictate the laws to their paid lackees in Congress. Equating legality with ethics or morality in this capitalist captured dystopia makes one a fool. Our laws are designed to defend the desires of property owners against the basic survival needs of human beings with nothing that our society has already catastrophically failed.
You can catch charges for the misdeed of feeding the homeless here.
(and to anyone who wants to chime in with "well feeding homeless people might make them linger, effecting property values which needs to be a consideration alongside feeding hungry poor people." 🖕)
They factor it into their decision to use self checkout. If the increase in shoplifting is less than they save on staff reduction (it is, significantly so), they consider it a tradeoff, so it's hard to call it unethical.
I understand what you're saying, but I don't think that's what the meme was meaning. I think it meant when you leave empty handed, it looks like you're shoplifting. That makes you nervous and you start acting weird which makes you look even more suspicious and more nervous. Wash, rinse, and repeat till you get home and cry because social situations are awkward and hard and life would be so much easier if I was alone on a deserted island like Tom Hanks in that one movie.
... I might've lost track towards the end, but you get the idea.
Much more understandable though. Even without anything to declare, the "please come here" can mean that you'll lose the next 20 minutes looking at your dirty underwear with a stranger, while you are probably already kinda stressed from the travel.
One time I got trapped in a store because the door was behind the counter where the register was and a guy was sitting there the whole time. I decided not to buy anything, but I looked around for a while so I felt like he might question me. So I just kept pretending to look around which made it even more awkward to leave empty handed.
I think I decided not to buy anything after 20 minutes but spent a whole hour in there trying to figure out how to leave
Man I've done this before but maybe spent 15 minutes and that felt like an hour. A whole hour must have felt like a whole day.
My problem is that I AM buying something but I stand there analyzing all the options just walk out with 1 thing. As I'm checking out I start to wonder if anybody realized that I've just spent 15 minutes standing at one shelf to end up buying 1 bottle of infant cough syrup.
I accidentally put a product in my purse at Walgreens to get my phone out, and within 5 seconds an overhead page went off saying “code zero, code zero”. I quickly grabbed the product back out and half yelled “omg I’m sorry!” before going to the register to pay for it and also mumbling to the cashier who probably gave no fucks that I was sorry, it was very much an accident.
It's a consequence of our capitalist society, of how we're not allowed to just exist in most places without buying or consuming something. About the only places we have left are sidewalks, public parks, libraries, maybe a large mall. Anywhere else and you can potentially be asked to leave if you're not seen "doing" something or at least looking like you're going to buy something after awhile. If the staff don't care, you can "get away with it" (that is, get away with just existing), but more often than not you may be asked to leave. I'd try to test the theory out by just standing around for a few hours, but who actually has that kind of time?
And for me the feeling is inversely proportional to the time spent there.
I'm looking for something very specific, they don't have it, I leave. But man, does it seem I just went in real quick to steal something as fast as possible.
I memorized all of the best, publicly available bathrooms in Boston. It was extremely important info. The best is restaurants with bar seating because you can just say you are headed to the bar but no one ever tried to stop me anyway.
I won't let myself leave a local book store without buying anything, hence I only visit when I'm out of reading material.
Probably plays back into when I helped watch my father's and mother's trade show tables respectively. My father would sell sports cards back in the 90s and he was lucky to have one paying customer all day at an event we had spent all morning setting up for.
My mother used to paint whimsical designs on chunks of wood (toll painting) and set up a table of her painted wood art various church sales. I saw the hours my mom had spent tracing and painting those dumb little seasonal characters, only to see these rich bitches saunter by her table, turn her work over, say "That's cute!", And walk on.
To this day I will not walk into an antique store or junk shop or book store without at least ten bucks to burn. It feels gross to take up a shopkeeps time and space without buying something.
My wife always feels guilty about leaving a small shop without buying anything and will say stuff like "We'll be back!". I have to remind her we're under no obligation to buy anything and you shouldn't feel guilty about it.
This reminds me of how I this summer I went to a store only to discover that they don't sell the ice cream I wanted to buy, so I just ended up buying some crackers to not feel akward. (but anyway, the crackers were good)
Raised catholic here too, maybe catholic guilt but personally I think it's more so the pervading idea that people implicitly aren't allowed to exist in a space outside the home or offices unless they spend money and by walking out without buying anything bypasses the normal routine of going to a store to get something and going through some kind of checkout process.