I am wondering if any of you heard about this article, it’s been making the rounds on BlueSky with both condemnation and praise.
In the article and the podcast it draws from, a NYT columnist and two guests (who, as it happens, are all very wealthy people who certainly aren’t stealing to eat, despite their frequent references to Aladdin and Les Miserables) lay out their case. Since big corporations are “stealing” from everyone all the time anyways, it’s totally fine to steal “back” from them. And while they admit that it’s true that increased shoplifting would lead to businesses raising prices, and if everyone was stealing from stores the current system would collapse, they view this as a good thing, because they claim that society is already set up for massive systemic theft, so doing stuff that makes it collapse is good, actually. One of the panelists references Mamdani’s city owned grocery stores, and suggests that increased shoplifting could hurry the collapse of private businesses and thus usher in the era of publically owned grocery stores.
Some quotes:
So… What are your thoughts on this form of “protest”?
I have to say, I think it’s completely ridiculous. I listened to the full podcast in audio form, and it was the most highly concentrated dose of nonsense I’ve seen in a looooong time. I think this kind of attitude is incredibly toxic, and I think the attempt to associate this normalization of brazen petty theft with democratic politicians has the potential to be incredibly damaging to us in an electoral context. So much so that it’s almost hard to believe that people like this as genuine and not just Republican paid saboteurs.
Walmart has experienced a rather large uptick in shoplifting since they moved to eliminate a large part of their workforce and let their customers work as cashiers (aka self-checkout). Walmart hasn’t collapsed. Instead, they added facial recognition and AI systems to track and catch habitual shoplifters. And they’ve adjusted prices as necessary.
Similarly, businesses aren’t going to run at a loss. If there is an increase in costs (whether due to an increase in shoplifting or an increase in fuel/shipping prices or whatever) they just increase the cost of their items to compensate for it. Effectively, all this does is “steal” from honest customers since they will pay for the stolen goods through increased prices.
I get the desire to fight back against price-gouging companies, but this is going to punish innocent victims. It’s not going to do much harm at all to their intended targets.
They address this - they admit it would probably cause prices to rise, eventually to the point of unsustainability, but that’s a feature, not a bug. I think the argument goes:
Food is a human right
We shouldn’t make a profit on getting people access to human rights
Given 1 and 2, companies that are currently making a profit on food are in the wrong, and this situation should be rectified
I agree with you for any realistic proportion of the shoppers shoplifting. The argument that the people on the podcast made was that the current situation is that all companies are stealing from all of their workers and customers all of the time right now*, therefore if all the shoppers were shoplifting this would be justified and no worse than the current situation. So in that scenario, there wouldn’t be any honest customers.
Although I guess if they’re all going to buy some portion of their list to have an excuse to be in the store in the first place and then shoplift the rest, then the portion they’re buying would be what gets more and more expensive.
That said, I found it funny that at one point the NYT columnist asked Piker if he would be in favor of stealing from Mamdani’s government run grocery store, if and when it ever opens; and Piker responded, no, of course not, that money came from the taxpayers.
Who does he think the grocery store’s money come from? It isn’t collected in the form of taxes, but it’s coming from the same pool of people who both pay taxes and shop in the United States. And in fact, the money in taxes is more heavily skewed towards coming from rich people than the money coming from the grocery store (well, I suppose that might be less true of a Whole Foods or such).
While one cannot fault Jean Valjean for stealing a loaf of bread, if a store is ripping people off, is it not imperative not to buy there? And why would that not be your first move, as opposed to looting the place and burning it to the ground?
Agreed. The discussion was morally obtuse and intellectually lazy, and in the comments section, readers have rightly skewered the participants. It reminds me of when the Times saw fit to lionize Valerie Solanas (the mentally ill woman who shot Andy Warhol) as a feminist pioneer. This should never have got past the editors.
The one lady who told the story of how she used to regularly shoplift from Whole Foods in the distant bygone era of 2021 explained that she was only there because the old lady she was shopping for as part of a Mutual Aid Group asked her to go to Whole Foods in particular.
People can’t live without food, and more often than not there is no practical option for food that isn’t gouging people. Most people don’t live on or even near farms, after all.
That is a pretty incredible claim. What is your evidence for the idea that “more often than not” there isn’t food available that isn’t gouging people?
That might be true of so-called “food deserts”, which are indeed a problem, in very specific places. According to this source, there’s about 19 million Americans who live in a food desert:
That’s like, 5-6% of the population. Certainly that’s too high for a country as rich and well developed as the United States, but it’s a very far cry from “more often than not”.
What does this have to do with anything? A farm isn’t the only place not to be gouged. A grocery store might charge more for something than a farm, but that’s because by transporting the food to a central location where I can buy many different products, they are in fact providing me with a valuable service that I am more than happy to pay for; if I didn’t find it valuable, I would be free to go find produce stands or something. The reason I don’t do that is that the time I save by just going to the grocery store is more valuable to me.
In the long run, yes. But if you check the Wall Street Journal and so forth, you can usually find a chain grocer that lost money lately.
Somehow I doubt shoplifters check this in deciding where to steal.
As to the likely effect of people on the left making out that stealing is moral, it will be to push the overall population, who does not steal, rightward.
Why on earth, given all the evidence of history, does anyone think that “full chaos” will work out well for them, or for society in general?
And I’ve been hearing forms of this argument since the days of Steal This Book. I expect it was around before then.
If you think all the stores are ripping you off, and you have no way to raise or forage all your food, that argument doesn’t work; you’ll have to shop somewhere, or starve.
And the people quoted in the article are saying it’s all stores; it’s systemic.
They’re right that a lot of the problems in our food distribution system are systemic. They’re wrong that shoplifting will fix any of them. They’re massively wrong that bringing on “full chaos” would fix any of them.
Among the many other problems with this approach, the rich authors of the article, who won’t need to shoplift and face prison time, are the ones egging the poor folks to take on the risk of being arrested and facing prison time.
I don’t think that this is an effective mechanism for systemic change or systemic destruction. Folks who honestly imagine that this is somehow going to snowball in such a way that the wealthy are going to loose and the poor will win are being willfully ignorant about how protest works, about organization, and how businesses run.
I also suspect that most folks participating in this form of “protest” don’t actually believe they are causing social change- I think they feel that the social contract has been torn to tatters, and so why not just say “fuck it” and loot where you can and where it feels good. Wealth and power goes to those who take it with little regard for honesty, ethics, community, or sustainability. Our systems expect, reward, and even encourage behaviors much more destructive than shoplifting.
Not to excuse it, but I understand it. Shit is falling apart. People are going to stop following rules if they feel like those rules are pointless, or are only in place to serve the few.
edit to add…
And of course these folks, as @Velocity says, are just doing something that feels safe and low/no-stakes, while encouraging it as some kind of lifestyle choice for those who don’t have the same safety nets.
As a point of fact, the criteria for food deserts are awfully strict and the data can be incomplete. Just looking at my area, there are a couple marked out because developers put apartments in strange places away from any commercial areas. But, right there in the nearest commercial zone, there’s a huge supermarket. The criteria is apparently some combination of walking distance and income, which isn’t actually realistic. In one desert there’s literally nowhere to put a grocery store within walking distance that isn’t already housing, lstge commercial campuses, parkland/floodplain, hospital or a colossal highway interchange.
Or another blind spot is not including ethnic markets/groceries. One of the deserts listed near me has a large Asian grocery right in the middle and it’s well stocked with staples and vegetables at reasonable prices.
I’ve never had the impression that grocery stores themselves were price gouging for some small group of individuals to make big bucks. There are a LOT of things to be paid for in the production and distribution of food before it gets to the grocery shelf. If you steal something that the store already bought from Kraft, then Kraft - the actual big money food conglomerate - doesn’t suffer. The only part of the equation that gets disrupted is the retailer and as everyone else has said, that just causes the retailer to raise prices to cover the loss.
Rising gas prices make food prices go up. Crop & livestock disease make prices go up. Change in climate patterns & weather disasters make prices go up. Loss of immigrant labor makes prices go up. More expensive energy (domestic electric & natural gas & propane) makes prices go up. Rising health care costs for employers make prices go up. None of this is the fault of the grocer. There are a lot of entities making or losing money on the way to the grocery shelves.
Even if the grocer is shitty like Wal Mart and instead of taking the hit on those poor conditions themselves, they tell their downstream to eat the costs or lose their business, I don’t see how stealing from Wal Mart makes any sort of statement.