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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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The way I see this going is for it to end up being a giant shoplifting subsidization scheme. If there's no profit motive, none of the employees or managers have any reason to care about shoplifting, and any politician who doesn't want to be seen as an alt-right fascist isn't going to want to crack down on it either. I expect the shelves to be emptied out by looters just brazenly and without even trying to hide it walking in, loading up bags, and walking out, leaving the store barren and useless until the next time it restocks. This is just going to be a massive welfare scheme that siphons taxes into the pockets of thieves.

There is not a lot of shoplifting prevention motive at other stores either. After a frustrating Amazon return experience, I told a WF employee I was just going to go steal some ingredients because Bezos owed me. They said that was fine, so I did it.

There's still some limit. There can't not be, because money comes from somewhere and capitalists gonna capitalist. Stores that take fewer losses than it would cost to hire security mostly don't bother. Some stores do hire security (There's a Walmart near me that we call Ghettomart because it's in a poor neighborhood and sees all sorts of poor people, and has security guards near the front). Stores that take enough losses to outweigh their profits close down, because they're not profitable. Not arresting the criminals and doing literally nothing isn't the same, the closing down is just a lot more subtle and less obviously connected to the crime from the outside.

Now this is a real question: is it ethical to shoplift from Whole Foods to collect on a debt if Amazon owes you money and refuses to pay?

The scheme is basically it will be a private grocery store whose land costs are covered by the government and in response they must offer certain items 30% discounted.

So the operator has an incentive to avoid shop lifters. But the operator also has an incentive to minimize the supply of the 30% discounted items.

Hmmm. Okay so it won't endlessly funnel taxes into shoplifter, it will just go out of business due to shoplifting and/or vandalism for the same reason all the other grocery stories in the area did (as far as I can tell that's the main reason food deserts occur).

So it's just going to be a giant misuse of public funds operation, like New York seems content to produce without stop for centuries now?

Nothing ever happens, truly.

Yep

It will be interesting to see if the Mamdani administration prefers shortages, or if they prefer lines. Each way has its pros and cons.

I expect the shelves to be emptied out by looters just brazenly and without even trying to hide it walking in, loading up bags, and walking out, leaving the store barren and useless until the next time it restocks.

This has been predicted sufficiently often that I predict that the NYC government will be prepared with defenses to prevent this. A politician can't be seen cracking down on this shoplifting due to the optics, but a politician can still crack down on it without being seen, and Mamdani certainly has a great incentive to crack down on such shoplifting. It would have to just be organized by a politician's orders by private citizens who have no credible link to the politician or his associates or to any organization, and it would have to be performed far away enough from the marts such that journalists can't get bad-looking photos, or journalists would have to be kept sufficiently away. An informal perimeter around each mart where private citizens police both journalists and the types of people who seem likely to loot seem like a decent solution for any sufficiently charismatic politician who wants to create the perception of these marts succeeding.

And that's just me spitballing; I'm sure a real politician who has real experience with power and optics and the time and incentives to use them could come up with better methods for cracking down on the looting while avoiding the bad optics.

In New York these people are called thé guardian angels and they’re loyal to Curtis Sliwa, an opponent of Mamdani.

Average age of a Guardian Angel: 73 years old.

Huh, Mamdani may be laying down the groundwork for the source material of a modernized 21st century remake of Gangs of New York.

And here I was expecting Escape from New York.

Interesting proposal, a squad of goons operating in a legal gray area re: the state’s monopoly on violence, for the purpose of abetting the political fortunes of an avowed socialist. Pink-ertons, if you will.

Pink-ertons, if you will.

Here, take this groan of approbation!

... I don’t think AAQC's are appropriate for puns, but damn that was good.

If I were Mamdani I would let shoppers mob the store and simply make them do it in a semi-"controlled" way. The rush just prove what demand there is for State Grocery and how we need to expand the program, what a huge success. This argument will work on exactly the people it needs to work on.

If there's no profit motive, none of the employees or managers have any reason to care about shoplifting

None of the employees in any normal store have any reason to care about it, either, other than the threat of losing their jobs for not tackling it, which is unchanged here. Their wages aren't based on profits the store makes.

Plenty of low level employees do care, in the sense of "Fuck you, I have to do this shit to get my stuff. Why should your defectbot ass get it for free?"

The employees who don't have that attitude are usually the ones getting let go within a few months.

No minimum wage cashier is tackling a tweaking drug addict shoplifter, I guarantee you.

For the most part you don't have to actually interact. The videos of utterly brazen thieves are the tip of the iceberg. The other 90% will bail to try later or somewhere else if a staffer is just hanging around suspiciously close. "Hey, can I help you with anything?" is the best practical defense.

None of the employees in any normal store have any reason to care about it, either, other than the threat of losing their jobs for not tackling it, which is unchanged here.

It is changed, in the owner cares, the owner hires the manager presumably putting pressure on him to care. The problem with the public sector is that especially for people who don't live next to them, these issues are so diffuse voters don't care enough to vote across ideology. Until things get very very bad, at which point the solution can end up being the equivalent of a shock treatment. So the "manager" rarely gets pressure to care.

EDIT: Someone pointed out as a response elsewhere in the thread the operators of the store still would care about profitability, then in this case yeah, disregard my comment.

The usual defence of shoplifting is that stores price in shrinkage. So if the NYC city administration is going to be paying for all this, then the for-profit operators can just pass the costs of the shoplifting on to them. Certainly, if I were going to sign a contract for this, I'd be sure to load all or as much of the liability onto the city as I could get away with.

If stores price in shrinkage then that just means the shoplifter is stealing from their neighbor who does not shoplift and is paying 3% more because you are stealing.

Honestly seems worse to me. Better to steal from evil corp than your neighbor John. And economics would tend to indicate you are stealing from John.

Yes, all shoplifting is theft from the community. But that's a second order consequence, so it's functionally inscrutable High Arcana to the people who need to hear it.

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