When I worked at Kmart, on more than one occasion they were forced to first to fire a large number of cashiers (10+) due to stealing. And the Kmart I worked in was definitely in the 'good' part of town.

Now Kmart also paid literally the minimum wage, but it still shocked me the number of people who would steal when they clearly had video, and regularly fired people for doing so. And some of the people who stole got caught for stealing bottles of soda to drink while at work...

As for stealing time, that was much more common, but I actually never saw anyone fired for that, no matter how often they took half hour long bathroom breaks, or spent an hour putting away 5 items. I guess Kmart understood they had to put up with something when paying literally as little as possible.

Maybe if Kmart paid their employees a little more they could afford to buy themselves something to drink at work.

We had water fountains in the back, you can always bring your own drinks, etc. It's hard to make an excuse for someone stealing a bottle of soda, a luxury.

It's not like anyone was stealing TVs, and that's what blew my mind about the stealing. It tended to be drinks and candy bars, stuff that not only was low value, but just simply wasn't necessary. It was stealing for the sake of stealing, because they thought they could get away with it.

That's an employees way of saying just how much they care about the job. It's a two way street.

I think the total amount of people who steal would go down if paid more, but I think there is just a "base amount" of the population who will always do this regardless what job/how much they get paid.

If thieves figure out that stealing incentivizes the employer to pay more (in an effort to reduce stealing), they now have a new motive to steal. That is, to increase the pressure on the employer to raise wages further. This new motive can even 'feel righteous', as it benefits the other low paid workers as well.

Why pay them more when you can offer some of what they're stealing as a benefit for working there. It's probably a lot cheaper and creates goof faith.

If Kmart paid their employees more, people would shop at Walmart.

And they did. Sears paid their employees very well, and consumers rewarded sears by shopping at their new competitors that offered lower prices.

Ironically enough Sears paid their employees well until they were bought by Kmart. When Lampert (Kmart CEO) took over he cut wages and jobs at Sears and then proceeded to run the company into the ground. Customers didn’t stop shopping at Sears because employees were paid too much. Sears had more customers at the time they were paying higher wages. Customers stopped shopping at Sears because extreme cost cutting efforts by a former hedge fund manager with no retail experience eroded the company’s customer-oriented quality brand.

I think it was inevitable that Sears would lose customers to cheaper merchants. Sears was offering employees expensive defined benefit pensions and healthcare. The 80s, 90s, and 00s saw the spending power of the bottom 4 quintiles drop. Even if people wanted to support a Sears type store, they can’t afford to.

Lambert didn’t help, but I think we’re still seeing the hollowing out of the middle class causing a loss of customers for places like Sears that could have paid middle class wages and sold decent quality goods.

I don't think that logically follows. Costco is well-known for generous compensation and are doing well.

Costco serves a limited range of items to middle and upper middle class areas only. As it already fulfills this segment of the population that can pay a little bit extra for quality, no competitor to Costco exists.

The same dynamics exist with Nordstrom/Apple/Trader Joes. There’s a few brands that can afford to offer more quality and better paid workers, but they don’t exist in poorer parts of any city, and there’s only one of each type of store.

Everyone else has to offer the lowest prices.

Not to be nitpicky, but wouldn't Sam's Club be considered a competitor to Costco?

It is, but last I heard Walmart was downsizing Sams Club operations. I also don’t think it’s known for quality and treating its employees well like Costco is. If you put a Sams Club next to a Costco, I would bet people choose to go to Costco.

What actually happened to Sears: https://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroy...

They can't afford to bring an empty bottle from home and fill it with the free water from the water fountains? You surely jest. Soda is not a life necessity owed to employees. Particularly if part of your business is selling soda. Every K-Mart I every saw had an employee lounge with fridge where you could bring your own drinks or lunch and store them as well.

I worked with a gas station chain and they had a similar approach. They cumulatively lost thousands of dollars from cashiers stealing from the registers, but I guess it was less than having to pay them more? They usually recouped the stolen money through store surveillance, but still, it was a surprisingly high amount of time and effort; I figure an easier solution would be just to pay people more.

Now working with grocery stores, they commonly tell me how difficult it is to find cashiers. Pre-COVID, I was at one, and they had 10+ cashier openings, and no applicants.

My comment was pure anecdote from years spent in retail (Best Buy) and co-owning a pizza restaurant. I'll update it if it helps.

A quick google finds a number of stats referencing what I'm talking about, but probably nothing scientific. Here is an example: https://losspreventionmedia.com/theft-by-employees-more-comm...

Reliable help in "low skill" jobs (although I don't believe they are low skill) can be notoriously hard to find.

And yet wage theft (by employers) seems to be the largest form of theft in the US by far. Is it really a wonder that people would steal / slack off when they are so consistently getting screwed at their workplace?

https://www.nelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BrokenLawsRe...

https://www.deseret.com/2014/6/24/20543670/wage-theft-how-em...

Yep, the most egregious daily example is Wal-Mart and basically showing their employees how to apply for welfare versus paying them a livable wage. Corporate welfare at its best.

But how does an individual combat that? I personally just don't shop at Wal-Mart...

Walmart advising employees to receive benefits they are lawfully eligible for is not theft.

Neither is downloading a car, and yet, we have a highly patronizing video prepended to a lot of home video releases that disingenuously equates copyright infringement to theft.

Intentionally paying an employee less than a living wage, with the expectation that someone else will be charitable enough to make up the shortfall, is indeed not theft, but it is unethical. There is a popular movement to make that behavior illegal, via reforms to employment law.

The obvious impediment here is that poor employees have little lobbying/campaign cash, as compared with the mega-corporations that underpay their laborers. So I feel confident that "Fight for $15" and similar movements will fail without more unionization.

What? Feel free to disagree with copywrite law, or whatever.

But at the end of the day, I don't see anything wrong with helping workers take advantage of benefits that they are legally entitled to.

There's also nothing wrong with a man who rides a horse to the point of injury calling in a large-animal veterinarian to treat it, a vet whose services are paid by someone else.

But there is some question as to whether the availability of treatment allows the man to ride the horses harder, with less regard for their welfare, than would otherwise be possible.

Metaphorically, the vet should refuse to treat injuries brought on by recklessness or cruelty, unless the person responsible pays.

Unwinding the metaphor, Wal-Mart should be forced to pay the cost of entitlement programs to the extent that its employment practices make administering those programs to its workers more necessary. There are many ways that goal may be approached.

It's not "theft" by any definition of the word, but when the situation is described to the modal individual, they are likely to say "they're stealing from the welfare system!"

If you think that minimum wage should increase, or whatever, then just do that, lol.

We have that for a reason. But it should apply across the board.

Also, doing the thing that you are suggesting is basically equivalent to saying that all poor should be fired. Because that is what would happen.

I don't think it is a good idea to give companies a huge incentive to never hire poor people. What you are suggesting would just ensure that poor people get screwed over, because they would never be hired.

Opposing political positions have complicated the issue of poverty wages far beyond what is necessary. What we have, in law, is the result of a century of unproductive struggle, that branches out into other parts of the economy.

We are still living the legacy of the Great Depression, then the New Deal, and then also the attempts to unravel the New Deal.

To address your comment more directly, companies can't fire all poor people. They are needed to run the businesses (until their automaton replacements are built). But one of the reasons poor people are poor is that they cannot afford to not work for long enough to make potential employers hurt enough to offer them higher wages.

One point of a minimum wage is to put a stop on the race to the bottom for wages. Raising the minimum wage will certainly put some people out of work, many of them permanently. All those who cannot generate enough labor value to pay for the cost of their employment will lose their job, if they had one, and be unable to find other work.

But companies that require wage laborers will have to pay them enough to live on, without the fear of being undercut by someone more desperate.

But then you still have the problem of all those people who are unemployable economically, because they're just not productive enough to work for an employer, and lack the capital, credit, or capability to support themselves with self-employment.

So you have to pair minimum wage with something, so that those people don't resort to crime, the career of last resort. Whatever that is would certainly be sustainable, if and only if the employers that are setting the prevailing wages were somehow made to pay the costs of the externalities they force upon the society in which they operate, mostly brought on by ruthlessly cutting their labor costs as closely as possible to the bone, and diverting a greater proportion of their revenues to owners and managers. For the most part, for non-luxury goods and services, labor cost funnels into customer disposable income. You can't sell mass-market consumer-grade goods and services unless someone pays their workers enough to afford them.

And that's what the minimum wage does. It forces all employers into a cartel, such that everyone must pay their workers enough to survive on, plus a little extra disposable income to spend on stuff that no one needs, but requires economies of scale to exist. If the rich owner of a business likes blockbuster movies with big production budgets, they can pay the hundreds of millions of dollars all by themselves, or they and all their rich buddies can pay their workers enough that they can all afford a $10 movie ticket once in a while. If the rich owner of a business likes fine dining, they can pay for a personal chef and the upkeep for kitchen and pantry, or they and all their buddies can pay their workers enough that they can all afford a $50 meal once in a while. When Wal-Mart pays poverty wages, they are reneging on the cartel agreement. Their lowest-paid employees can't even buy a Big Mac without budgeting for it in advance, much less go to the movies or eat a steak dinner. Those employees cannot support other types of business when all their pay goes to rent, utilities, public transportation, and food.

I think that you missed the point a bit.

There is no need to do some wierd complicated scheme regarding social benefits of people who are working.

Instead of that, if you think that people aren't getting paid enough money, then you should probably just advocate for increasing the minimum wage.

I think you even kind of admitted this when you said "And that's what the minimum wage does".

If this is the case, then that is the solution. Just advocate for increasing the minimum wage.

> When Wal-Mart pays poverty wages, they are reneging on the cartel agreement.

This agreement is called the minimum wage! They are not renaging on that.

If you think the minimum wage is to low... Then the proper response is to advocate for increasing it.

Sure, but for all the talk of socialism, Walmart is a state-subsidized entity. How is that a free market?

Call it whatever you like, they're using it as a crutch to pay their employees as little as possible.

Wal-mart already pays well above the minimum wage. By your logic, they're actually saving the government billions of dollars in welfare that the government would have to pay to take care of their own citizens.

Both can be true at the same time

I suspect that those of us who worked our ways through school at menial jobs can think of many examples right off the top of our heads.

In my experience, "1/2" is too much (depending on how you define stealing). But it was quite common for both employees to steal from their employer, and for employers to steal (wages) from the employees.

It was also quite common for employees to simply walk off when they felt they'd had enough.

If you consider employee and employer a resource exchange (time and abilities for money) then theft can also be tucked in as underemployment. If a task takes 10 minutes to complete an employee intentionally draws it out to 4 hours, is that theft? They were there, they were working, but didn't do it at maximum efficiency. If an employer can afford to pay an employee $20/hr and was even expecting to but was able to get labor at $10/he, is that theft?

Those in power define the rules and define things like 'theft.' Theft in the traditional sense is taking physical tangible resources that aren't yours. When we move to intangibles like time, businesses have defined all the rules around theft, not people.

In the US at least, businesses do have more power to get things written into law, yes, but certainly not all of the power. Minimum wage laws, for example, certainly aren't the work of business interests.

In practice, the situation is rather gray. Employers will virtually never call the police in a case of theft (or "theft")--they'll simply fire the person involved. Likewise, most employees won't do much if they're stolen (or "stolen") from by employers, they'll just quit.

We're not even consistent in the ways that we think about the topic. There has been talk of a "rent strike" during the pandemic, which amounts to stealing resources from one's landlord (who might be "rich" or might be quite "poor"). Few people would go along with the idea of a "grocery strike", in which those who need food but cannot pay simply shoplift from their local store. Somehow the former sounds more okay than the latter, even though the former would typically involve theft on a much larger scale.

And of course, most of us posting here are "stealing" from our employers in some sense. The better employers typically realize that they're better off looking the other way.

There's a handy chart out there that plots change in worker productivity and change in purchasing power by income percentile over time that answers this in a single graphic.

If a task normally takes 10 minutes, and an employee completes it in five, is that a donation of effort?

Is it theft to titrate the productivity of your labor to fit the rate of pay you receive for it? Employees do not get paid more for effort that exceeds par.

If I get paid $7/hour, I can easily reduce my productivity until one hour of my labor produces $21 for the employer. Or maybe I work two hours to produce $160 and slack off for six.

Two consecutive generations of not being rewarded for contributing additional effort for the benefit of the company has taken its toll, culturally. Nobody is willing to uphold a string work ethic for an unethical employer.

The employers burned through all their credit with labor, and are trying to refinance by redefining all the rules. It won't work. It's time for them to pay up.

> Two consecutive generations of not being rewarded

Only two? Someone skipped history class. :-)

There is an inflection point around the late seventies and early eighties which marks a huge expansion in the depredation of the upper class upon the middle and lower classes.

Prior to that point, increases in worker productivity positively correlate (at least weakly) with improvements in the purchasing power of worker wages. Afterward, working class purchasing power went flat or dropped even as their productivity shot through the roof. The owner class acquired the ability to capture everything, and they chose not to let it trickle down, by the terminology of the time. They didn't spend it. They loaned it or invested it, such that it never fully left their control.

After the abolition of slavery and advent of industrialization, labor movements have occasionally been able to claw back more of the workers' share of trade in the specialist economy, and then keep more equitable sharing of revenues going for a while afterwards, but the working class hasn't caught any breaks for a solid 40 years now, and unions are now relatively weak, compared to their historic peaks.

Prior generations got peanuts for their extra efforts, but they did at least get something.