Retail Musings: The Stupid Move
It is said that confronting thieves is a big mistake when you work in retail. After all, the stock they steal is insured, but it goes without saying that staff are not so easily replaced! Risking one’s safety to protect a laptop or some ink cartridges really isn’t worth it, and it would be extremely cold comfort to tell a grieving family their loved one died to stop a printer or a pen being stolen.
I know this, yet one evening in 2014, on a day where I had already received some bad news, an email came through warning of a group of laptop and tablet thieves operating in the area. I made a note of the details, and carried on with my duties. Working that night were myself, and a 17 year-old girl with a knee brace on, so I naturally hoped we wouldn’t get any unpleasant visitors. It was therefore one of fate’s worst jokes that the thieves from the email would stroll in a short time later. They made a beeline for the tablet PCs, and yanked them off their flimsy alarm hooks. In a burst of anger, I tried to get in their way, and got pushed to the ground for my troubles.
I was shaking from the adrenaline and the fury, but in hindsight, I came to realise what a stupid move that was. Any one of the four thieves could have had a blade, or some other weapon. The stuff they took was not worth my life, but in that moment it was all happening a red mist descended, and I wanted to stop the little shits (pardon my language) from stealing from my store. In the aftermath of it all I still had to do the banking and close up, and the next morning I went back in to record the CCTV and pass it to the police. I never did find out if the thieves were apprehended.
More than 10 years on from that particular incident, I would like to believe I am a bit calmer, and less inclined to risk it all for the sake of product. I have too many far more important things in my world to make such a stupid choice again.
Trying to stop four guys all by yourself probably is not a good idea, but taking a casual attitude towards thievery is not a good idea either. When we allow thievery to become low risk proposition, we risk anarchy. No honorable insurance company will cover the cost if theft is inevitable.
Think of it this way. Thieves will take a risk to protect “their” loot. If we are not willing to protect our property, we won’t keep it.
Security and order have to be maintained for force and punishment. That means someone has to take the risk of confronting thieves, arresting them, putting them on trial, and punishing them. When policemen do a good job, we owe them all the praise we can give them.
I supposed it depends on what the right balance is. The trouble is that one can never be sure what the thief is carrying. My brother-in-law did a stint as a security guard for a local supermarket, and when he chased after a thief, they pulled a syringe of blood out. He decided it was safer to let them go. I certainly agree that police do a great job, albeit so often a thankless one.
Syringe of blood? Weird version of a lethal weapon. If you are a security guard in the USA, that’s when you pull out a gun and tell the thug to drop the weapon. Then you make the thug lay face down on the ground, zip tie him, and call the local police to take him in. At least that is what is still done in some states.
Some states now have other ideas, but California’s experiment has failed. Voters there used a ballot initiative end the shoplifting spree. The government had $950 limit on shoplifting. If you stole less that $950, you could run out of the store and management could not stop you. For some reason, storekeepers were leaving the state.
Some politicians seem to regard thieves as a core part of the political constituency, but soft on crime is really a dumb idea. There are some people with mental problems and drug addiction issues who cannot easily be deterred, but most people won’t commit a crime if they know they are going to end up in jail. That is, if they know jail is an unpleasant place that just means 8 hours a day of hard work, no privacy, sleep on a hard cot, and bland, tasteless food; nobody is going to want to go there. And no, I don’t believe government-run jails can rehabilitate anyone.
Much of the criminal class is illiterate. Ignorance it seems is conducive to crime. So, about the best we can do is teach the people who didn’t learn to read in government-run schools how to read. Sadly, I don’t have a high expectation that government-run prison can do that.
I don’t think it was intended as a lethal weapon per se, more of a deterrent, and it struck me as a particularly unpleasant one. I’d sooner not see guns everywhere here in the UK, since they’ve never been much of a deterrent in the USA, and are more likely to lead to loss of life in any given situation.
As to your remarks about government-run institutions… well, you know my views on public vs private, and I’ll leave that there.