A viral Reddit post has sparked a fierce debate about our collective tolerance for shoplifting, with scores of folks sounding off on whether the practice is acceptable.
The convo kicked off this week, when an Aussie Redditor who works at Woolworths said their “unpopular post” is that they are “sick of seeing people walk out with trolley after trolley of groceries while staff are told to just stand there and watch”.
The user claimed Woolies’ company policy forbids employees from stopping shoplifters, and that they’d witnessed repeat offenders steal phone chargers, cosmetics, meat and other “expensive stuff”.
“The rest of us are expected to work hard, follow the rules and pay for everything while other people just take whatever they want and everyone acts like we should feel sorry for them,” the Redditor added. “At what point did this become normal in Australia?”
A bunch of other users flocked to support the sentiment, saying they’d witnessed “how many people want the benefits of living in a society while thinking they have an exemption from participating in the collective rules for the good of that society”.
“Were there always so many people with main character syndrome?” another user asked.
A common counterargument in the thread was that supermarket giants like Woolies — which make eye-watering profits and have been accused of price gouging, wage theft and misleading deals — should be able to cop, or might even deserve, a few stolen items.
“Right now, [Coles and Woolworths] are in the news for blatantly ripping everyone off,” one user wrote, while another asked: “Woolies has repeatedly shown they are willing to steal from their own staff and you can’t understand why people feel comfortable stealing from them in return?”
Users were quick to point that this ‘sticking it to the man’ argument, which has long been a rationale behind shoplifting, is actually counterintuitive, since Woolies “factor theft into the pricing model” with the flow-on effect of increasing “the price for the rest of us”.
Still, the thread featured a bunch of mentions of a “broken social contract”, which is the erosion of society’s unwritten rules, like paying for groceries, when citizens feel like those rules have left them shortchanged.
Others argued shoplifting simply happens because of other factors like the safety risks of trying to stop thieves, the desperation brought on by cost-of-living pressures, or the unclear boundaries around whose responsibility it is to prevent it.
The thread blew up just days after Coles was found to have misled customers with its ‘Down ‘Down’ sales campaign, so the conversation is certainly top of mind for the Redditors sounding off in the thread.
Despite all the counterarguments, shoplifting is illegal in Australia, with penalties ranging from on-the-spot fines to community service and even jail time in New South Wales depending on the value of the stolen items.
Though the debate will undoubtedly continue even beyond the internet, one user hit the nail on the head: “I don’t think OP was expecting the response that we are witnessing.”
Lead images: Getty and Reddit
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