California Getting a Jump on Black Friday Shopping

[Incredulity 11,681]

1 minute ago, hobbes2702 said:

Not surprising that you didn’t know that’s a modern libertarian idea that came about with John Locke.

What are we arguing then, 17th Century French Poetry?  I will defer to your undergraduate degree.

[Guest Lobo]

4 minutes ago, hobbes2702 said:

Not surprising that you didn’t know that’s a modern libertarian idea that came about with John Locke.

Trump said that John Locke was the main inspiration to Thomas Jefferson to write the U.S. Constitution.  

[wildcat09 29,361]

While we're on the topic of thefts related to pharmacy chains, Walgreens recently settled a lawsuit for stealing millions of dollars from its own employees. It settled for $4,500,000, which was only approximately 22% of the potential damages. That's ~$20,454,545, but we can round it down to $20,000,000. 

Nobody will ever be indicted for it, though, because an employer stealing $20,000,000 from its employees isn't even a crime.

[hobbes2702 13,049]

7 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

What are we arguing then, 17th Century French Poetry?  I will defer to your undergraduate degree.

Not arguing anything. Just responding to what you said. If you’d like to make any points pertinent to the topic at hand then that would be great. But then again we’ve already seen that you aren’t informed on the subject matter and just want to yell about progressive policies.

[Guest Lobo]

It does seem, albeit anecdotally, that higher-risk/higher-reward "bulk robberies" are taking place with greater frequency.  

That is the mark of organized crime mimicking drug cartels.  You have 100 kilos, you send it through 10 different points of entry.  3 will be seized, 7 will get through.  But it beats trying to shuttle in a few keys at a time over long periods of time.  The "shrink" is baked into the price.  

Crime lords are sending out crews to just barrel into a place (either by vehicle or just a mob of people) and grab as much high-margin merch as they can.  A percentage will be arrested or the loot unrecovered.  But enough will get through to make it worthwhile.  They will smother a market in a few days and then move on.  It beats sending in a couple people a day to grab a few things over the course of a few weeks.  

To think this is new to the "defund the police" movement is laughable.  This approach has been going on for about 100 years.  It's the one thing Italians actually invented in America.

[Incredulity 11,681]

“People have always gotten murdered in America, what’s the big deal?”- Surly Leftists 

[hobbes2702 13,049]

1 minute ago, Lobo said:

It does seem, albeit anecdotally, that higher-risk/higher-reward "bulk robberies" are taking place with greater frequency.  

That is the mark of organized crime mimicking drug cartels.  You have 100 kilos, you send it through 10 different points of entry.  3 will be seized, 7 will get through.  But it beats trying to shuttle in a few keys at a time over long periods of time.  The "shrink" is baked into the price.  

Crime lords are sending out crews to just barrel into a place (either by vehicle or just a mob of people) and grab as much high-margin merch as they can.  A percentage will be arrested or the loot unrecovered.  But enough will get through to make it worthwhile.  They will smother a market in a few days and then move on.  It beats sending in a couple people a day to grab a few things over the course of a few weeks.  

To think this is new to the "defund the police" movement is laughable.  This approach has been going on for about 100 years.  It's the one thing Italians actually invented in America.

This is 100% correct. The large scale retail robberies whether it be smash and grab or after hours store breakins are massive organized crime rings. They always have been. 

[hobbes2702 13,049]

Just now, Incredulity said:

“People have always gotten murdered in America, what’s the big deal?”- Surly Leftists 

“Solutions?” - Surly “leftists”

crickets…

[52-80 19,213]

1 hour ago, hobbes2702 said:

So again, is this only happening in places that have policies similar to San Fran or is it happening all over the country?

What does the rest of the country have to do with the fact that looting and theft and B/E are bad; and lowering their criminality signals a tacit tolerance of such things. 
 

buttt derrr insurance

 

[hobbes2702 13,049]

3 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

What does the rest of the country have to do with the fact that looting and theft and B/E are bad; and lowering their criminality signals a tacit tolerance of such things. 
 

buttt derrr insurance

 

Because if those things were actually correlated then we should see these crimes only occurring in places that have lowered the criminality. Unless you’re arguing that what San Frans municipal laws are has effect across the entire country.

[wildcat09 29,361]

The only time the word "insurance" wasn't used in a trolling manner in this thread was one time when hobbes pointed out that employees risking their lives to prevent the theft of insured property would be bad. Y'all are making up shit you think liberals say to give yourselves something to mock.

[hobbes2702 13,049]

1 minute ago, wildcat09 said:

The only time the word "insurance" wasn't used in a trolling manner in this thread was one time when hobbes pointed out that employees risking their lives to prevent the theft of insured property would be bad. Y'all are making up shit you think liberals say to give yourselves something to mock.

Par for the course

[JimmyJames 12,271]

1 hour ago, Walden Ponderer said:

Smash and grab happened at least as early as the 80s.

Basically every single store in mid town Manhattan in the 80s and 90s had a metal door they pulled down to cover the glass windows at night. Most don’t anymore. Or at least last time I was there. 

[wildcat09 29,361]

How about this, guys. I'll start caring more about retail theft when you start caring enough about wage theft to support making it even be a crime. 

[JimmyJames 12,271]

It’s just the right wing hate machine finding something else to bitch about and blame “libs” and “the left” all the while proposing absolutely no solutions whatsoever.

[52-80 19,213]

10 minutes ago, hobbes2702 said:

Because if those things were actually correlated then we should see these crimes only occurring in places that have lowered the criminality. Unless you’re arguing that what San Frans municipal laws are has effect across the entire country.

Again, what the fuck does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

If your San Francisco neighborhood suffers crime, you dont want to see loosening of its prosecution, regardless of what happens in San Bernardino. 

[hobbes2702 13,049]

4 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

Again, what the fuck does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

If your San Francisco neighborhood suffers crime, you dont want to see loosening of its prosecution, regardless of what happens in San Bernardino. 

So now we are arguing feeling? That’s the crux of your issue you here? Not anything to do with what actually contributes to or lowers crime? Just how people feel about it.

[52-80 19,213]

4 minutes ago, hobbes2702 said:

So now we are arguing feeling? That’s the crux of your issue you here? Not anything to do with what actually contributes to or lowers crime? Just how people feel about it.

What are you doing about crime besides selling insurance and blaming society? 

[hobbes2702 13,049]

2 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

What are you doing about crime besides selling insurance and blaming society? 

What are you even talking about at this point? 

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12,301]

2 hours ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

So anyway, this kind off grab, and run tactic was really not happening until the summer of the protests and beyond.  So while there's for sure a % of theft built in, just ignoring open mass, theft by security guards was not typical protocol. Theft deterrence has always been a tactic retail merchants have employed.

You fuckers would argue about the color of a clear, blue sky.  Or any post by somebody you consider on the other team. The Surly CABAL, alive, and still grabbing the moron high ground.

You are dumb.

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13,586]

2 hours ago, Incredulity said:

“People have always gotten murdered in America, what’s the big deal?”- Surly Leftists 

 

[workswithseed 2,109]

1 hour ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

 

Are you saying surly leftist are trump?

[Mole 4,333]

3 hours ago, hobbes2702 said:

Not surprising that you didn’t know that’s a modern libertarian idea that came about with John Locke.

Username checks out.

[Serak The Preparer 3,431]

Good Lord, Taylor Hamm is jealous of @Onboard 2.0's performance in this thread. Every single point he has made is completely incorrect. I know that his radio station makes some questionable assertions sometimes but this is new achievement!

[We’reTexas 1,473]

6 hours ago, hobbes2702 said:

So now we are arguing feeling? That’s the crux of your issue you here? Not anything to do with what actually contributes to or lowers crime? Just how people feel about it.

To be fair, it’s a valid point. It’s actually the crux of the crime issue in San Francisco, as Chesa Boudin has acknowledged. Even though crime is generally down YoY, several events and developments have contributed to a sense of lawlessness: the NYE hit and run homicides by a former Boudin client, the shift of property theft to burglaries during the pandemic, the string of attacks on Asian Americans by repeat offenders, and, oh, the fucking sideshows. Despite the data, people don’t like to be told their feelings don’t matter (this is a recurring problem for progressive prosecutors - see Philly DA, about Larry Krasner).
 

It’s been a rough year, and with certain high profile events and crime literally hitting closer to home, folks are irate about the tone deafness of having a DA that openly blows off quality of life crimes while instead finding ways to charge police officers for years-old homicides. I support most Chesa’s platform, but voted to recall him because he’s a disastrous DA. Sorry if I’m being overly specific, but that’s because the controversy in SF is that of confusing, internecine squabbles in a parochial town that have been exploited by national right wing outlets for cheap shots on “progressive values”.

 

 

[TwiceHorn 31,516]

7 hours ago, We’reTexas said:

To be fair, it’s a valid point. It’s actually the crux of the crime issue in San Francisco, as Chesa Boudin has acknowledged. Even though crime is generally down YoY, several events and developments have contributed to a sense of lawlessness: the NYE hit and run homicides by a former Boudin client, the shift of property theft to burglaries during the pandemic, the string of attacks on Asian Americans by repeat offenders, and, oh, the fucking sideshows. Despite the data, people don’t like to be told their feelings don’t matter (this is a recurring problem for progressive prosecutors - see Philly DA, about Larry Krasner).
 

It’s been a rough year, and with certain high profile events and crime literally hitting closer to home, folks are irate about the tone deafness of having a DA that openly blows off quality of life crimes while instead finding ways to charge police officers for years-old homicides. I support most Chesa’s platform, but voted to recall him because he’s a disastrous DA. Sorry if I’m being overly specific, but that’s because the controversy in SF is that of confusing, internecine squabbles in a parochial town that have been exploited by national right wing outlets for cheap shots on “progressive values”.

 

 

Still, people need to adjust their unrealistic and unfounded expectations of "feeling safe" about things that don't really affect them.

That is the central problem here.

[Beau Vine 54,337]

14 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

 Y'all are making up shit you think liberals say to give yourselves something to mock.

Edited December 1, 2021 by Beau Vine

[Don Johnson 4,754]

SF Mayor ready to crack down

 

[henrygandorf 29,194]

did this thread start out on daily texan?

just a wild guess.

[wildcat09 29,361]

Retailers say thefts are at crisis level. The numbers say otherwise:

Quote

Organized retail crime is haunting the nation this holiday season.

Captured on smartphones and closed-circuit cameras, thefts involving groups of people smashing windows or individuals wheeling loaded shopping carts past security guards and out the door have been looping on social media and TV news, raising the specter that crime rings reselling boosted merchandise present a major threat to retailers.

With industry groups sounding the alarm, politicians have declared the issue a priority. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would increase the budget of the California Highway Patrol next year to beef up its Organized Retail Theft task force. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta met with retailers, online marketplace companies and law enforcement Tuesday to develop strategies to fight organized retail crime. Police and prosecutors say criminal justice reforms need to be rolled back to deter smash-and-grabs.

Although some retail and law enforcement lobbyists cite eye-popping figures, there is reason to doubt the problem is anywhere near as large or widespread as they say. The best estimates available put losses at around 7 cents per $100 of sales on average.

It’s easy to get attention for sensational claims, however, particularly when they come from official sources. Rachel Michelin, president of the California Retailers Assn., told the San Jose Mercury News that in San Francisco and Oakland alone, businesses lose $3.6 billion to organized retail crime each year.

That would mean retail gangs steal nearly 25% of total sales in San Francisco and Oakland combined, which amounted to around $15.5 billion in 2019, according to the state agency that tracks sales tax.

Can that be right? In a word: no.

The country’s largest retail industry group, the National Retail Federation, estimated in its latest report that losses from organized retail theft average $700,000 per $1 billion in sales — or 0.07% of total sales — an amount roughly 330 times lower than the CRA’s estimate.

Asked how the organization arrived at that figure, a CRA staffer said that “there’s no way of knowing exactly” how much organized retail crime affects the bottom line of businesses. The staffer said the estimate was based on a back-of-the-napkin calculation: If organized retail thieves steal $70 billion annually, and California accounts for 10% of the U.S., California’s losses add up to $7 billion, meaning the Bay Area “is likely in the billions itself.”

Leaving aside some of those assumptions, how did they come up with that $70-billion number? The staffer pointed to a report from the Retail Industry Leaders Assn. published this year. But that report didn’t find that organized retail thieves stole $68.9 billion per year at all — it estimated that all retail crime combined, including employee theft, regular shoplifting and fraud, added up to that number.

An industry advocate made a similar error in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in early November. At a hearing on regulating online marketplaces, Ben Dugan, president of the National Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail, or CLEAR, and director of organized retail crime response at CVS Health, told the committee that “CLEAR estimates that organized retail crime accounts for $45 billion in annual losses for retailers.”

When asked where that number came from, Rich Rossman, vice president of CLEAR and sergeant with the Broward County (Fla.) Sheriff’s Office, said that it was pulled from the National Retail Federation’s report. But the NRF puts all losses to theft and fraud from all sources at around $45 billion, not losses to organized retail crime.

The $25-billion discrepancy between the figures touted by the two industry groups suggests the difficulty of quantifying any problem in an industry as splintered as retail. When it comes to organized retail crime specifically, the best estimates appear much smaller.

With the 55 member companies that responded to its latest annual survey representing about 25% of all U.S. retail sales, the National Retail Federation has the clearest window into broader trends, said Mark Mathews, who leads the NRF’s research team.

Its latest report found that total “shrink” — the industry term for all inventory losses from theft and fraud, internal and external, as well as paperwork errors — grew from 1.4% to 1.6% of sales on average from 2015 to 2020. The estimated portion of those losses coming from organized retail crime grew from 0.045% to 0.07% in the same timeframe.

With $3.1 trillion in bricks-and-mortar retail sales in 2020, that puts estimates for total shrink at $49.6 billion and losses to organized retail crime at $2.1 billion nationwide.

Although the NRF publishes its organized retail crime estimates each year, the group stopped publishing a detailed breakdown of the sources of shrink in 2019. But in 2018 its survey found that 35.7% of shrink came from shoplifting or organized retail crime, and 33.2% came from employee theft. Both percentages had declined since 2015, and a different sort of risk — paperwork error — hit 18.8% of total shrink in 2018.

Mathews said some categories of retailers face higher rates of organized retail theft, with those that sell easily portable and salable goods at higher risk. In his Senate testimony, Dugan reported that CVS Health loses more than $200 million a year to organized retail crime, or 0.21% of its $91 billion in 2020 retail revenue, a rate three times higher than the national average.

The Retail Industry Leaders Assn. released its own report, which put that nearly $70-billion price tag on total retail crime, in late November as part of its campaign with a spin-off group, the Buy Safe America Coalition, to lobby for a federal bill that would make it more difficult for people to anonymously sell goods on internet marketplaces. An earlier version of that bill, the INFORM Consumers Act, would have required online marketplaces such as EBay, Etsy and Amazon to verify the identity of sellers who make hundreds of sales or bring in more than $5,000 a year with their accounts. The National Retail Federation, which counts Amazon among its members, has endorsed a more recent version of the bill that has more limited reporting requirements for sellers.

Mathews at the NRF found fault with the methodology behind RILA’s report, which was based on data from five retail companies and written by John Dunham & Associates, a consulting firm that produces reports for corporations and industry groups (and whose founder was an in-house economist at Philip Morris in the 1990s). “I wouldn’t feel comfortable in putting out data with that few respondents, frankly,” Mathews said.

Jason Brewer, head of communications and marketing at RILA, said that he could not provide more details on the data in the group’s study because members had submitted it confidentially, and he could not say what percentage of total sales they represent. But he did defend its significance, saying that the respondents “represent a cross section of retail, which included grocery, home improvement, pharmacy, general merchandise and clothing,” and that “based on the conversations we’ve had with asset protection professionals, these numbers are probably conservative.”

Even if the dueling retail associations can’t agree on their numbers, they agree on the principle that organized retail crime is better dealt with away from stores and at the level of the fences — the people reselling the stolen goods.

Broader crime statistics paint a picture of a decreasing problem, not one on the rise. National crime statistics from the FBI show shoplifting decreasing steadily every year from 2015 through 2020, the most recent data available. Larceny — the taking of property without using force or breaking in — declined 16% between 2010 and 2019, then dipped even lower in 2020, the data indicate.

At a local level, more up-to-date statistics sharpen the image of a waning problem. Property crime in Los Angeles is up 2.6% from last year, according to LAPD numbers published Nov. 27, but down 6.6% from 2019. The category that includes shoplifting — “personal/other theft” per LAPD — is down 32% from 2019. A San Francisco Chronicle analysis of that city’s shoplifting crime data showed that the number of monthly reports had changed little in the last three years, though it also raised some major questions about the accuracy of shoplifting reporting to law enforcement. Smash-and-grab thefts are classified differently because they involve violence, trespassing and high-value hauls, and suspects have been charged with robbery, burglary or grand theft after recent incidents in L.A. and San Francisco.

One thing that has gone up is the visibility of open theft from stores. Ubiquitous security cameras and smartphones mean that few crimes go unrecorded, and videos of people loading up bags and carts with products and walking out the door make for viral content.

The ease of committing a crime like that is, in some part, traceable to decisions made by the retailers themselves, according to industry analysts.

Tony Sheppard, an executive at Canadian loss prevention software company ThinkLP, received his first exposure to the issue as a store detective at a Montgomery Ward store in the Boston area in the 1990s. “The first shoplifter I ever went to detain was a booster stealing a whole rack of coats,” Sheppard said. At the time, he carried handcuffs and detained the suspected thief himself. “Nowadays, unfortunately, because of safety concerns and liability issues, a lot of companies are very hands-off.”

Lawsuits from people injured by security guards in the process of apprehending shoplifters — in some cases, even from the alleged shoplifters themselves — have made aggressive in-store policing a losing proposition, Sheppard said.

In one recent case, a West Virginia woman won nearly $17 million in damages from Walmart after she was injured when a man being pursued for shoplifting stumbled into her, on the basis that Walmart escalated the situation. “Most companies realized from a financial standpoint it’s just not worth it. A couple big lawsuits take away anything you gain by making all those apprehensions,” he said.

Sometimes hiring staff to stop shoplifters in the first place doesn’t make financial sense, security consultant Chris McGoey said. “To hire and train a loss prevention department, especially a competent one, costs money,” McGoey said. Some retailers have found that the cost of the merchandise recovered by security staff was lower than the cost of employing them. “It’s almost cheaper to do nothing and just take the loss” on that basis, McGoey said, “but then you pile liability on top, it’s a no-brainer.”

The spectacular nature of the recent smash-and-grab robberies might change that calculus for retailers, McGoey said, and lead to beefed-up security staffing and putting more products behind lock and key. But he doubts it.

“Modern merchandising is about getting your merchandise up in front. You want it highly visible,” McGoey said. “We’ve gone through cycles where you put high-theft items in locked cases, but that’s anti-merchandising, that’s anti-retail management. The merchants hate it.”

For small businesses that lack the record profit margins of national chains, hiring additional staff to deter theft or putting items behind plexiglass may not be options, and a theft that involves a smashed window, even if covered by insurance, can impose a heavy toll in lost time and sales.

On the other hand, stolen merchandise can sometimes be recovered. The CHP reported that it contributed to recovering $20 million in merchandise stolen by organized theft rings in 2020. If the national average of 0.07% losses holds for California — Mathews at the NRF said the group could not break out data by state — that’s more than 10% of losses to organized retail theft in the state, well above the national recovery rate for stolen items (excluding cars), which hovers below 4%, according to the FBI.

 

[Willfully Horn 8,042]

On 11/30/2021 at 4:52 PM, hobbes2702 said:

This is 100% correct. The large scale retail robberies whether it be smash and grab or after hours store breakins are massive organized crime rings. They always have been. 

How many posters sing sycophanticly in this thread? Go shit on them.

https://www.surlyhorns.com/board/index.php?/profile/395-billfromlaketravis/

[We’reTexas 1,473]

12 hours ago, Don Johnson said:

SF Mayor ready to crack down

 

She was talking about cracking down on drug dealing in the Tenderloin, as well as the rise in property crimes during COVID. Retail theft has always been a significant problem in SF (people literally  scoop up bags of merchandise at the Walgreens locations in the Mission and sell it on the sidewalk outside), but as the various studies posted in this thread have indicated it’s likely more of a pretense for the recent retail closures in the city.  

[wildcat09 29,361]

Bump:

Walgreens executive says the company 'cried too much' about theft and may cut back on private security guards:

Quote

Walgreens "cried too much" about theft last year, according to an executive of the retail pharmacy chain.

And the Chicago-based company may even consider cutting back on private security in stores.

Walgreens CFO James Kehoe said during a Thursday quarterly earnings call that the company has seen "lower levels of shrink" in inventory in the second half of 2022.  A year ago, the company said that its inventory shrink rate, or the loss of inventory attributed to theft, fraud, and damage, was over 3%, Kehoe said it is now down to roughly 2.5%.

"We're quite happy with where we are," Kehoe said.

He added that the company "put in too much" private security at the start of last year and wants to reduce their presence, instead relying on law enforcement officers: "The security companies are proven to be largely ineffective," he said.

Kehoe's comments come after months of other retailers sounding the alarm about retail theft. Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon said in December 2022 that stores would close and prices would rise if theft levels did not drop.

Missing inventory also reduced Target's gross margin by more than $400 million in fall 2022 compared with last year, and the company expected those profit losses to grow to $600 million by the end of the fiscal year, Target CFO Michael Fiddelke said in November 2022 during a company earnings call.

The issue of theft has ballooned into a $94.5 billion problem for the retail industry, according to a 2022 study conducted by the National Retail Federation.

Kehoe's message Thursday was much calmer than a year ago, when he warned that Walgreens was "absorbing a 52% increase in shrink" at the end of 2021. At the time, he attributed a large part of the shrink to organized retail crime.

"This is not petty theft," Kehoe said in a January 2022 investor call. "It's not somebody who can't afford to eat tomorrow. These are gangs that actually go in and empty our stores of beauty products. And it's a real issue."

I do find it funny how Walgreens is now fessing up that they were really exaggerating the problem while the NRF's absurd estimate of retail theft increased from $70 billion to $94.5 billion.

[HamsterHookah 112]

3 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Bump:

Walgreens executive says the company 'cried too much' about theft and may cut back on private security guards:

I do find it funny how Walgreens is now fessing up that they were really exaggerating the problem while the NRF's absurd estimate of retail theft increased from $70 billion to $94.5 billion.

I'm not saying you are, and you certainly haven't said you are so I don't want to put words in your mouth, but why does it FEEL to me like you are on the side of thieves and petty theft?

Can't being against the theft of property and goods be at least one thing that civilized humanity and modern man have in common?

[wildcat09 29,361]

2 minutes ago, HamsterHookah said:

I'm not saying you are, and you certainly haven't said you are so I don't want to put words in your mouth, but why does it FEEL to me like you are on the side of thieves and petty theft?

Can't being against the theft of property and goods be at least one thing that civilized humanity and modern man have in common?

I'm against lying about the threat of crime to shape public opinion and public policy in ways that I find to be harmful.  I would hope that's something that civilized humans can agree with.

[Longhorn_Fan68 33,881]

goddamn these fucking cockroaches. just can't get rid of them!

[HamsterHookah 112]

27 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

I'm against lying about the threat of crime to shape public opinion and public policy in ways that I find to be harmful.  I would hope that's something that civilized humans can agree with.

Lying feels like too aggressive a word here.

Did the CFO of a major organization just make up out of thin blue air a rash of retail theft? Was there not many viral videos at the time and a bit of a trend for that petty theft that could reasonably, or unreasonably as you see it, stoke some fear around shrink and the impact of revenue? Especially for someone whose role is to manage the financial health of the organization?

Lying would look like something different. And I don't think you'd have this statement from the earnings call if it was a lie. It was more of "the data showed X and we thought Y-- turns out we over-rotated and it was really Z which was much lower than Y, so our preventative measures and costs can be reduced." That's just standard feedback looping in business via trial and error and hypothesis and experiment from where I sit...

Edited January 5, 2023 by HamsterHookah

[wildcat09 29,361]

Or it was a lie to soften the PR hit from closing a bunch of stores and firing a lot of people because you'd determined that you had too many stores open, which further fed into the hysteria and helped fuel political campaigns against progressive DAs whose agenda corporate executives tend to be ideologically opposed to. 

[HamsterHookah 112]

Just now, wildcat09 said:

Or it was a lie to soften the PR hit from closing a bunch of stores and firing a lot of people because you'd determined that you had too many stores open, which further fed into the hysteria and helped fuel political campaigns against progressive DAs whose agenda corporate executives tend to be ideologically opposed to. 

I see. It was all a conspiracy by the corporations and it was based on the lies about retail theft and they are now coming clean. Makes sense.

[wildcat09 29,361]

I never said it was a conspiracy. The way these types of panics works is that everyone involved in fueling them has pretty obvious self-interested reasons for contributing to the hysteria. It's largely organic, not a secret agreement by a shadowy cabal.  

It's funny how certain posters in this thread keep making shit up and pretending that those they disagree with have said it. I'm beginning to question the veracity of your claim that you don't want to put words in my mouth.

[HamsterHookah 112]

25 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

I never said it was a conspiracy. The way these types of panics works is that everyone involved in fueling them has pretty obvious self-interested reasons for contributing to the hysteria. It's largely organic, not a secret agreement by a shadowy cabal.  

It's funny how certain posters in this thread keep making shit up and pretending that those they disagree with have said it. I'm beginning to question the veracity of your claim that you don't want to put words in my mouth.

I just think you are staunchly anti-business (and never was that so clear to me than in the Southwest thread when you gave a point of view that was, at best, wildly ignorant of what it means to operate a business outside of your pure play technical background), and that it feels like you will take any position that puts business in a bad light-- real or imagined.

And with that enemy of enemy is my friend mentality, you find yourself coming across as a sympathizer to thieves of travel sized shampoo and cheap mascara and about to expire pringles.

[HamsterHookah 112]

@wildcat09 actually, I might be thinking of captainant and not you. I am sorry for conflating you two and making inferences on bad data. 

[Huckleberry 33,054]

Fantastic performance here where you start from a faulty premise, misinterpret multiple statements due to confirmation bias, confuse him for someone else, and in the end are just as cocksure as ever. Truly, you have a dizzying intellect. 

[wildcat09 29,361]

It's understandable, a lot of posters have an avatar with John Boehner shaped like a penis eating another penis while wearing an asshat.

[aggie08 21,513]

god you suck donkey

[Biff Tannen 45,697]

2 hours ago, HamsterHookah said:

I just think you are staunchly anti-business

I think you have a wildly different definition of "anti-business" than many people on this board.  "Pro-business" does not mean "suck every corporate dick within mouth's reach".  

[Hefeweizen 5,328]

Animal tobacco is a very skilled and effective debater.

 

With himself.

[ConferenceRoom 6,144]

7 minutes ago, Hefeweizen said:

Animal tobacco is a very skilled and effective debater.

 

With himself.

[Incredulity 11,681]

 

 

BuT HaZ INsurAncEs !11!1!!

 

in 3..2..1...

[wildcat09 29,361]

On 11/30/2021 at 5:51 PM, wildcat09 said:

The only time the word "insurance" wasn't used in a trolling manner in this thread was one time when hobbes pointed out that employees risking their lives to prevent the theft of insured property would be bad. Y'all are making up shit you think liberals say to give yourselves something to mock.