Hacker News Reader

Comment by dls2016 | Hacker News Reader

dls2016

> If criminals can get away with constant car break ins, burglaries, and daylight mass raids of stores, why stop there?

This is rich. The rich always get away with crimes: wage theft, labor violations, financial fraud, environmental destruction, opioid crisis... but some people shoplift and society is falling apart? Cry me a river.

Let the market fix their own broken supply chains.

People have been writing songs about retail theft for ages. Think about the term "riding shotgun"! This isn't a new problem.

View on HN

what happens when the market fixes its supply chains with private police forces that are entirely unaccountable to local governments, and purely protect the rich? That's what's happened to South Africa.

Railway police didn't seem to be doing much there.

This already happened in the US, too, regarding strike-breaking forces. See, for example, the official history of the Pennsylvania State Police.

But there are numerous solutions between the current situation and what you describe. Better locks, housing the homeless, reducing the amount of junk we import, etc.

I remember as a kid trains had cabooses (a sign of more employees). But of course that has all been optimized away. I’m guessing the skeleton crew is completely unable to secure the train if they wanted to.

Edit: downvotes for saying that the US has handled the identified problem in the past? (Which was a slippery-slope comment, anyway.)

>but some people shoplift and society is falling apart?

So you are okay with people stealing from you, as long as they're poor?

>Let the market fix their broken supply chains

There is resistance in this thread to instating armed guards, stating that it's dystopian to enforce property laws.

Shoplifting is the act of stealing from a retailer, not an individual. Yes, I make a very big distinction between the two. I just don’t see why corporations in the US can get away with so much (shoplifting and wage theft are both estimated to cost the economy $40bln per year) and I’m supposed to feel bad someone is stealing from Amazon or Louis Vuitton? Doesn’t mean I’m “ok” with shoplifting, I simply feel it should be a civil matter like wage theft.

Railroads have always had their own police, so I’m not sure the reluctance. Retail/supply chain theft is a cat-and-mouse game… always had been, always will be. Step up enforcement, improve the locks, house the homeless and move on.

>Shoplifting is the act of stealing from a retailer, not an individual

No. You can shoplift from a small business or a family owned convenience store, which is essentially stealing from an individual. Those packages on the trains belonged to individuals btw.

Yes, and mom-and-pops commit wage theft, too. Shoplifting should be a civil matter.

> Those packages on the trains belonged to individuals btw.

And?

Where do you think the term "riding shotgun" comes from?

I think it comes from a stagecoach having a driver and a shotgun guard. That has nothing to do with retail theft; the stagecoach wasn't a store.

Yes, my argument is a little muddled by grouping retail and supply chain theft together. I definitely think supply chain theft is somehow more serious.

But grouping the two together is a result of the recent San Francisco story being mentioned in this thread. People here on HN are usually so critical of the media, but this LA train story and the San Fran shoplifting story were both treated as a symptom of some larger societal problem. And maybe they are! But that is not at all evident from the stories.

In my opinion, both symptoms are the result of a decades long brutal drive for absolute efficiency in both supply chains and retail stores. And of course organized criminals are going to take advantage of the fact that perhaps that "efficiency" went too far in cutting security.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com