Fox Hosts Tell Us They've Never Worked Retail Without Telling Us They've Never Worked Retail
They want retail stores to arm employees in order to stop shoplifting.
Within the last few years or so, conservatives have been having themselves a good old fashioned moral panic about shoplifting . The appeal of it, for them, is clear — they get to whine about how "degenerate" society is becoming, they get to blame inflation on something other than corporate greed and they get to have sexy, sexy daydreams about vigilantism. And not just any old vigilantism, vigilantism in the service of capitalism. Like, the idea of someone losing their life in order to stop someone from stealing a tube of mascara from Walgreens is heroism in the first degree for these people, not a tragedy.
This week, the gang at Fox's The Five discussed a recent incident in which a supermarket worker was fired for filming shoplifters stealing a bunch of laundry detergent. Co-host Greg Gutfield suggested that workers should be armed and came up with a bizarre idea for stores to hire people to stand outside of their stores and steal stolen items back from the shoplifters — and even recommends it as an ideal after school job.
Transcript via Media Matters:
GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): If you have a supermarket or any kind of store, you have these guys that just hang out and they wait for the people to leave, then they take their stuff and they get, like, 10%.
CHARLES HURT (CO-HOST): You get, like, a posse.
GUTFELD: It's basically a product posse. And so they just hang out there, and then it's like -- let's say they take $500 worth of stuff, they'd get $50 if they take the stuff from them. It actually sounds like a lot of fun for kids for a summer job.
...
HURT: I actually love that idea. I think that it -- you'd want people to kind of know what they were doing. You'd want armed people to be doing it, and to do it.
GUTFELD: That's not my idea, but I love it.
HURT: But it is amazing that you have all of this concern about liability where it sorts of cuts against the employees. What about the liability for the employees? You're creating -- I think the legal term is "attractive nuisance" by having a store that doesn't enforce shoplifting, doesn't enforce this kind of theft. Aren't you endangering your employees? And why can't employees get together? I mean, I would think -- I think it's a Constitutional right you have, even if you're at work, to be able to be safe in your environment, to be able to protect yourself.
JEANINE PIRRO (CO-HOST): Defend yourself.
As a former retail worker ... how about no?
I'm sorry, but no one in retail is paid enough to have to be armed at work in order to fend off shoplifters . Hell, no one is paid enough to have to work at a store where their fellow sales associates are packing heat, because that could go very, very wrong. Even the people working in the women's shoe department at Nordstrom aren't making enough to put up with that, and they have a far better commission structure than the one Greg Gutfield is imagining here. How often does he think that people are running away with $500 worth of merchandise that this would be worth anyone's time?
It also would not be a great look to have a bunch of armed vigilantes hanging out outside looking menacing. Additionally, the store could be held liable if any of the nuts who signed up for that gig were hurt.
I have explained before that stores handle shoplifting a certain way for a reason. That "reason" is that they don't want to be sued — by employees, by their families, by those accused of shoplifting who may not actually have been shoplifting, by customers injured while someone was attempting to stop a theft in progress, or even by those shoplifting who were severely hurt or injured.
As unfair as it seems, an employee like that is a liability . I hate for anyone to get fired, but he acted rashly, he put himself in danger, and if he had been kept around, it would have set a really bad precedent for other workers. If another employee saw that what he did was okay, then they might then do that themselves and end up murdered.
The extremely unexciting fact of the matter is that the most effective way of preventing theft is customer service. People aren't going to shoplift while talking to a sales associate or even while a sales associate is in the same aisle stocking shelves.
I can't tell you how many places I have been to lately that are incredibly vulnerable to shoplifting. I worked in retail, so this is something I think about when I go places. It's easy to shoplift with self-checkout in a lot of places, it's easy to shoplift when there are barely any employees around, it's easy to shoplift when there are no dressing room attendants there to ensure that everything that goes into a dressing room comes out again. There is no need for anyone to go full cowboy or for retail workers to be armed, when a far saner solution to this problem would be to just get a dressing room attendant and have human cashiers. Have sales associates on the floor, spacing hangers and folding jeans and talking to people. Have a greeter there to say hello and goodbye. This is all loss prevention 101.
But these stores, you see, they have made a calculated decision. They have decided that it would be less expensive for them to tolerate shoplifting than it would be to hire more people at a fair wage. They have decided that the money they are saving from self-checkout, from not hiring a dressing room attendant, from not hiring more people in general is worth whatever it is they are losing from shoplifting. They do not deserve our pity. Hell, they don't even Greg Gutfeld's fantasy "product posses."
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