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> In the post-apocalypse or some other lawless society perhaps > Detroit man steals 800 gallons > Detroit Jokes aside, it's common policy pretty much
by t-3 3y ago
> In the post-apocalypse or some other lawless society perhaps
> Detroit man steals 800 gallons
> Detroit
Jokes aside, it's common policy pretty much everywhere for cashiers and other employees who are not specifically security personnel to never confront shoplifters or other thieves, always comply with robbers, etc. Insurance covers material losses as long as reasonable precautions are taken.
- ibejoeb 3y agoDetroit has really come up in the past 5 years. I recommend folks visit and check it out. Motor City's downtown actually has decent public transit via bus and light rail, and it's very walkable* during the nice season. Lots of entertainment. * oh but watch out for bird/lime/lyft/uber scooters literally everywhere and everyone's drunk
- rainclouds 3y agoDetroit downtown is nice, the Lions win games, what alternate reality is this?
- red-iron-pine 3y agopendulum swings back it seems
- henvic 3y agoI'm really into driving and all, but I've been in Detroit a year ago and it sucked. The only good thing about it was the Henry Ford Museum and the fact that Canada is just across the border.
- gs17 3y agoYou probably don't know how it used to be (which is also very different from my grandfather's idea of "how it used to be"). I was there last year, but I was also there for 25 of the past 30 years and the change from when I was a kid is startling. "I recommend folks visit and check it out" is not something someone would have said about Detroit unironically for a long while.
- RandallBrown 3y agoThe Henry Ford Museum isn't in Detroit...
- pests 3y agoIt's metro detroit and less than 5 minutes from Detroit itself.
- rootsudo 3y agoI want to believe, but I also remember 2007-2014 $1 houses, GM bankrupcy and such - is it really different?
- ibejoeb 3y agoIt's different, and it's not like it's without its problems. Of course there are still depressed neighborhoods, but there are a ton of development projects going up, lots of new restaurants, bars, nightlife venues, and arts and sports programming. By "coming up" I mean on the upswing, and you can definitely see the difference from a few years back.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gitonup 3y agoDetroit hasn't, downtown has. Downtown has improved wildly since when even when I was growing up near there in the 80s/90s, but people don't realize how large Detroit is. It's nearly 140 square miles. Downtown is, charitably, 2sqmi, and that's including all the way up to Wayne State. The light rail is the People Mover loop downtown plus a trolley up Woodward, within that range. The theft mentioned in the article occurred at 8 Mile and Wyoming, which is a 20 minute highway drive from Campus Martius in no traffic. "Clean Downtown" that happened when the city hosted the super bowl and other related efforts have very lopsidedly focused on the downtown area.
- queuebert 3y agoExactly. That theft is only ~50 nano-Enrons. Not worth a life.
- FeteCommuniste 3y agoLove "Enron" as a unit of theft, haha. Did you just make that up?
- queuebert 3y agoYes. I'm in favor of comparing blue collar crime in units of white collar crime so that punishments are proportionate.
- SilasX 3y agoMaybe a nitpick, but I think it would be more accurate to say that it has, in recent years, become policy to not confront thieves, even verbally and non-violently because so many of them are now willing to escalate to lethal force on the most trivial of provocations, effectively giving them a heckler's veto[1] on any measure except locking them up or asking the police if they'll find time to arrest. I know in my grocery store training c. 1998 they definitely told us to give verbal warnings to thieves that we saw what they did, but now, even that much is dangerous. >Insurance covers material losses as long as reasonable precautions are taken. No one would get insurance to cover small, regular losses. And even so, insurance isn't some magic pot of gold that restores the losses that lead to closure, it just means the impact is absorbed over everyone. It's still there. [1] Recent discussion of the concept here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37688954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37688954
- jghn 3y agoWhen I worked at a grocery store in the early 90s we were instructed to not intervene. So the trend isn’t as linear as you propose
- chupasaurus 3y agoThere's a video [0] back from 1984 or 1985 with a small up-and-coming band Metallica stealing from a store. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnPXn19Li6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnPXn19Li6A
- bagels 3y agoNapster: never forget
- SoftTalker 3y ago"insurance" for small losses == higher prices for everyone. Some amount of "shrinkage" whether due to shoplifting, employee theft, or unknown reasons is built into the economics of a retail store.
- CPLX 3y agoWhere did this insurance myth come from? Why do people think there's some kind of insurance that has anything to do with people shoplifting from a standard retail store? Like that's not a thing. There's insurance for catastrophic losses and out of the ordinary stuff but there's not an insurance policy that's paying for people stealing from gas pumps, or grabbing a TV from an electronic store and running out the door.
- trimethylpurine 3y agoOf course it's covered. You can insure anything (with very few exceptions protected by law for obvious reasons). An individual case is likely not worth claiming when considering the deductible. 800 gallons might be. But, it can definitely be covered.
- CPLX 3y agoYou actually can’t insure everything. And you definitely can’t insure everything for less than the cost of just suffering the loss. There’s no viable or common policies that cover run of the mill retail shrinkage. It’s not a thing. Stores just have to eat it. Before you argue this point try to consider how such a policy could possibly work. You just total up what you think shoplifting is costing and tell the insurance company and they give you money? What business model is going on there exactly? How does the overall market work, where does the money come from that is reimbursing you for those losses?
- trimethylpurine 3y agoRisk is calculated on a per incident basis. Deductibles prevent frivolous claims. It's pretty simple really. There's no need to downvote just because you don't understand something. That's just petty.
- CPLX 3y agoYou can’t insure repeated ordinary course of business losses that you have almost total control over and are a core part of your business function. You didn’t answer my question because it’s impossible to come up with a reasonable answer. In insurance the cost of losses is borne by people who did not suffer loss. So the cost of your car crash is borne by someone who didn’t have a crash. But they’re OK with it because they don’t know if and when it’ll happen to them. And an accident is a major loss, so they’d rather pay a little every month to avoid the uncertainty. But shoplifting is a week in and week out thing. If you have a shoplifting policy that’s reliably more expensive than the shoplifting why would you keep it? You wouldn’t because it’s not a thing. You can insure for major losses, robberies and burglaries and so on. But no retail stores can’t and don’t insure for things like someone driving off with a tank of gas, or pocketing an iPad, or a steak, or something. It’s not an insurable risk.
- qingcharles 3y agoI personally know of an incident where Walmart shelf stacker chased shoplifter of $5 hat out of store and got into a tangle with the getaway driver's car and they ended up in a coma for three months which apparently cost Walmart almost $2m in medical bills.
- doubled112 3y agoBack when I was a gas station attendant, my manager made it very clear that if you're being robbed, the only correct answer was to offer them smokes and help loading or bagging. This was not Detroit, or even the USA. Think slightly North.