[mlmarr]

Originally Posted by ThirdOfFive

Interesting thing happened this past Sunday. My wife and I were shopping at Wal-Mart just off 466. Because of the small parking lot and the glut of church-crowd shoppers we didn't park in the lot but on the side by the service bays and entrance. After we checked out, instead of going out the front doors and circling around to the service bays, we exited through the customer door by auto service. We had a cart full of stuff (in bags) and traveled through the store to the side entrance, exiting without anybody saying anything.

Lesson: we could have picked up a dozen other items on our way out and stuffed them into our bags, and nobody would have been the wiser.

I've had several conversations with Wal-Mart associates these past few weeks. One with a lady in electronics just this week revealed that she stopped a person with over $400 worth of stolen merchandise. When I asked what happened, her response was "probably nothing". Another time at another Wal-Mart I stopped to buy a flash drive. After the associate unlocked it and checked me out I commented that the store must be losing a lot of money to the shoplifters. He just smiled and said "Wal-Mart isn't losing a dime--YOU are!"

It got me thinking. If I could waltz out of the store the way I did, how many others, probably far more knowledgeable about the "art" of ripping off stores, are doing it too? Wal-mart is the undisputed leader when it comes to shoplifting targets but other stores are certainly not exempt. Retail stores have about a 3% profit margin and shoplifting must be cutting into that pretty well. But...if the stores' responses are merely to raise prices, along with the occasional shoplifting arrest hitting the papers...are they really motivated to do any more than that? We TV'ers are targets in many ways, and this is one of the more insidious, in my opinion.

Unless the stores do more to stop this, aren't we in effect subsidizing a criminal (petty, to be sure, but still criminal) enterprise? And what can be done to further motivate the stores to actually implement measures that REALLY work--and stop penalizing their customers for their inaction?

thank the current government ... for this nonsense