Price signal opacity & third-party payors
Louisiana WalMart shoppers go feral when the food-stamp computer shuts down, stores become unable to verify whether any benefits are left on EBT cards, and one store decides to put its shoppers on the honor system for the duration. It was looting without guns.
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8 comments:
I am increasingly of the opinon, "let them starve", as harsh as that may be.
I'm not inclined to go that far, yet. I would ration, though.
Of course, that would require guards, with actual, you know, guns, to enforce.
Eric Hines
We don't know what percentage of people shopping in those moments elected to steal. In an odd form of "sharing" some apparently told others to come down quickly. We might hope that many took no more than was lawful.
But crowd example can be devastating to morality, and the prevailing cultural demonisation of corporations which have the networks of supply - especially Wal-Mart - likely undermined whatever basic morality folks started with.
The theft, the lack of shame, and the abandonment of the work to others are all troubling.
My somewhat Luddite reaction to this is that the problem would not have started if food-stamp recipients still got actual, paper food stamps. If my grocery store's link with my credit card company is off-line, I pay cash. If I could *only* buy food with my credit card then I'd probably freak if my grocery store told me it couldn't be verified right now and, no, we don't know when it will be working again. I wouldn't loot if I was put on the honor system but I would be really upset and angry and want to make someone pay for scaring me. Anger sometimes grows out of helplessness; so does greed.
[If this wasn't a comment, here would follow a lot of words about charity, earning rather than just getting, responsibility breeding dignity, the corrosive effect of having no agency in ones own life, etc.]
My more technologically oriented reaction is that it was awfully stupid of Xerox to take a system supporting shopping off-line on a Saturday. I'm sure Xerox was absolutely certain there was absolutely no possibility of a serious problem resulting from a "routine test" of backup systems. However, as anyone who has been within spitting distance of a computer system knows, those "routine tests" are always the ones that bite you.
Remember Chernobyl.
You can't put a group of people on the honor system if they have not been taught the meaning or concept of the word "honor".
I've been active in Scouting as an adult for some 21 years now. As part of the process for advancing a rank, the Scout has a "Scoutmaster conference", where the Scout and the Scoutmaster sit down and talk about his life both in and out of the Troop.
It is a habit of mine to ask the Scout to recite the first part of the Scout Oath. I stop him after "On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country...". Then I ask a question:
"What is your honor?"
Invariably the Scout fishes desperately for an answer. They have no idea, because I'm the first person to ever bring up the subject. Now, it may be a bit much to expect an 11-year old to have a cogent definition of honor. Fine, it's a teaching moment. What gets interesting is when I'm in an Eagle Board of Review talking to a 16-year-old young man who's been through the program and has said "On my honor ..." once a week for 6 years and HE doesn't have a cogent answer.
Honor is not taught in our public schools. It's not taught in many of our homes. It's certainly not taught in our entertainment. So putting people on their honor is a crapshoot at best these days.
AVI,
I believe that one could make a reasonably educated guess about the number of people who were actually stealing by the number of filled carts left in the aisles when the announcement that the system was back online came across.
Quite frankly, I hope that the security manager for those stores made note of every person who left a filled cart so that they can receive extra scrutiny from now on.
Free of charge, even!
What Ron said.
...one could make a reasonably educated guess about the number of people who were actually stealing by the number of filled carts left in the aisles when the announcement that the system was back online came across.
Walmart is heavily security camera-ed. They can get an even closer estimate from the number of filled carts leaving the store during the outage.
Remember Chernobyl.
And Apollo 12.
Eric Hines
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