A Nation of Petty Thieves

Are you a petty thief? Do you pilfer pens, paper clips, tape, and other office supplies from where you work? If so, you are not alone. American businesses spend millions replacing pilfered office supplies. Any one act alone does not amount to very much, but when multiplied by thousands, the costs accelerate dramatically.

Petty thievery is not limited to office supplies. Department stores have had to adopt desperate tactics to combat pilfering. Why do you think we have to put up with those hard to open molded plastic wrapped items? People will steal anything not nailed down. Thieves find that wearing new clothes underneath the clothes that they wore going into a department store a way to get clothes without paying for them. Non-paying customers discard their old shoes in the aisles of the shoe section and simply wear the new ones out of the store.

People who allow their children to rummage through the toy department to play with and destroy the toys on display represent another form of pilfering. Purchasing an item just for a one-time use and then returning it for a full refund after using the item is pilfering.

There are those who will open boxes, take some of the contents out of the box, and leave the now incomplete package on the shelf. Grocery stores have resorted to giving free snacks in hopes of selling a product to combat the compulsive snackers as they wander through the store.

Anytime a person acquires the property of another without permission or paying for it is stealing. Pilfering is just a nicer way of describing stealing. The word pilfer has connotations of something that is no big deal such as taking cookies out of the cookie jar without permission. But truthfully, the amount of petty thievery that takes place in this country is shameful.

RFID tags are beginning to gain inroads to combat the stealing out of the stores. But that is just an added expense to the item. The extra packaging surrounding those small items adds expense to the items. The people that wind up paying for the stealing epidemic are the legitimate customers. Yes we the customer underwrites the measures taken to combat the effects of thievery and in effect underwrite thievery itself.

So the next time you acquire a tune for your iPod that you have not paid for, think about what you are doing. Digital rights abuse by the public only serves to condition us to stealing. Over pricing merchandise is for another blog. Just remember that whenever you steal, no matter how small the item cost us all in the end.

Cheers,

-Robert-