Why? What a waste

[govcampbell]

Job a Sears goes well, after transfer to in-store marketing. No pressure to make sales now, just filling shelves and pricing. Managers like me. But then, I work a hell of a lot harder than those idiot teenagers they're currently employing at the same hourly rate. Don't know if this makes me dumb or more mature.

The waste part is this: Yesterday, I got to work, and the store was crawling with mucky-mucks. You could cut the tension with a bloody knife. The Managers were all closed up in the office, no one in, no one out. People are taking statements. People are getting called into the office. The senior salesman is running the store, becuase no one's answering phones in the managers office. Finally, people start emerging.

That's when the cops showed up.

And hauled away more than half of the staff of shipping/receiving. Four kids, ranging in ages from 16-22 (he was the receiving manager) the charge? 82,000 worth of merchandise, smuggled out over the last several months.

These kids are going to jail now. They've ruined their lives. I don't know them that well, I'm new, but I just feel so sad about the whole waste of it all. The wasted potential, the wasted dreams. What's ahead of these kids now? Nothing.

It makes me sick.

Comments

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

The main reason these kids did it, I think, is because they don't think they'll get caught ... they think they're cleverer than everyone else ... or they just don't think. If they sat down and considered the risk factor - "if I get caught my life will be ruined" - then odds are they wouldn't have done it. But peer-group pressure and juvenile bravado probably didn't allow them to even consider "what if" scenarios - "nah, it won't happen to me, we won't get caught".

Sad thing is, of course, the second big reason not to do it - because it's *wrong*, it's theft, it's indirectly lowering the living standards of the community (by raising prices, etcetera) - probably wouldn't appear anywhere near as important to them as a "you're going to get caught!" warning.

The other interesting thing ... I've always thought it fascinating how membership of a group can allow one's perspective to drift, or amplify anti-social tendencies. Each of them on their own wouldn't have dared do this, probably (ignoring the fact that the logistics might have precluded a solo theft anyway). But as a gang, each one re-inforcing the others' criminal tendencies and keeping the foot flat on the accelerator - "Whaddya mean, we might get caught! Of course we won't! Sorry, silly me, you're right of course" - the lot of them would eventually drift further and further off the centre and never notice it, because they're measuring their behaviour only relative to each other; and they're all drifting together. I guess that's a subset, or stronger case, of the "but everyone else does it!" excuse to malfeasance.

[govcampbell.livejournal.com]

That's an intersting point. I wish we'd covered more group psychology in my survey class when I took it in college, but it was more focused on development. I knew some of these kids, only marginally, but they seemed like nice people at the time, so perhaps it was some kind of peer reinforcement. I would like to hope so, given the scale of the crime. We've gotten some of the merchandise back (TVs stolen for personal use, mainly), and we're having a hard time explaining to customers the sudden influx of "returned" merchandise.