Cool pro-tip that sometimes works to get around the WSJ paywall, especially if you use DDG. Search for the title of the WSJ article and put “msn” after.
It will sometimes send you to Bing’s google Amp-like (ugh, I know) MSN news site where there is no paywall.
Also, remember that paid sick leave is different from paid vacation. In many states, unused paid vacation must be paid upon termination, many times regardless of the reason for the termination. Unfortunately, my state is absolute trash and does not provide any protections for workers’ rights or hold employers accountable for a damn thing. Hope this helps someone else though.
They didn’t lose anyone, its only been out for a short time. With the recent changes at twitter breaking all sorts of long time features Threads is poised to be its replacement.
What none of these articles seem to want to highlight is that this is completely normal retention behaviour. 50% week 1 retention isn't excellent by any stretch of the imagination, but it's well, well within the span of what's normal.
Yeah, this "Omg Facetrash lost all their users, they have such a dead platform lol" is stupid. I dislike Meta, but it's a new social media, of course not every single user who checks it out will stay, that's how it is for all new social medias, video games, anything
For those who do not know, in Exodus, Moses gets pissed off, smashes the tablets people today call the Ten Commandments, goes back up the mountain and Yaweh has him carve new ones with different laws on them. Those laws are the only laws called “Ten Commandments” in the Bible.
They include:
Three times a year all your men are to appear before the Sovereign Lord, the God of Israel. [Good luck with that]
Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast
“Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.
As the end of the chapter says:
Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.
“The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock, whether from herd or flock. 20 Redeem the firstborn donkey with a lamb, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck. Redeem all your firstborn sons.
Maybe my vote could have been 2/3 of a white vote? And we could negotiate with women. Maybe they could just tell us who to vote for but not actually do any voting and we could then have a family vote?
They are talking about organized retail theft. Individuals stealing still could make up a large amount of loss. Article doesn’t seem clear to me on that point.
They literally closed those stores without actual theft issues. You think they’re gonna reopen them now that they’ve admitted they were lying? Of course not. Sounds like imaginary theft has a ReAl aNd MeSUrAbLe impact on my community too. Fuck 'em.
I never commented about Target closing or reopening stores. My comment was relating to insurance not just being free money that covers bad stuff happening. There’s also such a thing as being uninsurable.
I’m all for bashing corporate greed but claiming theft isn’t a big deal because they have insurance is a bad take.
Let’s take a step back from this pointless argument. Shrink rates have been between 1-2% for arguably forever. Retailers currently are aghast that their shrink losses went from $90 billion to $120 billion! Yikes! That sounds like a big increase!
Yet, that shrink percentage has not significantly increased. It’s been around 1.5% for a few years now. Doesn’t that make you wonder though? If the percentage of shrink loss isn’t increasing, how are the losses increasing 33%? And even more perplexing is, how are these companies posting record profits? Quarter after quarter their profits are increasing as much as 6% even with these record breaking shrinkage losses.
It’s almost as if they have taken advantage of the publics attention of COVID era inflation, and price gouged the retail market. It’s like they priced their products 33% higher than they were, in order to make record profits, and those higher prices can easily be conflated into record shrinkage losses.
Weird. I’m sure that can’t be what’s happening though. My always friendly Walmart has always been set on giving me the cheapest prices possible. They couldn’t be trying to change the narrative to make it seem like customers are thieves. They love their customers, and would never patronize them for something as greedily evil as a drop in their revenue bucket.
Why are so stores spending so much money and labor redoing stores to add locked shelving display units for basic goods?
The cost of the shelving and maintenance increases, and the required labor increases because every customer will need an employee to unlock the displays every time they need an item like video games in the 90s.
Stores don’t want to lock up toothpaste and bottle neck their sales but they’re doing it en masse, why is that?
If you walk into basically any CVS in America, you’ll notice the number of employees working the floor is inversely proportional to the amount of merchandise locked behind plastic cases. It’s far more cost efficient for the corporation to just pay fewer employees and lock up as much of the high-margin merch as possible.
Without a doubt, they lose sales because of this tactic, but they also have less overhead and almost nonexistent theft. I don’t think this trend came as a result of high levels of shoplifting, it was just the inevitable outcome of corporate cost-cutting practices. The companies won’t hesitate to blame these decisions on rising levels of theft and organized crime, though, as if the act of shoplifting isn’t as old as commerce itself. It’s not a new problem, it’s just a new convenient solution that saves the retail giants a ton of money.
Stores like target will charge whatever they can, do you think target is saying well we could charge more but we won’t to be nice but now that shit is getting stolen we’re going to increases prices to make up for it.
It’s factored into profits but that doesn’t mean it’s going to change the price. The reason cost is a factor is because competitors can’t charge lower than what it costs for the product. But when you have online as a competitor then things like cost of stolen items have less of an impact because you need to compete with them or other chains who have figured out how to prevent theft at a cheaper cost than you.
Wait are you telling me insurance is a scam because if you ever need to use it it’ll cost more money? That’s crazy dude, I feel so awful for the massive multimillion dollar companies that are forced to pay for it…
Why wouldn’t I steal petty shit from a large chain store like Walmart? They stole living wages from workers in many communities, they stole the diversity of local businesses that used to be in many communities, most importantly they steal from every single one of us by not paying a genuinely fair share back to the society they profit off of in terms of taxes. Sorry, not gonna feel bad for stealing some toothpaste, especially when it is a store that fired all the cashiers and has one person frantically running around helping people in a sea of obnoxious self checkout machines that all blare the same audio loop out over and over and over again.
At first they thought at first it was greedflation, that it was the 1% siphoning off all the profits from the economy to shareholders, they thought it was massive corporations hedging families out of the housing market, austerity and lack of social safety net… but the whole time it was ME stealing toothpaste from walmart, slowly undercutting the heart of america. They didn’t realize until it was too late, I had become too powerful. I have a whole bathroom full of stolen toothpaste tubes and I am ready.
It literally doesn’t, that is the whole point of this discussion? I am telling you, there is zero mathematical/economic evidence that shoplifting even registers as a problem worth investing time and energy into for massive corporations. They do invest time and energy, but it is because the narrative is useful to them. That is what this is about, it is about a story. Not economics, not math, not hard cold reality, it is about a narrative that emotionally engages you and gets you upset. It is about a story that rationalizes the world for you in a way that directs your anxiety and fear. There is zero scientific grounding in your beliefs about shoplifting, it might as well be a spiritual or religious belief you hold and just the way people will try to take advantage of you by preying upon your spiritual beliefs, so will corporations and politicians try to take advantage of you by preying upon your belief that shoplifting actually matters to economic behemoths that shape and undermine our entire economy.
Literally THE ENTIRE point of being a massive chain is that random noise like shoplifting disappears into the overwhelming roar of economies of scale.
Well, ease of regulatory capture is another bonus but that just strengthens my argument…
Stores invest millions in anti-theft security, in technical, logistical, and physical ways. All of those things cost money.
You are making a clear logical fallacy by acting like this proves shoplifting must actually significantly impact their bottom line. Further there is abundant evidence that corporations invest massive amounts of money into things that don’t actually help them economically. Don’t tell me you also believe the narrative that markets are magically always rational??
You don’t seem to be able to understand this isn’t about numbers, it is about narratives.
You are making a clear logical fallacy by acting like this proves shoplifting m
If they invest the money, the money is spent, thus affecting the bottom line
Not sure why you’re trying to argue this so hard, but there is no percent chance you will be correct here. Costs are indeed passed forward onto customers.
Further there is abundant evidence that corporations invest massive amounts of money into things that don’t actually help them economically.
The efficacy is completely irrelevant. What’s relevant is the costs induced. You are correct that people are irrational. That doesn’t change the fact that the irrationality costs them money, which they make back via pricing.
Also I assure you that Wal-Mart has a very large team whose only goal is to measure the cost/benefit analysis of decisions like these - and those teams also cost money. Even the concept existing at all raises prices.
If they invest the money, the money is spent, thus affecting the bottom line
Not sure why you’re trying to argue this so hard, but there is no percent chance you will be correct here. Costs are indeed passed forward onto customers.
ahahahaha so now you are blaming me for the irrational economic behavior of corporations? I feel so powerful now, thank you.
“Companies say these incidents have led to a spike in merchandise losses, known as shrink. The metric incorporates inventory losses caused by external theft, including organized retail crime, employee theft, human errors, vendor fraud, damaged or mismarked items and other losses.
But the retail industry’s own figures on shrink cast doubt on their claim that the problem is ballooning. Researchers say retailers may be blaming theft for losses when they don’t actually know the cause.
Shrink is an “issue where you’ve got a problem, but there’s no way to know exactly where the losses are coming from,” said Richard Hollinger, a retired professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Florida, who studies retail losses and launched the retail industry’s first annual security survey in the early 1990s.
According to the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) annual survey of around 60 retail member companies, shrink is a “rapidly ballooning issue.” In 2021, retail shrink hit $94.5 billion, up only 4% from 2020 but a 53% jump from 2019.
But, in fact, the average shrink rate as a percentage of sales dropped to 1.4% in 2021 from 1.6% in 2020, according to the latest NRF survey. That number has hovered around 1.4% for more than a decade.“
Ok ok so the concern for shoplifting from Random’s doesn’t even warrant tracking as a separate stat (it is no more important than workers occasionally misplacing boxes in the supply chain??), we are talking about <1% of sales. Sorry not going to lose sleep over that?
How about those organized shoplifting sprees that we keep hearing about? What does the national Retail Foundation, the group that is going to be the most concerned about this out of any?
“The NRF estimates that organized retail crime costs companies an average of just 7 cents for every $100 in sales.”
I mean as you yourself noted they are already locking up stupid shit like toothpaste. Nobody is fuckn stealing enough toothpaste to effect profits. Hell I’m not sure who would even bother stealing toothpaste, it’s not exactly expensive. Saving yourself like a buck at most by not buying the cheap (just as effective) stuff.
And I’m not advocating for theft sheesh. I just think it’s funny that the oh so wonderfully for profit insurance companies fuck over retailers too. I was trying to comment about how insurance is maybe kind of a scam…
I’ll also note that there isn’t actually a widespread theft problem. Stores aren’t locking up toothpaste because people are stealing it more than they used to. There were a few places, notably New York which did some really stupid shit with petty crime essentially just publicly saying they weren’t gonna deal with it that caused a lot of problems but by and large toothpaste isn’t locked up because people are stealing it. The company is just a dick
It’s not that the toothpaste itself is the high theft item, it’s just easier to lock the whole shelf rather than specific items. Notably items like Razor blades have crazy high theft rates and are usually near the toothpaste, causing them both to be locked up.
Check out some metropolitan areas for a preview of what’s coming to a store near you. Denver has been locking stuff up for years already.
That type of knee jerk conjecture is really weak. The data collected on shrinkage, as noted in the linked Reuter’s article, is noisy. You can’t differentiate lose due to theft or shipping mistakes or cliericsl error.
More importantly, and not mentioned directly in the boingboing article, was the cited number of rising organized theft was based upon an analyst from a security firm. The report was created in partnership with that firm. With the recent redaction, there is no mention of that firm.
What kind of company doesn’t insure against sickness of their employees? When I mentioned I was sick a lot, my boss at the time laughed and told me the company gets an insurance payment if I’m out, so not to worry. Fyi, I’m in Europe.
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