I think I wasn’t clear, I’m not defending this guard and have no sympathy for him. What he did was utterly wrong and was 100% his own cold-blooded decision. I was saying, we all have impulses, including bad impulses, and as adults we control those bad impulses and don’t act on them. That’s normal. You can’t turn off your bad impulses but you can choose to not act on them. And this guard… well, he lost it. No sympathy from me. He doesn’t even have mitigating factors in this - it was completely cold blooded. He could have just let it go, he was never in danger. As I said, he made not just one but two very bad decisions: following them out, and then reacting in anger to being pepper sprayed.
I will say though, why does Walgreens even have armed guards? There’s almost no situation in which it’s the right decision for them to use a gun. Really the only possible situation where they should use a firearm is if someone is in there taking hostages or an active shooter - and those are ultra-rare situations which these guards simply do not have the skills or training to handle. So why even have them? They are only there for intimidation. That’s an inherently bad plan.
For better or for worse, the future of retail is going to be designed by Amazon and will be these kind of automated stores that will be inherently resistant to shoplifting. You’ll need a membership or valid credit card to get in the door.
Edit: and yes, I was engaging in armchair psychology.
Hopefully this is something that will come out in the inevitable wrongful death litigation. I certainly wouldn’t put it past this guy to have just decided to have his day made for his own indefensible personal reasons; but I’d be a lot more concerned in the general case if it turns out that “seriously, it’s not worth fighting with shoplifters” is one of those things that they say in training because Legal says that’s the liability-minimizing position; but then there’s a steady drumbeat of yelling at people about shrinkage numbers in a way that implies but does not state(especially not in writing or on tape) an obligation to do something about them, belittling employees who actually follow procedure for just standing by, etc. As you note, there are plenty of ways to imply that what the employee handbook says is policy and all; but Team Players know, off the record, how certain things actually work.
I certainly don’t want to minimize this case; but I’d be a lot more concerned if this is a particularly bad outcome of a plausible-deniability “actually do go after shoplifters” messaging campaign than if it is just a particularly bad outcome courtesy of an atypically bad person.
I will say when I worked at Walmart, not confronting shoplifters seemed to be both the de jure and de facto policy. The closest I ever came to having to deal with it wasn’t actually shoplifting. My first year, the Black Friday sale started at 4 am. The store, however, was open 24/7. The sale items and displays were put out about midnight, and the managers assigned several of us to “guard” the sale merchandise and tell any shoppers who tried to put any of those items in their cart that those items weren’t available until 4 am. After two unsuccessful attempts at telling shoppers they couldn’t have those items yet, and receiving looks that could kill from them, I just noped right out of that assignment. I decided, they can fire me if they want, but I’m not paid enough to get into a fight over merchandise. They did not fire me. That whole night was such a clusterfuck. God, I’m glad I don’t work in that hell hole anymore.
Well I dunno about that. Who’s to say the next bad actor won’t have mace, or worse? There’s nothing in a Walgreens that’s worth getting into a confrontation with a bad actor over.
The obvious solution is to not have customers in the store at all - just have them order off a menu and prepay at a kiosk, then pick up the purchase at a (well-secured) window.
Either that, or just Amazon for everything. Depressing, but probably the most likely.
Maybe figure out ways to deal with entrenched poverty, such as ending poverty-wage jobs such as those found at wal-greens? Why is ensuring that massive corporations pay their employees living wages wrong? Aren’t the working class the primary patrons of places like wal-greens?
Why are corporations more worthy of our sympathy than pregnant women who shoplift and get shot for it? At what point is human life worth more than corporate profits?
I mean, the most obvious solution is not to have weapons everywhere ready to turn a few seconds of confrontation or a moment of some guy being a dick into a potential morgue visit for whoever happens to be around. Like every other country that is not in a state of total collapse, which all manage to let people into stores just fine. But of course America has to treat that as impossible, because everyone needs the freedom to randomly have their life taken away.
TFG talking to at the NRA convention, about, for some reason, young people shoplifting.
Apparently, though, if someone commits a crime such as grabbing your genitals or defrauding you through an imaginary “University”, or not paying taxes, or not paying carpenters, electricians, plumbers, carpenter installers, window installers, attorneys; in those cases gunplay is not a recommended solution.
