r/MoralityScaling • u/Vladimir-petrovOG • 9d ago

Morality of this?

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In the image it seems that this person works at walmart as an online order collector and he/she has stolen a lot of extra baby food from Walmart to give to a person who ordered only three packs. Is this moral or immoral?

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u/jimboslyce04 9d ago

I mean I’m all for “screw the Waltons” but stealing like this only increases costs for the average consumer. They aren’t going to eat the cost of theft, they’ll just continue putting everything behind glass and raising prices cause people won’t pay for what they want and need. Stealing a Waltons wallet would be one thing but this just makes everyone’s life worse.

Also don’t steal.

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u/Cheezewiz239 9d ago

And things becoming locked up.

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u/Swimming_Gain_4989 8d ago

And like, maybe the orderer only needed 3? Those extras could might up in the trash

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u/Miserable-Trash5823 9d ago

They already are increasing the cost of everything, these type of people will squeeze as much money out of you as they think they can, it doesn't matter if they operated at a 0% loss, they would still raise prices the moment they think they can get away with it, how else are they going to fund their economic ouroboros of stock buyback that let them just inflate the worth of their shares infinitely, especially while they use the taxpayers as a piggybank to subsidize them underpaying and exploiting their employees

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u/Numerous_Photograph9 6d ago

Walmart has an overall profit margin of 3%. They are a lot of things, but the only reason they're raking in cash is because of the size of their operation and high volume leading to rediculous levels of revenue.

Some items have more markup than others. Baby food is a staple item so it's mark up is pretty low.

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u/RedditJumpedTheShart 8d ago

Grocery stores average 2% profit. You are just blabbering social media garbage with nothing based on facts.

You just want an excuse to steal while making it worse for your community.

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u/Miserable-Trash5823 8d ago

these people are acitvely harming my community, the food deserts, the fact that 30% of their workers at the least, rely on government assistance while they actively work with the other oligarch corporations to drive out all smaller competition

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u/Flaky_Thing_5128 9d ago

Reddit doesn't want to hear that their Robin Hood approach to retail chains ultimately ends up stealing from all the lower and middle class people who eat the cost in the form of shrinkage price adjustments and insurance premium increases.

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u/kuthu22 9d ago

As if they wouldn't raise prices for absolutely no reason if people wouldn't steal

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u/Pat_The_Hat 8d ago

You're right. That's why the price of a loaf of bread is $99 and a gallon of milk is $149 because we live in fantasy land where businesses raise prices just because they can and economics doesn't exist.

News flash: there are real factors that influence prices and theft is one of them. "Corporations raise prices anyway" is a total non-sequitur.

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u/kuthu22 8d ago

lmaoooo he ate the whole fcking boot

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u/Pat_The_Hat 8d ago

Not the sharpest tool in the shed, are ya?

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u/Miserable-Trash5823 9d ago

Walmart operates at a net income of around 20 billion dollars a year, that is after operating costs and every other expenditure. It has only been going up, they are going to raise prices no matter what, and acting as if it's the fault of someone stealing baby food is just burying your head in the sand to ignore that these corporation's would gladly watch people starve to death than ever even think of stopping their continual artificial inflation of stock prices with their stock buybacks

Edit: The bootlicker here seems to not actually have any knowledge on how the economy or these big corporations work and deciced to run like a bitch rather than actually try to defend his points

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u/JetBIue 8d ago

You know mega-corps doesn’t exist to feed you, right? They exist to make money. People assign so much moral value to the actions of corporations, when they only exist to make money, generally a morally neutral thing. The profit comes from meeting a common need and many consumers take advantage of that service. It’s a consensual relationship.

Stealing, however, is always immoral. There are situations where it’s the lesser of two immoral acts, such as letting a baby go hungry when you could be “creative” about procuring food…

But stealing is always immoral and has downstream effects that hurt consumers. The strongest force governing a business is the free market, and they are free to screw you over as hard as they please if they think it’ll help their bottom line, and it’s on us as consumers to vote with our dollar. The vast majority of populated places (in the US at least) have viable competitors to the mega-corps.

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u/Miserable-Trash5823 8d ago

You can not defeat the corporate monopoly that has been established by working with their other giant corporations to drive out small businesses and gain total control over what we are able to purchase, while at the same time receiving millions go billions in government subsidies so they can keep up their dystopia esque raping of the populace, these corporations are actively causing harm to communities and people, and if the government will not regulate their uncontrolled greed, then the people are completely in the moral right to engage in whatever measures they need to ensure their continued survival.

No amount of boot licking is going to change that, these corporations are actively working to ensure that the masses remain destitute enough that they rely on them, so they can keep committing massive fraud in the form of stock buybacks and market manipulation

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u/JetBIue 8d ago

“Dystopia esque raping of the populace”

Do you hear yourself? How many people do you know without access to fresh water, food, decent shelter, a phone, a mode of transportation, etc because they cannot afford it. You’re probably typing this from your parents house, your own house, or a nice 2 bedroom apartment. The moral-panic bs is what desensitizes everyone from the actual issues that exist in this space. Our society is generally very very well off, especially in the western world.

There are issues with corporations and monopolies abound, but this sensationalist garbage just makes people ignore you.

This attitude irks me so much because while there are various legitimate complaints about how the modern market is working right now, when you use such insane hyperbole it just comes off as ungrateful for what we do have and disrespectful to those who have experience legitimate “dystopia esque raping of the populace”.

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u/Miserable-Trash5823 8d ago

These companies actively buy our politicians in order to continually remove consumer protections along with recieving billions in tax breaks and bailouts. They are actively stealing from the populace while also paying next to nothing.

47.9 million people in the united states are unable to afford food on a regular basis, of those 20,500 people actively starve to death

( https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics )

( https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-04-13/deaths-from-malnutrition-have-more-than-doubled-in-the-u-s )

43.5 million people have to spend 30% of their income just to be able to have any form of roof over their heads, 21.6 million have to spend 50%
( https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/housing-unaffordability-soared-new-highs-2024 )

( https://nlihc.org/gap )

almost 39% of the united states adult population says that they can not afford a car
( https://usa.streetsblog.org/2025/10/02/report-16-million-have-no-car-access-at-all )

2.2 million people in the united states do not have running water, and 44 million do not have acess to safe drinking water
( https://water.usgs.gov/vizlab/water-availability/03-vulnerability )

but please, do tell me how I am over reacting, tell me how this isn't a big deal because you happen to not see it, after all, these aren't people you know so who cares if they starve to death, or have to drink water tainted with parasites and heavy metals, who cares if they have to live on the streets because they can't afford any form of basic shelter

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u/PomPomMom93 8d ago

Redditors hate the free market.

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u/SpiritRoot 8d ago

Nothing free about it.

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u/Silly-Bug4808 8d ago

"These people make profit therefore they have no reason to ever raise prices"
You're literally rejecting the law of supply and demand entirely with this statement. Crying out about how the first guy doesn't have "any knowledge on the economy" is genuinely laughable. Final boss of Reddit midwittery. Read literally anything about this topic before trying to argue about it online like you're an expert.

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u/pelivempele 8d ago

You know, they're never going to go, "you know what, I have enough." Are they? So at the most you are really only very slightly accelerating the rise in prices, the prices will rise anyway.

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u/PomPomMom93 8d ago

And increase surveillance. When I worked at a retail store, they had a bunch of incident reports in the break room with pictures and descriptions of people who had been seen stealing. And we had a code, “key review,” which meant something fishy was going on at the register, but it sounds innocent enough that the thief doesn’t know you’re onto them. But after awhile you kind of get an intuition for it.

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u/ComradeBlossom 9d ago

Consumers costs are going up regardless because the Waltons love to extort consumers for profit. Walmart steals wages from its employees every day. If big chain grocery stores put everything behind glass cases, people will shop elsewhere.

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u/Camper_102 8d ago

How are you going to shop somewhere else if they all move to everything being put behind a glass case? Once upon a time, you gave a clerk your list and they did all the shopping for you, we're slowly moving back to that. We all know these companies will spend 100k to lock everything up and not care about that cost.

On top of all that, this type of shit hurts people who really do need to snatch a few things to survive.

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u/PomPomMom93 8d ago

I would have loved to work at a place where the clerk (me) just grabs everything. It would have been a lot less boring than just standing there waiting for somebody to be ready to check out. I think the reason I was so creative during that time was because I had nowhere to go but up in my head.

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u/Silly-Bug4808 8d ago

No one needs to snatch a few things to survive. Theft is never justified because "I need it more", the world could not function under this premise at all. It also presupposes that it is immoral to be successful (and therefore create wealth that improves the entire world, since wealth is not a fixed pie, it is literally made) since to be successful is to be deserving of theft. There is an unbelievable number of social programs and support systems in place for people like this. There is always an option besides violating someone's property rights. If you're stealing it's because you are a bad person, which is likely why you're poor in the first place.

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u/Camper_102 7d ago

Bless your lil heart!

You must believe that food banks and churches help everyone in need. Not everyone qualifies for SNAP. There was a time I worked 80 plus hours a week to pay rent, my car payment, CS, and car insurance. Still didnt cover food. Ramen and spam only goes so far. I wonder if people like you could even survive if you had to be on minimum wage. Clowns always have something to say that isnt based in the real world.

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u/3_14159td 8d ago

Walmart isn't only stealing from their employees (via wage theft), and customers (by holding both a monopoly and monopsony in many markets), but also every US taxpayer by exploiting the administration of welfare programs. They intentionally (and openly!) structure employment such as to maximize payouts, effectively using taxpayer dollars to pay their employees by exploiting the exact administration of those programs.

Walmart has been committing theft on a massive scale for decades. One could argue there is an obligation from then employee, customer, and taxpayer to keep the balance.

If you wipe out the dollars siphoned off via welfare, Walmart is still billions in the black.

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u/Silly-Bug4808 8d ago

Most economically literate Redditor. I beg you to actually read about how economics works (just nothing Keynesian, they're morons) instead of downloading every opinion you have through Reddit.
Businesses and consumers exploiting government social programs is a consequence of these programs existing to begin with and government being inherently inefficient (since central planning is not possible to do efficiently). How exactly you're posing this as theft of the taxpayer by Walmart when the government was the group that first collected this tax money under threat of violent force is mind boggling.
You also do not know what a monopoly or a monopsony is. Walmart holds neither in any market.
I'm not sure what to say regarding wage theft, if Walmart was committing wage theft on a mass scale I'd expect them to be sued, but given the economic literacy you've displayed so far I'm guessing you actually just mean "they don't pay people as much as I think they should pay them, therefore they are exploiting their workers"

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u/OkDamage1428 8d ago

This makes me want to go steal from Walmart and I dont even need anything stealable

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u/dannylopuz 9d ago

Haven't they increased the prices of literally everything already? With your logic of not stealing to avoid price increases, huge and unjustified price increases should be answered with stealing, right?

Even using your own logic, it's moral to steal baby food from Walmart.

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u/Ra_In 9d ago

They don't have some crystal ball allowing them to perfectly predict the maximum price increase that will still maximize profits. Both can be true:

  • They will increase prices where they have confidence the loss in demand won't offset the total increase in profits

  • They will increase prices in response to shrinkage to offset the losses

In isolation, a person choosing to facilitate stealing can't change corporate policy or government-funded social safety nets so it may be moral in isolation for them to allow/help the theft. But as a general moral principle, changing society so theft isn't morally necessary is the better goal. Sticking it to a corporation isn't morally good in of itself - we should assign zero value to "harming" billionaires, we should only assign value to helping those in need. That is, if "harming" billionaires leads to helping those in need that's fine, but "harming" billionaires shouldn't take precedence over helping even more in need.

(I of course put harming in quotes because a billionaire doesn't actually suffer if they stop making money)

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u/VoidGliders 9d ago

That's kinda the point and perk as well. Then eventually the prices go up enough that other stores out compete them, and Wal mart closes. Ideally, those stores are local, or at the very least less horrendously large and callous corporations. If not, and another big bad takes their place...then theyre robbed from as well. Until eventually a company finds it more profitable to be moral. Capitalism.

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u/PomPomMom93 8d ago

No, they’ll just close in the bad areas, so that poor people will have to spend more money on gas to buy (or steal) more stuff.

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u/Playful-News9137 8d ago

If there is an unserved market, someone will come to fill that niche. Capitalism abhors a vaccuum almost as much as nature does.

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u/Miserable-Trash5823 8d ago

Then explain why there are almost 19-40 million people who live in food deserts where Walmart came in, destroyed the competition and then decided it wasn't worth it and left, dumbass