Preface To Laws: Breaking The Law All The Time

This probably won't shock you, but everyone breaks the law all the time.  It's not just the petty shit, like running a red light, which apparently isn't even a law you can break in Lexington, since just last week I was sitting at an intersection & a n SUV zoomed through a red light right in front of a police car, & the officer inside didn't seem to notice, or to care.  No, people steal & cheat pretty much all the time.  I think it's actually part of our economy.

Not that I'm an economist or anything, & not that I have any more information than some (actually quite dated) anecdotes.  Come to think of it, all of these stories I am going to tell involve convenience stores, so maybe I should have said at the outset that everyone breaks the law all the time in convenience stores.  But I've seen it happen many times, even outside of convenience stores, & I am such a pessimist, that I'm convinced it happens pretty much all over the place, despite the industry.  Anyway, the Panama Papers seem to suggest that the very rich have made their habit of cheating into a damned art form.

So, three stories:

1) When I was a boy, my mother worked in a convenience store.  Not only would she let us (her family members) take anything they wanted for free (when the boss wasn't there) (this included junk food, comic books, candy, & sodas), which meant she was stealing from the place she worked, but she told me later that her boss, at the end of the day, would take one hundred dollars out of whatever money they made, & put it aside, & not claim it.  This basically meant he made $36,500 every year tax-free.  That's in 1970s dollars.  & sure, he pocketed it, but also maybe that helped pay for all the things his employees stole.  Because surely he knew they stole!

2) & you know what?  I have a sneaking suspicion he did know, because in 1989, I had a job at a Seven-Eleven in Austin, Texas, & I was told by the manager, whose last name was Bailey so everyone called him "Beetle" (true story), that he basically wrote off a hundred dollars a day of the store's earnings as a loss due to theft.  This wasn't about the employees - it was the company's policy to do so, just because it assumed that people were constantly stealing from the store.  I myself caught a lot of folks stealing, actually, since I worked the 11pm-7am shift.  That was when people tried to steal beer & very cheap wine.  But you've probably seen people shoplift before.  I see it at my local convenience store weekly, sometimes in front of employees, who often don't say or do anything about it.  As someone at Seven-Eleven once said, which is kind of a mantra for folks doing retail work, "They don't pay me enough to care."

3) Speaking of Seven-Eleven, Beetle also made sure I watched the Oak Farms vendors like a hawk.  Oak Farms was the dairy that supplied the store with the milk, ice cream, butter, etc.  It seemed strange to me that we were to be suspicious of a company which had a pretty exclusive relationship with our store, but I soon found out that many of these people would try to "short" the store (ie, give less than what they claimed on the orders) so they could take the leftovers to independent convenience stores & sell them for cash.  This was such a common practice that, although I never caught him cheating my store, the Oak Farms guy I worked with for my first couple of months was fired for theft abruptly during my time at the store.

Does this prove anything?  No.  Are there honest people?  Sure.  I feel less inclined to take advantage of such situations these days because I am able to afford stuff.  Recently, for example, at the self-check-out at Kroger, I missed a couple of things in my basket, & noticed them when I got to the car, & I went back inside to buy them.  (The person overseeing the self-check-out area didn't notice me leaving without paying for stuff in the basket, not did he notice me bring stuff from outside, run it through the self-check-out minutes after buying stuff, & leaving again.  Probably not paid enough to care.)  I wouldn't have done that when I was in college.  I would have felt a little guilty, but the cool feeling of naughtiness would have balanced the scales somewhat.  Also, I was poor.

But is it fair to take these personal narratives & somehow, by analogy, claim the entire country, if not the entire world, is like this?  Probably not, but as I said, I'm not an economist.  But if you, like me, have a sneaking suspicion that capitalism fundamentally depends (& encourages) on a certain level of dishonesty if not outright theft, then having these experiences in my memory banks has not suggested any more integrity-rich alternatives.