Here are just a few things that these petty thieves don’t understand. The people who pay for the theft of these goods aren’t the CEOs or shareholders of these supermarkets. It’s the customers – the very people trying to make an honest living, feed their families, and get through the week without their grocery bill creeping up yet again. As I showed in a previous blog post (see here) supermarkets are actually a huge force of social good to consumers, not an enemy from whom one should feel entitled to steal. Not only do supermarkets help us shop in the most affordable and efficient way, they employ hundreds of thousands of people across the UK, they invest millions into local communities, and they donate huge quantities of food to charities and food banks every single week.
And to think that supermarkets are swimming in ludicrous profits is to express economic ignorance of the most absurd kind – most large corporations operate on tight margins (see my past blog posts on the nature of profit and margins), because profit totals are not the same as profit margins. These stores are not cartoon villains to be looted from by the latest puerile left wing buffoons - they are the backbone of the UK’s food supply chain that have huge operating costs. They make relatively small profits at the margin, and yet across the nation they keep customers fed, shelves stocked, prices competitive, and people employed.
So, when activists stroll in and help themselves to “free” food, they’re not helping to administer justice; they’re heaping injustice on the consumer, the checkout worker, the delivery driver, the hard working families doing their weekly shop, and the pensioner counting pennies – and ultimately, on food banks too. Every time these so-called activists fill their boxes and walk out, they’re not “helping the poor.” They’re making food more expensive for the very people they claim to care about. It’s economic illiteracy dressed up as moral heroism - performance activism designed to make the activists feel righteous while causing wider harm in society, just like all the similar groups that came before them.
Moreover, do these selfish brats really think that food banks wish to be associated with being on receipt of stolen goods? Food banks rely on trust, generosity, legality, good intentions, and partnership with retailers. If these activists want to help the poor, they should get a job, fundraise, volunteer at Food banks, give their own money to charities etc – things that actually require effort and good deeds, not narcissistic, virtue-signalling, selfish ones.
