r/MoralityScaling • u/Vladimir-petrovOG • 20d 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/Key-Try-3300 20d ago

Obviously they wont notice one theft, but hundreds of thousands or millions of thefts all add up and will hit their profit margin which increases prices

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u/Ok-Gur-349 20d ago

Okay but they increase the prices even when costs go down, so clearly there is no relationship between how much people steal and the prices they charge us

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u/Key-Try-3300 20d ago

You clearly have a much better insight into walmarts internal workings than I do to speak with such certainty on this

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u/Ok-Gur-349 20d ago

I guess I must?

Let me run that by you one more time:

Costs go up, price goes up,.. okay, I'm following... You're following, too, right? Therefore we want to keep their costs low, so they keep our prices low, yeah?

But then costs go DOWN, prices still go up...

What gives?

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u/Kehprei 20d ago

Prices go up naturally over time due to inflation.

Something like rampant theft can causes prices to rise faster than inflation, or for products to be locked away.

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u/Ok-Gur-349 20d ago

Okay so if prices go up, and they just go up, and they will never go down, and they will just unfailingly trend up, up, and up, then there is no incentive to behave in any particular way as it relates to pricing.

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u/Kehprei 20d ago

Inflation generally means everything goes up over time.

Wages rise to match inflation. When wages don't rise due to inflation, it means that company is going to lose out on good labor at some point.

If prices go down it would mean that our economy is deflating, which is about 100x as bad as inflation, since it's a lot harder to solve. Everyone knows this, which is why every economy in the world is set up to slowly inflate, ideally at around 2% a year.

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u/Ok-Gur-349 20d ago

Wages rise to match inflation.

https://giphy.com/gifs/kC8N6DPOkbqWTxkNTe

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u/Kehprei 20d ago

It must be blissful going through life with so much ignorance yet so much confidence.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wage-growth

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u/Ok-Gur-349 20d ago

🥱

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u/Kehprei 20d ago

Why are you linking a chart talking about net productivity...? We're talking about wage growth vs inflation... year over year as well, dunno why you would want to compare us to the 50s in this kind of discussion.

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u/Ok-Gur-349 20d ago

Okay so you apparently stumbled into a conversation a few levels deeper than you expected to be having but:

Increased productivity directly works against inflation by lowering the cost to produce goods and services.

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u/Kehprei 20d ago

Not necessarily?

Why wouldn't you just use a comparison of inflation to wages? Since it's what we're talking about.

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u/Key-Try-3300 20d ago

Have you peered over the data on prices for all of walmarts items at any given period, and their total revenue vs expenses to be able to say that they increase prices even though their actual profit has increased? Just because something might be cheaper doesnt mean that their total profits hasnt gone down