Greed

Over the past weekend at a WalMart in Louisana patrons who utilized EBT cards for the SNAP (food stamp program) noted their cards showed no purchase limits. Soon the store was overwhelmed with shoppers who apparently stripped the shelves bare in an attempt to get food items that they did not have funds to purchase. WalMart employees had noted the problem and contacted their corporate office. They were advised to let the folks go ahead and shop. IBM who runs the system was doing a test of its emergency generators and that apparently crashed the system which resulted in no balances showing. One shopper who was being checked out when the system returned to normal had a 49 cent balance on her card and about $700 worth of grocery items scanned. WalMart indicated they would not prosecute if the shopper left the groceries. The shopper walked out empty handed. If you are curious there are procedures in place for when this sort of thing happens. We are a caring nation and don't want anyone to go hungry. If the system crashes and the store has no idea what their EBT-SNAP balance is they are allowed to purchase $50 worth of food items. The limit varies by state, this is the limit in Louisana. WalMart was contacted and corporate did not respond to inquiries if employees at the store were aware of the $50 limit.

You might reasonably ask, where the fuck are you going with this? Greed, avarice, whatever you want to call it seems to be a hallmark of the current American lifestyle. Game the system. Get yours before someone else gets it. Get all you can and fuck the next person. I watch Shark Tank and too often I listen to one of the "sharks" ask how much it costs to produce an item and how much it sells for. The response may be that it costs $3 to make and is sold for $6. The "shark" has one concern. Can the cost of production be lowered? It is never the intent to lower the price for the item it is to increase the gap between the cost of the good and its ultimate sale price. So, you watch investors with hundreds of millions or in some cases billions of dollars concern themselves only with the procurement of more money. We celebrate their greed. We commend them as job creators. When they try to lower the costs of production they are almost always suggesting moving production overseas. They are job creators but the jobs are often in China. There is no concern for those losing jobs here only with getting a better return on their meager investment. I contend meager since often the request is for a modest sum given the extreme wealth of the sharks.

Let's get a bit closer to home. You go to the store and pick up 20 grocery items. When you review the register receipt when you get home you note that you got your 20 items but were only charged for 19. The item that did not ring up was valued at $20. What do you do? It's a big store like WalMart and they won't miss that $20? Do you go back and pay the $20? What if it was the other way around? You got overcharged $20. We are all in the car headed back and fussing about our time and expense for the extra trip.

Many are making a big deal out of this incident at WalMart over SNAP benefits. Isn't that typical, welfare queens and people to lazy to work taking advantage of the system. The truth I see here is that there is no difference in the three situations. The "sharks" were greedy and taking advantage, if I get something I didn't pay for and know about it then to my thinking I stole it. The folks in Louisana were guilty of greed and theft as well but no more than the other two groups. You don't get a free pass if you are rich, or it wasn't your intent, or extra blame because you are poor. Morals are not situational. Greed, is greed, is greed. We cannot celebrate it in the rich and punish it in the poor. It is always wrong.