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Of Kings and Queens
Theft As Aggression and the Genesis of Urban Food Deserts, by the Ghetto Grocer
© 2015 James LaFond
DEC/17/15
My mother was recently needling me about the food deserts profiled by liberal columnists, who claim that money grubbing retail food companies refuse to serve the urban poor, and something needs to be done, laws need to be passed, etc.
My friends on the Left tell me it is all due to racism and poverty, that blacks are kept in poverty by racism and once impoverished they must steal—are forced to by material need, which is greater than any morality—to survive, and therefore drive retailers away. On the Left there is no understanding of theft as aggression, no correlation is made between Attila the Hun cutting your head off and taking your livestock and Jeremy the Thug shoving your cashier down on the floor and making off with that register till.
On the Right, those guys tell me it is genetic. I have close friends who will argue all day long that behavior is transmitted through the blood line and not through culture and is not subject to teaching, conditioning or other environmental influences.
When it comes to supermarket loss prevention I am one of the reigning experts in Central Maryland. My career as the Ghetto Grocer saw only four years in management, during which time I outperformed all of my colleagues who had decades in management, because I had seen the employees from their worker perspective for decades—making me the nightmare boss you could not bullshit. For instance, I am currently retired, simply stocking perishable groceries overnight two or three nights per week to make writing possible.
I know 18 of my coworkers to be thieves out of 120. I will occasionally suggest to the manger to run a movement report on an item I know employees to be stealing, and leave it up to him and his camera array to catch the thief. If for some reason he retired, and his boss pleaded with me to take his job, and promised me I could retire with a severance package in six months after training my replacement, I would be tempted. The first thing I would do is fire 18 thieves. I did it before…
Supermarkets
Supermarkets cannot stay open in extensive urban ghettos for multiple reasons. It might also surprise you to know that supermarkets that do not embrace a catering/restaurant program [which is expensive] do not thrive in upscale locales. You might be able to keep the doors open—but forget a profit. People with money make their food purchases at restaurants. You didn't buy that stunning piece of plastic surgery to have her tits melt in the kitchen, did you? Out of any five stores in a chain, two break even, two lose money and one makes good—hopefully good enough to keep the others afloat. Basically, supermarkets just provide local jobs. The CEOs of grocery chains are among the lowest paid of their kind. At the end of the year the net profit is expected to be between a half percent and two percent.
Ironically your best retail food customer is the single welfare mother. Indeed any store that is not positioned to capture welfare recipients at 20% or more of the customer base is in trouble from the start.
Big Mamma
Big Mamma is your ideal customer. Yes, she might eat an entire rotisserie chicken while her children devour a box of snacks. But not only will I look the other way, I’m willing to pay some retarded white guy $10 an hour to clean up her mess. She is the cash bomb. No customer, not Bill Gates or the Dyke Queen of West Germany spends as much money on retail food as Big Mamma. This is not calculated as a percentage of income, but in raw dollars.
These are big people who eat a lot! And they only care how it tastes and won't chew your ear off in the aisle for a half hour bitching about GMOs while your porter is taking a nap behind the bailer and the toilet is backing up from that truck driver that just made that run from Battle Creek, Michigan without a stop to get you your 25-sent granola bars in time for EBT cash to hit the street, that are going to fly off the shelves when you raise the price from 89-cents to "ten for ten." There is no requirement to buy ten, but raising retails from 89-cents to 10 for $10 increases sales from a case to a pallet on most items, when you have the right customer base...
What is more, this lady has poor impulse control, exasperated by her once a month windfall, and is also—thank God—poorly educated in making purchasing decisions. Not only does Big Mamma spend twice as much money as the next closest customer, but her dollar is an impulsive dollar, which nets the grocer four times the profit of—the Korean or Hebrew dollar, for instance, and twice the profit as the Anglo or Hispanic dollar.
So, we want to serve Big Mamma. The question is, how can you do it and not get robbed blind by the various fiends who prowl her neighborhood?
You do this by setting up your store on the edge of a white gentrified or middleclass residential area that she can get to, but that the criminals she spawns cannot raid at will and melt back into a neighborhood sympathetic to their larcenous cause.
But why is Big Mamma’s hood so dangerous for retail operations?
First let me rundown the retail theft checklist. You need to know who is going to steal from you and who will not.
Management
The following are your management types in descending order of income, what they bring and what they take.
White male managers are your most effective operators. Unfortunately 20% of them are thieves, smart thieves. One guy, that hired me 20 years ago, just got busted for embezzling 2.5 million, and will not even by able to pay $2,500 back, as he left it in Vegas!
Black male managers are not as effective as whites for various reasons covered below, but tend to be more loyal, and will only steal from you 10% of the time—and this dude is so happy to be out of an apron and in a tie he does not cost as much!
White female managers usually end up with nervous breakdowns and are not as effective as men, but are 100% loyal and never steal, ever. This is the backbone of any retail food staff, white chicks. Work her until she breaks and get another.
Black female managers are rarely effective and steal at 50%—fully half of the ones I have worked with being confirmed thieves. The problem is you have to have one or you are asking for EOC heat, and once you have her, as long as she does not murder the President of the U.S. A., you really can’t fire her.
The Staff
Asian and Latino employees work hard, never steal, and unfortunately gravitate to better paying lines of work, so are extremely rare.
Male employees, white and black, are generally almost productive enough to justify paying them, but steal less often than their counterparts in management, at about 10%, so are tolerable. When you find a guy that can produce, consider keeping him in the ranks and rewarding him there. If he is a white guy, work him like a dog because he has no government agency set up to listen to his whining about your evil corporate ways. If he wants out of the grind he can either quit or get into management and die of a stroke when he’s 61.
Women, white and black, who do not qualify for management, are usually not worth anything on the staff, and generally steal at about 20%, with lower paid working black girls less than half as likely to steal as their management counterparts, and white girls on staff infinitely more larcenous than the white girls in management. I won’t even try and explain this, as it boggles my mind.
Among management and staff there is no correlation between lower income and higher theft, except that full-timers steal more than part-timers in independent operations. Indeed, it is the other way around more often than not. I personally know of three local chains and one store that went out of business due to management theft!
Customers Who Steal
Upscale customers, regardless of race, do not steal, unless it is a matter of insanity or thrill-seeking, which is so rare as to make it both ineffective in reducing your net and also easy to address.
Customers who purchase groceries with EBT [either “Food Stamps” or “cash side”], always steal, unless they are Hispanic. I have never seen an Asian on welfare. All of these black and white thieves will fight with and argue with staff, threaten to take legal action, etc., driving off less lucrative but easier to serve customers. For this reason, and based on their high purchase value, I looked the other way as long as they ate it in the store, and drew the line at them taking unpaid goods out the door.
Dedicated Thieves
Every neighborhood has white dope fiends that steal high value items to sell for hits of dope. They are easy to spot, rarely fight and usually give minimal resistance to search and arrest.
The thieves that cannot be dealt with by a single store detective and a manger, which is the most security that can be budgeted to protect one of these open environments and not tip payroll over to the point where profits are lost and losses begin are:
Gangs of teenage black girls, who cannot be touched by security staff, rush the store ten at a time and can only be dealt with by locking down the store and driving away paying customers, while awaiting the arrival of a black female cop.
Small packs of black male youth who attack and rob your male employees coming and going from work and commit strong arm robberies on your white female staff on the parking lot. I personally escorted my female staff and paid a big psychopath to attack thugs lurking by the store.
Lone looters, men who hoist 100 pounds of goods in sacks and fight all comers who try to bar their egress, are common in majority black urban areas. As a general rule all black thieves will swear that they brought all 100 bars of soap into your store with them, and will fight to the finish to defend what they claim is their property. Only in the face of uniformed police will they sometimes drop the goods and run.
Pairs of adult black men armed with firearms, who target your management and female staff with robbery, pistol whippings, abduction and rape. Armed security and uniformed police on site are the only defense against this threat, and are prohibitively expensive unless you get a tax break or are pulling in over a half million per week.
All four of these threats are only common in majority black ghettos. All of these violent criminals are on welfare benefits, and all threaten your best, most loyal, employees, often working with black female managers and shift leads acting as informants. As your white female managers are driven off site and replaced by black females, these replacements actually coordinate sizable heists with armed thugs.
Income Disparity
The most honest employees of all races make between 10-30K per year, which makes them more impoverished than the welfare recipients who constitute the majority of violent thieves, and who benefit from subsidized housing. Professional thieves and thugs who live with welfare receiving women are counted, in this analysis, as welfare recipients. The least violent thieves are the poorest, being penniless dope fiends.
Black female managers who make the same as white female managers are infinitely more likely to steal, yet, white male managers are more likely to steal than their lower paid white female and black male counterparts.
Note: White mangers are better paid because they usually run the place while the blacks and women run departments or assist him. There are enough black grocers out there with the level of integrity necessary to fill more top management slots at store level. Unfortunately, the black females on your staff will make their life a living hell and will usually only listen to a white man, meaning these talented black guys tend to look for a supply side job like running a bread route or working for a big soda company rather than fight through all of the bitch politics at store level and put up with being called an “uncle tom” every two hours.
Race and income are not indicators of theft.
Race is an indicator for aggression, with blacks committing virtually all supermarket violence.
Welfare recipients are more prone to steal and more violent than other thieves of the same race, with the only violent whites being welfare recipients.
This examination is indicating that what is at the core of theft and aggression is a sense of entitlement. Indeed, the supermarket managers caught stealing had all been passed over for corporate promotions and/or had complained about making less money than their counterparts in other businesses. Every thief I had ever worked next to said he or she stole because the company did not pay him what he or she was worth.
There is something more though. After all, what happens to all of these stolen goods? When a guy runs out the door with 200 deodorant sticks in his sack, how does he get rid of them?
The Resale Market
In my time at bars, on bus stops and on the spit-patina concrete sidewalks of Baltimore, I have met almost no one, of any race, who was unwilling to buy obviously stolen goods. There is still shame though.
Whites do not want to be seen buying stolen goods in public, and will only do it in bars and basements. Also, in mixed-race and white neighborhoods, there are still enough citizens that are willing to report a sidewalk vendor selling DVDs on their front walk to the police, and in those areas the police will respond.
But in majority black neighborhoods, everyone, including the minister and the police officer and the city councilman, will buy stolen goods in public. Without a stigma attached to this process, whereby naked aggression is converted into clean cash with full community approval, there is no support –indeed, no call—for police action, which makes the business more lucrative, the thieves more violent, and even undercuts the merchant on top of the theft. Not only has Jerome [a real guy] stolen 72 bars of Dove soap, which I was only making 10% profit on, which was not enough to justify carrying it to begin with, but he is now selling those bars of soap for $2 where I will lose 29 cents if I sell them for $2.50, and he is doing it across the street!
This is when you cash out your inventory and close the doors. To successfully run a retail food operation you must be able to trust the customer not to steal, or to at least just steal what they can eat while shopping. When your merchandise starts going behind glass you now have to pay triple [not double] for handling and also lose impulse sales, which is the reason why you want stupid customers to begin with. Once your customers begin supporting theft for resale you have hit the urban shoal that will sink your retail ship.
The Prime Cause
In the end, the entire urban crime scene is about entitlement. Most urban violence is committed by the children of mothers pulling in about 30K a year, upon penniless black dope fiends and homeless guys and black clerks making only 10K per year.
Most suburban violence is committed by the children of middle class black parents upon working class whites making less than half what the parents of the perps make, who often coordinate attacks via smart phone.
It’s about the Haves beating up the Have Not’s.
Locally the Pantry Pride, Value Food and Farm Fresh [I interviewed the CFO who blew the whistle on the CEO]food chains went out of business because the upper class management was stealing from the company, putting working class employees out of work and into poverty, having to begin climbing the wage scale again even as the top rate was dropped.
Theft and violence, just as in medieval and ancient times, are forms of aggression most often practiced hierarchically, with those whom feel they are entitled to more than what they have either taking it from those who already have less, or terrorizing those who have no defenders in order to extort goods as diverse as submission and cash.
It is no accident that the welfare recipients that have turned their own neighborhoods into wastelands refer to themselves as Kings and Queens and to forcible sex as a “tax.”
In my view, urban food deserts have been made by a government entitlement system, probably by accident. But having effectively produced a violent mob, the government that created it has now seen its purpose and is turning it on the rest of us. If we do not setup money-losing supermarkets in the ghettos the ghettos will come to our viable markets and destroy them.
I have seen no evidence that blacks steal any more frequently than whites. However, the belief that has been instilled in blacks that they are entitled to more than they have, and that the holders of their denied fortunes are white [the same color as most store managers], has lead the majority of black shoplifters to seek open combat with any supermarket employee—whether white or a race traitor—who unjustly tries to deny them what is imagined as rightfully their due. I cannot count the numerous black shoplifters who I have seen take something off a shelf and attempt to walk out the door with it and shamelessly declare it to be their property and declare me or my security man to be the thieving attacker!
This boggles the mind, but is what we get for trying to appease a people for wrongs done to their ancestors by someone else’s ancestors. The food deserts and failing food markets of Baltimore are solid proof that fantasy, when believed by enough people, has real tangible effects.
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wife—
Phil B     Dec 17, 2015

I worked in bars (a long while ago now) and one barmaid I worked with gave me some advice about stealing.

She would not ring up sales (or at least, only ring up one drink when several were bought) and pocket the cash. That way the till was always "correct" at the end of the night.

She told me"When someone leaves ALWAYS stop stealing for a week or two. That way, when the profit goes up, the suspicion will always be on the person that left".

She was a slick operator was Anne ...and as far as I know, never caught.
Sean     Dec 17, 2015

It still amazes me that lack of acceptance for criminal/violent behavior in the black community. We recently had several violent black criminals put behind bars and the only comments from fellow blacks were along the lines of "you wouldn't care if they were white" and "they were decent kids about to turn their lives around."
the woodsman     Dec 17, 2015

Fascinating insight as always. Thank you.
Sam J.     Dec 18, 2015

Thanks that was an excellent layout of the whole situation.
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