I get what the guy in OP’s pic is saying, but realistically the ones who are affected the most are small local businesses. If we loot stuff from big box retail stores like Target or WalMart, they can easily absorb the losses and they don’t really give a shit either - they’d most likely just consider it shrinkage. You steal the same kind of stuff from a small independent convenience store, and suddenly the owner has a very real chance of being forced to close down the store, even if it’s a local chain. And even if you looted exclusively from big box retailers or other big name corporations, you’re still not affecting the guys at the top because they make fuckloads of money elsewhere, and last I saw, you can’t actually steal from Amazon unless you’re fine with being a douche and stealing other people’s packages.
Looting doesn’t really do anything. Is it a form of protest? Sure, I can see the argument. Is it an effective form of protest? Fuuuuuuck no.
EDIT: morer clearer message
Didn’t this happen to a Walmart in a small town? The Walmart took over all the small business and employed most of them, so when they pulled out of the area because of theft it took all the remaining jobs away?
I found this article but it’s daily mail and doesn’t talk in depth about it.
I think this might be it? However it doesn’t comment on loss of local jobs…
Doesn’t looting only really affects the small shops and the people working at the shops? I don’t imagine big corpos losing their shit over one or two stores burned. Drop in the sea for them. Boycott at a massive scale would be more effective to bring those fuckers down, easier said than done though.
Looting or boycotts, you need a certain amount of people dedicated to the cause to make corpos sweat. Sporadic actions by varying groups for different reasons is a mild inconvenience and achieves little. Not to say we shouldn’t be doing both, we absolutely should, but it needs to be organized and I don’t think there’s a large enough political body that would adopt these tactics yet.
I’d also like to add the looting small shops for no reason other than fuck capitalism isn’t a great message. If the owner was a dick then go for it and make it known why. Large chains aren’t going to punish employees for shoplifting, at least there hasn’t been any real evidence to support that. They threaten to close stores all the time due to “crime” but it’s never once panned out to be the real reason if they do wind up closing a store. I wouldn’t worry about the employees, it’s a very slim chance that they’ll see any punishment for it and even then, that could be used as a radicalizing force to bring more people into the movement
It definetly doesn’t help, if the small business corner shop owner gets looted. It just eliminates big corpos competition.
Can you share some sources of small shops getting looted? During the London riots it was Barclays Bank, PC World, Argos, and Tesco that were looted, not the boutique coffee shop or hand-made jewelry stores. Even the pictures on Wikipedia of the riots are just of these stores.
Maybe in an abstract way. I don’t think looters are typically thinking about anything but stealing stuff for themselves. It’s also bad optics, as the media always tries to conflate looters and people destroying random people’s property with protestors to paint movements in a bad light.
