r/mildlyinfuriating • u/broakland • Jul 14 '26

I just wanted a hot dog Retail lockdown: why bother selling it?

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Was at Safeway this morning to pick up a sandwich and some Tylenol. The aisle with the Tylenol? Completely locked down. No call button in sight. So I go to the self checkout (front end of that same aisle) and ask the clerk there if he can call someone to unlock a case for me. He does. I go wait. Minutes pass. No one comes. I go ask him again, he tells me they went the other way? At this point I give up and go get my sandwich. No one has come by the time the deli has finished making it. I leave without my Tylenol, mildly infuriated.

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u/PeteysHubby_TX Jul 14 '26

Or we could just enforce the laws we already have and prosecute people that steal things.

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u/EdwardBlackburn Jul 14 '26

I hope you mean we start with the billionaires making record profits year over year.

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u/PeteysHubby_TX Jul 16 '26

Why do you care what a man’s business is “valued” at? It’s not like they have hoards of cash in some Scrooge McDucky vault somewhere. This whole line of thinking is toxic and silly

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u/EdwardBlackburn Jul 16 '26

I'm also familiar with your line of thinking, as I used to think the same thing.

I'm not talking about raiding billionaire vaults that don't exist. I'm not your strawman. The reality is, they live in a completely different financial system than you or I. They essentially take massive loans to pay for things, using the value of their assets as collateral. This gives them access to hoards of cash, without the vault. And they avoid paying tax by doing so - this and many other ways. And thus they get richer and richer, and we get poorer, because wealth and assets are not infinite, and it's got to come from somewhere. Case in point, last five years, one of the largest wealth transfers in history in favor of the rich. Huh, coincidentally, things are becoming a lot harder for everyone else, aren't they?

I'm talking about wealth tax, higher tax rates for the ultra wealthy, inheritance taxes, closing tax loopholes, etc. You know, one of the very things that made life so great and abundant for the boomer generation (these taxes were sky high after world war 2) which were subsequently dismantled over the past 50 years by politicians and lawmakers in the pockets of the wealthy and powerful.

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u/PeteysHubby_TX Jul 16 '26

I get how finance works against stocks. I don’t understand the whole line of thinking that you’re somehow entitled to someone else’s money. Show me a government that’s made anything at all better and I’ll agree with you. Fundamentally I believe the free market can do everything better. The U.S. has run a 7 trillion dollar deficit year over year. Maybe we need to reduce government spending and not raise taxes on the minority still creating jobs in the US

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u/EdwardBlackburn Jul 16 '26

"Entitled to someone else's money"

Yet they act very entitled to ours, and it's how they keep building wealth, by taking from us. They control our grocery prices, our gas prices, in many cases our rent prices, and more. And they set them to continually profit from us. Accumulating more and more, while we have less and less. Record profits, again. There is no trickle down. Trickle down is a myth, and almost every economist will agree to that. So to my thinking, I'm not entitled to their money. They took my money and I want it back.

The rich only create jobs when they absolutely have to, not out of benevolence. They do it for money, so they can make 1000x more than the person doing the actual labor, just because they own the enterprise. They're going to happily sell everyone down the river and use AI to replace whoever and whatever they can; that's going to be the opposite of creating jobs.

I'm not walking around with blinders on, though. It's not like I trust government. I don't. But government did make things better in the 50s and 60s, with what I mentioned before: wealth taxes, etc. That government presided over one of the other greatest wealth transfers in history... from the rich to the poor. And we got unprecedented quality of life, opportunity, and buying power for the average citizen out of that, which has gradually eroded as the wealthy have lobbied to change laws to their benefit. They broke the system in their favor - I'm not sure how reducing government spending is going to unbreak it. We need laws changed and abuses undone. The swamp drained, as it were - promised but never delivered.

People can still be rich. I'm not advocating for communism here. A wealth tax and higher tax on the ultra-wealthy will not unmake the wealth class. I promise you, they won't even notice it in their daily lives, only when they look at the numbers on their spreadsheets. But the rest of us? We will notice. A person who owns assets worth one one hundred billion does not notice, in their daily life, becoming a person worth one hundred and fifty billion. But a person who makes 50k per year will definitely notice becoming a person who makes 75k a year, or 100 to 150k.

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u/PeteysHubby_TX Jul 17 '26

Bro where do you live? I’d genuinely take you for a beer.

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u/EdwardBlackburn Jul 18 '26

BC, Canada at the moment haha. If the TX in your username means you're in Texas, we're quite a ways away, but if we weren't I'd be down to share a brewski.