[yummyfajitas]

So you are perfectly happy with walmart branded cops roaming their property, using force against people and putting them in a walmart branded jail until the real cops come to pick them up?

Note that in reality this option inevitably includes walmart cops accidentally beating up an innocent black person, a sympathetic sick mother dying in walmart jail of some pre-existing medical issues, and similar things. (All I'm assuming here is that walmart cops/jails are identical to US Govt cops/jails.)

You'll have no problem with walmart when these things occur? You're sure that the media won't criticize them for this as well?

[douche]

College campuses across the country are setup exactly this way already. Similarly with large shopping malls and their rent-a-cops.

[yummyfajitas]

Clearly you think that if a model works well in a high trust community full of high intelligence high conscientiousness people who've spent $20k/year to be there, it'll work for Walmart.

I know of a hippy commune (upper middle class, mid 50's, entirely white/asian, yoga/meditation/etc types) that lets you operate the store cash register yourself. Admittedly the store is not as extensive at walmart, it mostly just sells organic vegan flax seed cookies. If you don't have enough cash you can just pay them tomorrow. So why can't walmart just adopt that model?

(I know, I'm hinting at the naughty and unspeakable idea that walmart shoppers are bad people who steal and commit other crimes.)

[justinlardinois]

> College campuses across the country are setup exactly this way already.

Really? I suppose that depends on where you are and whether it's a public or private college. Public universities in California have their own police departments, but they're run by the state government.

[jbooth]

The premise here is that Wal-mart spends much less on security than other shopping centers like malls and Target.

I haven't seen a lot of news stories about civil rights violations by Target's security guards. Maybe they're under the radar?

[yummyfajitas]

Most likely Target simply has fewer criminals in their customer base.

The simple fact is that any law enforcement will result in some civil rights violations. It's just a statistical inevitability. This is one of the reasons I'm extremely cautious about new regulations; part of the price of a new law is one or two more Eric Garners.

[jbooth]

Having somebody visible near the store entrance so that you're not a complete magnet for crime that creates taxpayer expense.. not exactly Eric Garner.

[yummyfajitas]

And what happens when the criminal class discovers that the $18k/year greeter near the store entrance will do nothing? Why will this be a remotely useful deterrent in that case?

Consider the possibility that if the greeters actually prevented a significant amount of shrinkage, walmart would have kept them. The cases being referred to the cops are only a tiny percentage of the shrinkage that occurs.

[jbooth]

"Consider the possibility that if the greeters actually prevented a significant amount of shrinkage, walmart would have kept them."

It's a possibility, I guess. But I've seen enough MBAs cut costs with poorly understood consequences to be a little skeptical of that assertion. How would they even know? Did they run a controlled experiment? Or did they just say a prayer to Jack Welch and cut anything they could?

[jessaustin]

It seems they've been running the experiment over the last decade? An executive will never get fired for cutting costs. Even if the cut costs destroy the company, she'll be off to greener pastures before that happens.

[wpietri]

If you'd read all the way to my third sentence, you'd know that I am not suggesting anything like that.