cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/1977881
Excerpt:
Banksy isn’t happy with Guess’ latest collaboration.
The legendary anonymous graffiti artist had a directive for his followers on Friday, encouraging them—possibly tongue in cheek, possibly not—to visit the Regent Street Guess store in London and steal the brand’s new collection that features his artwork.
“Attention all shoplifters. Please go to Guess on Regents Street. They’ve helped themselves to my artwork without asking, how can it be wrong for you to do the same to their clothes?”
Remember! If you see someone shoplifting, you didn’t.
Shoplifting from corporations is cool and good. An opinion.
Does he have an agent or somebody who can be contacted? Not justifying the shop from doing this but how would somebody seek his permission?
Who Banksy? because he has clearly given his permission in the form of a press release
So Banksy has gven his moral ascent to anyone stealing from that shop although obviously Banksy doesn’t have the legal right to do that and you will still get in trouble if the police catch you but the police in the UK don’t investigate shoplifting less than £200. Although they recently have been told to crack down on all shoplifting so that might change.
But the shop doesn’t have the legal right to have banksy’s stuff either… is it really stealing if the owner of the art says ‘take it, it’s free’?
Well maybe in an equal system here, but guess has more money so they’re our royalty apparently
If it’s someone stealing food and basics then yeah, but if it’s bored kids stealing fashion then they can fuck off. Don’t use the excuse of “sticking it to the man” to justify bring a bellend.
What, some kids stealing those clothes, of which half that aren’t sold will be shipped directly to a landfill?
Yeah, we gotta step up our game protecting that shit
You’d call cops on children lol
I’d probably just tell them to fuck off home if I was feeding particularly ballsy. Where do you live where the police are well-funded enough that they’d have time to deal with something as small-time and irrelevant as this?
IT IS MY DUTY AS A CITIZEN TO PROTECT TARGETS BOTTOM LINE
What so worst case scenario Walmart family is 0.0001% less rich?
Literally harming no one, get off your high horse if you got enough money to afford shit (yes even cosmetics some people value)
I think you’re missing my point. If you have so little money that you need to steal just to get by then society has failed you and fuck the corpos trying to keep you down. On the other hand, if you’re well off enough that you can spend your time posting online from your smartphone about how cool it is to nick designer fashion and cosmetics then you’re probably a poser who believes in nothing but getting stuff for free. I imagine there are a few people upvoting the original comment who take their beliefs quite seriously and spend their time doing real activism for social change, however I reckon most of them are edgelords who need to grow up and realise they’re not Robin Hood.
Nah but I do believe there is a gray area. Sure most people have a probably pretty modern phone and computer, but like is living large??
I couldn’t get a job today without a PDF formatted resume and attached phone number, I could have to decide between paying my phone bill and spending money on something I actually care about instead of just handing it off to a super company .
I don’t believe it is even slightly morally wrong to steal just for ones own mental peace of mind, we can probably forgoe a superyacht so some of us to not solely exist for labor
Companies look at shrink and if the margins are too high, they will close the store. It hurts communities if the store they need to purchase food from closes. This is especially problematic in poor communities where not everybody has easy transportation.
That’d be like a LOT of stealing tho. Avg Walmart pulls in $1mil A WEEK.
This is even more so in small towns where they were easily able to secure a monopoly, so for operating one store they’re able to be the only option for a whole town - and they’d have to choose to throw away a perfectly functional source of revenue.
There’s a reason many internet companies are expanding rural, its a larger more spread out market
People are stealing a lot. Saying it harms nobody isn’t correct. In the twin cities we’ve had a Aldi, Walmart and Walgreens all close within the last year. All of them were located in areas with a majority of people being on the poorer side of things. If people bought their groceries at Walmart, now the closest place is Cub which is about 6 miles away. That can be a 30-35 minute difference if you don’t have a car and Cub is much more expensive. I’m not defending corporations but they aren’t going to stay if people are stealing too much. Look at all the companies leaving in San Francisco and Portland.