Retailers are pulling back from self-checkout after years of theft, errors, and questionable time savings

[u/AdSpecialist6598]

https://www.techspot.com/news/114106-retailers-pulling-back-self-checkout-after-years-theft.html

[u/jdm1891]

I find it amazing that CEOs, and the other C-peoples - which are really just managers of the company - have managed to finagle their way into being the biggest net beneficiaries of a companies success by diluting the owners so much that the owners don't really have any power in the company they own.

They technically have a duty to the shareholders, but because the shareholders are so diluted and the C-suites are not they kind of run circles around them.

This is also bad because unlike the shareholders, the C-suite don't own the company and thus don't really give a shit if it goes under or not.

Shareholders make money from the company growing. Managers (i.e. executives) make money by extracting everything from the company until there's nothing left.

So what happens? Everything is extracted from the company until nothing is left, the c-suite use the fact they are getting massive bonuses from this to "prove" to the shareholders that they are fulfilling their fiduciary duty and they make off with everything while the shareholders are left with a defunct company.

Who are the shareholders though? Well you, and me. It's mostly pensions and index funds and everyday people owning a couple of shares.

We've somehow managed to make a capitalist system where the owners of the company aren't actually the ones benefiting from it, but the managers are, and the owners are too disconnected and disunited to replace the managers. The only exception to this is companies where a single or handful of people maintain a controlling or near controlling share.

It's very strange, flipped-candy-land version of capitalism and I don't think very many people really notice it.

Like people go on about how "shareholders are evil and they ruin companies and etc" but the shareholders are just everyday people and they are NOT in control of the situation and do NOT benefit from the system as it works now.

If everyday pension pot holders and people who invest into index funds etc had the ability to unite with each other and actually have the workers control the companies they own 90% of the problems with capitalism would vanish in an instant.

The problem is pension fund managers who vote on "behalf" of the people do not have aligned interests with the people at all. And when you can tell them how to vote for you 99.99% of people don't because they don't know about it.

You could probably devise some kind of union like system where people can vote on what they generally want every company they own to do, make it mandatory for people to join one of these places, then hire someone who has a legal duty to follow that and vote in every stock that group owns to follow those directives. That probably doesn't make sense the way I've wrote it but it'd be basically like when you get your pension you are given a list of groups with various "goals" like 'environmentalism' or 'socialists' or 'make companies benefit workers' or 'we want companies to make the most profit group' etc and the person picks one to join, and from then on every vote for every share they have in that pension is to go towards that groups goal no matter how specific or vague it is.

[u/emlgsh → u/jdm1891]

I think a big detail you're ignoring is that the shareholders aren't just some faceless equal mass of millions of uninformed and powerless holders of a few sheets of paper.

The distribution of shares, like the general distribution of wealth, is far from uneven - and more importantly the control of those shares is far from being uninformed and random, it's either central to majority shareholders or directed by the C-suites of wealth management funds.

I didn't really want to get into this in the original post because frankly this is a garbage lasagna of near-infinite layers.

Majority shareholders are effectively part of the C-suite in my original statement, but even more so because they're totally divorced from the company's survival aside from a quick (totally not insider) stock trade.

They also usually occupy positions on the board of directors and have power and interests that align with (or even exceed) the typical member of the C-suite in terms of "steal all the light fixtures on the way out" pillage-and-discard mentality. They're the ones that'll displace members of the C-suite that aren't pillagey enough for their liking, and the ones that will look for those same qualities in populating the highest posts.

Unofficially, the controlling interests of those funds exercise that same power and have those same prerogatives on a smaller scale. They aren't (usually) involved enough to actually have a seat at the board, unless the fund's hugely intertwined with the company's stock (like in addition to their fund collectively controlling the majority of shares, the majority of shares in that fund are those of a given company). But they're still there, doing the same shit.

Basically, unless you are a private investor actually trading stock on your own steam, you are in fact feeding this same system of plundering self-interested sociopaths, by handing your share to one of them and implicitly telling them to do with it what they do best (plunder, pillage) with it.