What About Consumer and Employee Greed?

Do a Google search for "corporate greed" and you'll find about 752,000 hits. Try "greedy CEOs" and you'll get about 24,000 hits.

Now try "consumer greed" and you'll only see about 500 listings, and you'll only find 2 hits for "greedy shoplifters."

Even though "corporate greed" and "greedy CEOs" get all the attention, it appears that a lot of shoppers and employees display quite bit of their own greed, as they helped themselves to about $42 billion of corporate inventory at retailers around the country in 2006, which as a percentage of total sales was about 1.6%~!!!

About $3 billion of Wal-Mart's merchandise was lifted last year by greedy shoppers and employees, according to this AP report.