Let’s say you’re the manager of a Wal-Mart, or a Safeway, or a grocery store. Let’s say that you get a phone call saying that you are being watched. The caller says he has a gun. Or a bomb. He demands that you wire $3,000 to an overseas bank account. What do you do?
In some of 15 stores across the nation last week, idiots wired thousands of dollars to the thief or gang of thieves. In fact, one of them almost got a group of store employees to cut off the fingers of the manager who called bullshit on the thief’s demands.
In Buchanan, Mich., on Monday, the caller directed employees of a Harding’s market to lock the front doors, move to the front and told them not to call police, said Berrien County Sheriff Paul Bailey. The man claimed he could see some workers standing up, and ordered them to sit down.
“He’s just ad-libbing,” Bailey said. “He can’t see anything.”
Nonetheless, Bailey said, the employees were so afraid they wired the caller $3,000. The manager even hung up the phone when authorities called, saying a bomb would go off if he talked to them.
Bailey said that in a phone call with police, the man even offered to trade a “hostage” for a police officer to make his threat more believable.
The caller has not gotten every store he’s called to give up money, but the FBI on Wednesday did not provide the total amount taken.
People are unbelievably stupid. The easiest damned test in the world, since the thief/thieves insisted they were watching, would have been, “What color is my hair? Am I wearing glasses? How many women are standing in this group?”
This is why people like John Edward, the fraud who says he talks to the dead, become millionaires. Because people are stupid. They don’t think. We are not taught critical thinking skills in our schools. We are taught to memorize and regurgitate facts. We are taught groupthink. We are taught not to rock the boat. In fact, in most schools, when you do challenge the groupthink or the status quo, you are penalized for it. Thinking outside the box is not a skill that is admired in our society, no matter how many people pretend it is.
One store manager with some modicum of critical thinking skills almost lost his fingers due to the extreme stupidity of his employees.
At one store Tuesday, the caller ordered customers and employees to disrobe. Employee Marilyn Case told The Hutchinson News that store manager Mike Piros argued with the caller, but they relented when he continued to make threats and instructed them to “do it now.”
He then demanded that one of Piros’ fingers be cut off for every hour his demands were not met, and another employee got a butcher knife on his orders, Case said. Jim Peterson, a customer, told the newspaper that people became distraught.
“People came undone and started saying, ‘No, no,'” he said.
Piros was not harmed. Police there initially said they were investigating whether the caller had hacked into the surveillance system, but later backed away from that possibility.
Gee. Imagine that. The police think maybe this is all one giant hoax.
Ya think?
This reminds me of the McDonalds employee that had strip searched a teenage girl on the demands of a phantom caller who claimed to be a cop.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15504125/
God people are retarded.
Consider the research of Stanley Milgram who found people would do almost anything when told by an authority figure That is why we had actors wearing a white coat perform on commercials. People actually reacted as though they were doctors and buy the snake oil.
it just shows how afraid people are of confrontation, in the yahoo article the phone was given to someone else, i’m guessing this changed was sex based not rank based, it’s disgusting yet tragic in it’s own right, this was probably the work of someone hard up for money and smart enouph to not go try to rob a 7 11 at 3:30 at night, bravo i say, in all honesty, it’s really not as difficult as alot of people tend to think it is to break the law these days and gain from it without being caught, whoever gave the money must feel like an idiot, at least we can all sit back and lauph and not take it so seriously, i forget when exactly the loss of currency becomes offensive, but 3k definantley isn’t within the border of this plane when pit against someones life, far be it a group of lives, some kid probably scored alot of candy lol
Perhaps the title should read *People are like Lemmings*
Actual lemmings are smater than that.
This reminds me of a famous study that was done, I think at Yale, sometime in the early 1960s.
A subject would be seated at a panel with buttons indicating increasing levels of electrical power. The subject was then told by a “scientist” in a white jacket that he would have to give electrical shocks to another subject who was on the other side of a divider, out of sight.
The man in the white jacket assured the subject that the person behind the divider would never be hurt, no matter how high the shocks went. And then he started to order to subject to administer shocks, very gentle ones in the beginning. As the shocks grew in intensity, the subject would start to hear groans of pain from the other side of the divider.
There was no other subject behind the divider, of course, just an actor who pretended to be suffering more and more.
Once the groans got a bit serious, subjects would often look at the scientist questioningly. And here is the point of the test. The “scientist” would keep reassuring the subject, using his apparent authority.
The upshot: Reassured by the white-jacketed scientist, most subjects went all the way to the maximum intensity. Most did not say, “I don’t care what you’re telling me, I’m not buying this.” Most chose to believe “authority.” I heard that the few who didn’t cooperate all the way tended to be countercultural types who easily questioned authority figures.
You say that people in this society are stupid. I wonder how it is in other countries. Are there countries where people generally think more clearly in unaccustomed situations? I don’t know.
It just goes to show you that it’s not a matter of respecting authority or not respecting authority. It’s a question of having just the right amount of respect balanced with a good dose of skepticism and independent thinking.
A friend of mine, formerly a corporal in the USMC, once commented that real discipline was doing what you are supposed to do even when someone else isn’t looking and making you do it. Similarly, real character and integrity consists of doing the right thing even if doing the wrong thing is profitable, easy and safe. In this case we have some jerk cheating people out of money by threats, which is both illegal and immoral. The person of good character and integrity wil eschew such schemes, out of a regard to his own character, and not just because he might be caught.
I, for one, am glad that I am so superior to 99% of the population. Hubris is not a problem.