Penny Winters was a 63 -year-old maintenance worker at the Portage, Indiana, Walmart store. The surveillance cameras caught Ms. Winters eating Oreos that she had not paid for during her evening shift at the store. When asked why she did it, Ms. Winters explained that she did not have the money to buy the cookies. She earned \(\$ 11.40\) per hour (the usual Walmart pay was then \(\$ 8.87\) per hour), but her son had been in a motorcycle accident and was unable to work, thus making her the sole wage earner in her home.

Ms. Winters also confessed that she had been taking Oreos, gum, deli sandwiches, chocolate, and potato chips for more than eight years, with four of the years being at a Walmart in Tucson, Arizona, where Ms. Winters originally lived.' She confessed to taking one to two items per week during her shift. She indicated that she began eating Oreos that were open and near cash registers, because she assumed that they could not be sold and would just be thrown away. However, when the opened packages were not available, she would simply remove the food from the shelves and then take it into the break room where she would eat it. The result was, because junk food costs add up over eight years, that Ms. Winters was charged with felony theft. She has come to be known as the "Oreo Grandma........................

Discussion Questions 1. Explain the gradual drift of Ms. Winters, and discuss her justification for the drift.
2. Some have suggested that Walmart should not prosecute Ms. Winters because of her circumstances. Walmart loses \(\$ 3\) billion per year to employee theft of merchandise. Are there stakeholders involved in this decision?
3. The police report indicates that Ms. Winters has never had any legal charges filed against her. Police could not locate any parking tickets or moving violations in Indiana or Arizona. Given her lifetime of obeying the law, explain what happened that would cause Ms. Winters to take the food.
4. A security manager for a major retail store explained what she called the \(80 \%\) factor. Her store's experience was that \(10 \%\) of the people they hire are absolutely honest; they would never steal anything from the store no matter how easy it might be or what opportunities they had to do so. She also added that another \(10 \%\) would always steal from the store. In fact, she noted that some people seek jobs from their store just to steal. She explained that they do not have to worry about the "absolutely honest 105." She also said that there is not much they can do with the stealing \(10 \%\) except get them out of there when they catch them. She finished by saying that they spend their time and effort in trying to prevent the \(80 \%\) from being in situations where it is tempting and easy for them to steal. In other words, she worked on preventing the "not so bad" yet "not so good" from falling into bad behavior. What does the retail experience say about ethical infrastructure? What does it say about character? What does it say about the costs of unethical behavior by employees?