A Study in Possession

As anyone who has gone through the process can tell you, law school is an interesting look at how we approach problems and conflicts as a society. The microcosms that come up through the experience can also be interesting. Today's story is less of an individual tale and more a collective one. While I did take part in what happened, I think the story as a whole is more interesting and enlightening.

What happened was that my law school decided that they wanted to put in a convenience store for its students to use. And, presumably to save on costs, the powers that were decided that they could do the entire thing cashier-less.

Over the next few months, the store was being put in. Most people were pretty excited; law school can require you to pull some late nights at the school and everything else on campus closed. Eventually, the store did open under a "scan at the door and check yourself out" model. But what was interesting was the transition period.

Pictured: An insufferably corporate mock-up of the space.

You see, in their infinite wisdom, the overseers of the law school decided to open the place officially at the beginning of a semester, even though they had already built and stocked the store far earlier. So, for the end of the previous semester, you had a bunch of sustenance and energy drinks sitting on shelves, taunting whoever would care to look as to what they couldn't have.

Some would describe what happened next as theft. Admittedly, students (presumably) had gone in and taken some of the items off the shelf before the store opened and (also presumably) enjoyed them. But there was one wrinkle in our fact pattern: The vast majority of items were paid for. Despite the official credit card readers not being operational until the store actually opened, there was a medium-sized pile of cash that was growing at the nonfunctioning register. (I indirectly contributed to this honor system by putting back some items after I could not check out with my debit card.) While some students would dare to take a few items, no one dared touch this pile of cash. It sat there for a good amount of time before the company responsible for the store took it (and, before you ask, I was privy to enough official communications that I know for a fact that the cash did make it to the storeowners).

It took some time for the store to respond to this series of events. The official stance of the store was that the students should not have taken any items before opening. However, despite the installed security cameras which would presumably have made matters of proof trivial, the saga largely ended with this slap on the wrist and the store opened on schedule the following semester.

This all begs the question: Why didn't the storeowners do anything?

Well, people were quick to point out that the store had not suffered any real harm. Indeed, they had liquidated store inventory ahead of schedule and one could make the argument that the store was better off for what had happened. And, while this was likely not a winning argument if it had gone to court, it was true enough that the impacted party seemed to not really care.

In this exchange between the attendees of the law school and those seeking to profit off of them, I think it highlighted a few things about the nature of property (particularly, store inventory).