... would YOU download a plant?

On today's episode of "I wasn't going to, but now that you mention it, that's a great idea!"

You can begin your plant downloading adventures today!

Ex-retail worker here that spent a lot of time in aisles, counting inventory, etc.

Steal whatever you want; I don't care. Not my job to look after that shit and I wasn't paid enough for it anyway.

Former retail worker here.

I was never paid enough to care about shit other than directly keeping my job. So, you know, look busy when the boss was around.

I had to stop people from stealing big shit, like TVs and such.

A hungry looking kid grabbing some food to eat in an aisle and leave the trash? Just throw the trash away please, I'm not your fucking maid.
- Former bigbox manager here. The garden section is throwaway, no one gives a shit about plants. Come to me when garden tools and lawnmowers are missing.
  
  Bad inventory practices are the leading causes of shrink. Any actual theft is securities problem.

I'd never considered this. Thanks for the idea, sign!

This is likely to prevent people from cutting the plants and later saying they picked up a fallen bit.

Yup, I doubt they actually care about people picking stuff off the floor.
- The boots-on-the-ground staff absolutely does not give af. It's definitely middle management that's being bitched at by higher-ups that are scared of losing a fraction of a penny.
  
  Source: middle management that gets bitched at by higher-ups that never set foot on the property.

Pinching off a leaf seems icky, but fallen leaves are fair game.

You sound like you steal from the forest. Abhorrent thief.
- ~~Abhorrent~~ Arbor-ent thief.
I usually take the floor leaves and tuck them into a plant or two I actually buy. That way I'm still paying for something and I might get some freebies if I can get the extra leaves to grow but it's not guaranteed. I probably wouldn't do this at a local store tho, just the big box stores.
bUt tHE MuLCh

(this is a non-argument unless people are taking literally every other leaf)
I’m pinching off a leaf right now.
fallen leaves are fair game

I don't think it works like that. It's like taking something that's dropped but usable from the shop floor. They might just sweep it to garbage but they probably aren't allowing you to take it anyway.
- Depending on the shop, they might also be picking up and propagating fallen leaves as well.

I wasn’t thinking about it before, but I’m thinking about it now.

Already done it.

Is it a crime to enjoy a succulent leaf?

Funny, I'm actually more inclined to do it now.

Just do it at places like Home Depot or Lowe's. Don't do it at your neighborhood garden center.
- Why? It's not like you're costing the shop money by taking trash off the floor. If anything you're more likely to spend money at the shop you do it at for supplies and such.

YOU'RE STEALING OUR TRASH! REEEEEEEEE!

If you clip a healthy plant without asking the owner first, you're a dick. But if I see you do it at a store, no I didn't. Cause the store made $2,550,000 while I was typing this.

Are we talking about the 450 square meter store that looks like an industrial warehouse, or the 12 square meter handcrafted-everything boutique?

Cause if it's the former, I didn't see you shoplift a whole ass plant and if it's the latter and I see you clip the tiniest part of a plant, I'm calling you out loudly.
- It's a dick move to pinch leaves if for no other reason that someone else may want to buy that plant, and you're damaging it. Enough people do it, it's a dead plant.
  
  Leaves fallen to the floor? Boutique or not, fair game. If you're willing to propagate from a leaf, you're probably not going to be buying whole plants anyway, and it doesn't hurt the store.
- Imagine going to the hardware store and someone calls it a fucking "boutique". It's just Ace Hardware, calm down. Robert, the guy with the nose ring over there, didn't really craft that screwdriver by hand, either. Fuckin' liar. Yeah I'm talking about you, the fuck you gonna do about it? Next time I see you explaining how you 'create lightbulbs with love', I'm lighting your car on fire. Don't think I won't!
  
  Anyway, what were we - oh yeah. Ace Hardware. Now impeccably posh, I guess.
I mean if you're pinching a leaf then that's not in the dubious territory, that's just straight up stealing. And it's not like someone is stealing fucking plant leaves to stave off starvation lol

Download in progress

I've reported you to the FBI
- I know you did

half of my succulents at home are from leaves that have fallen off in stores. sue me.

It's not theft, it's basically dumpster diving for living things. Living things that can grow in dirt with some water. They just see lost profit not an actual product loss.

I'll say if this is a family run place - it's still a dick move. If it's Lowes, Home Depot, or Menards, eh who cares.
- If it's a family run place, just ask the owners tbh. My partner and I once asked about a fallen tradescantia piece and she actually cut us off a bigger piece and wrapped it up for us. Only thing she asked in return was for us to tell her how well it does.
  
  It's a big plant now :)
- Depends. If you weren't going to buy it anyway, it doesn't cost them anything. And if you're grabbing a fallen leaf hoping for something, it seems like you aren't all that interested anyway.
- I only know about Menards because of random factoids, references, and memes. Frankly speaking I have just found out they have plants and are maybe a hardware store.
- Nah, you're getting a leaf, not a full plant. A leaf is fucking worthless. If the leaves had value, they would sell them.
Pretty sure some people believe that dumpster diving is theft too

They just see lost profit not an actual product loss.

so it's just like pirating movies
- Not really. When you pirate a movie you get the whole thing. Just as if you paid for it.
  
  A succulent leaf, however, needs years to become the size of an actual plant they would sell.
  
  It's even less damaging than pirating.
It’s not theft, it’s basically dumpster diving for living things.

That's often not allowed either
- Yes it is. We're encouraged to find any puppies, kittens, or babies in the trash.

My father enjoys grafting plants, he has an apple tree with 15 types of apples on it. Come to find out he's been snipping tiny branches off apple trees at Home Depot....

I like that. Good for him.
That's awesome.

Honestly, grafting plants is like fucking alchemy in my mind. That shit is crazy.
- Tissue culture protocols are basically modern druidic alchemy.
I honestly wonder if I went to an orchard if they would be able to give me a price to let me just graft their different trees. I don't want to wait 7+ years for many fruit trees. Grafted trees from what I've seen can often produce fruit in 2-3 years
- I recently moved and plan to buy a bunch of cheap apple plants from a big store and get them rooted this year. Then next spring take all the choice varieties from my father/childhood and graft them into the plants for my kids :)
- They might sell you something, but those branches took a lot of time and care to grow and mean profit for the farmer. You may be able to find an abandoned farm or a group of people who are preserving apple varieties to go branches from.

Kind of reads like an instruction, not a discouragement.

Like the person who was ordered to make the sign is not the one who wanted it.

If I want to steal from you I will. You can try guilting me all you want but I just don’t care.

It’s one thing to ban snipping off nodes and such but fallen fuckin succulent leaves? Get the fuck out of here lol

Read with a strong new jersey accent. 10/10

Well how much is it worth? You going to ring me up for a leaf?

Executive boardroom

"How can we barcode each individual leaf? Surely this is an untapped market?" -some MBA

In the corpora-fascist future, all plants are copyrighted variants and you merely purchase a license to possess one plant.

That's not the future, man, that's the farms of today. Monsanto literally searches farms for seeds and will issue huge fines or cancel contracts if they find that farmers are harvesting seeds from their plants. Monsanto owns the rights to seeds.
- Not only that, monsanto goes after neighboring farms if their neighbors use "patented" plants and claims they cannot harvest seeds because that would include the seeds that originate from the plants grown from the seeds blown by wind from their already fucked neighbors.
This is already happening. There's a company who copyrighted a breed of pineapple. They charge $400 for said pineapple and the company intentionally chops the top completely off, so that it cannot be propagated. Normally, you can take the green part of a pineapple, put it in the ground, and a few years later you'll have a new pineapple. It's ridiculous.
- Most plant varieties are copywrited, or somwthing similar. It's not actually as crazy as it sounds but it's definitely abused, just like all copyright law.
A time-limited license for Plant as a service. It’s a subscription model.
- PaaS would be too-often confused with "platform as a service", it needs to be Vegetation as a Service (VaaS).
You joke, but this is very much a real thing. Even if you buy certain hybrids, it can be technically illegal to propagate from them. The plant will have a little note attached to it saying so.

I love how their primary focus here is teaching you the term and only secondary concern is anti-theft.

I love how it reminds people that it's possible.
- Yes, it wouldn't have occurred to me until I saw this sign.

Maybe it is illegal in the sense that some succulents ARE invasive species

I do know that people go to garden shops looking for free material for growth lying on the ground, which id argue is unnecessary. Most people who own plants or a garden will happily share with you the fact if you show the ittyest bittiest piece of interest in them, and also share plants as well.

Hell I regularly give out succulent saplings for free or as a gift to friends and people I meet.

So yeah, you can just ask man, it's no biggie

Someone in my town has a big clump of some kind of tall ruffly flower that stands on a stalk amidst tall upwards-sticking blade leaves. Very neat and it seems to grow quickly to fill the area every spring. I've been too nervous to ask for a bit of it, but maybe I can buck up some courage and ask.
- DO IT, I believe in you.
- You can do it bro, I believe in you
and people I meet

I imagine you giving out small flowerpots with tiny succulents in them to surprised random people on the street and it made me chuckle.
- Yeah, this is 100% plant people, my wife is a regular dispenser of spider plants, there are upwards of 10 jade plants in the house, snake plant and money plant are mid propagation and I strongly suspect we'll have multiple pink princesses by the end of next year and maybe a few new Swiss cheese plants - given the room we have remaining these will largely be distributed.

I don't approve of shoplifting, but their cute new word makes me want to try it.

More like volunteer janitoring with benefits.

"no PLEASE don't spend half your paycheck here then get something for free :((( Pay me more money? I report u!!!!!"

Anyone know what store this is?

Plant props aren't a basic necessity. The plant shop doesn't decide your paycheck.

If you want to steal food from Walmart, go head, but don't feel entitled to whatever you want.
- In all likelihood the business is just going to throw away the plant props and they were going to be wasted anyways. So I don't see the problem with taking them
- I'm certain you meant "steal" ?
the home despot or blowes probably.

This sign is giving me ideas

If you're already buying a plant, add the leaf / trimming into the soil of the plant you're buying. It helps obfuscate it from staff.

So I have been told....

Shouldn't have given it a fun portmanteau name, then.

Truly it should be potlifting though.

We really do live in a dystopia.

So many examples every day.

Dystopia is when small sign.
I personally like nurseries to be able to stay in business. Most of them are just small local businesses.
Anarchy, because apparently words don't have meaning anymore

Oh yeah? Well now I'm just going to proplift even harder!

"Proplift" sounds like it should be a name for a weird helicopter.
- Or working out with a poet, political activist, husband, father, academic & emcee who is best known by me as a prolific podcast guest

So you're saying I should just take the whole plant.

Buy plant, propagate, return plant, profit. They didn't say you cant do it at home, just not at the store...
- Be kind, rewind, though.

… picking up…

No, Carl. I clearly up loaded that shit into my biodiversity.

Theft of garbage. Sure, store owner, whatever.

Things should not be alive if humans can't confine or use them for our capitalist purposes!

You can't, like, OWN Mother Nature man....

Captain planet would disagree

He didn't just own her, but fucked her as well

Life inherently steals. We steal each others carbon when we die.

Hand over your carbon, and no one gets hurt!
- No hydrogen, no oxygen. Just the carbon.
- I'll give you my entire carbon stick up the ass....its fun, hold on...no, that's my ass. Hold on, I know this one. Oh man! I need some help. Could you please? With your lips is better, no teeth. Hey! I'm in charge! That's my ass again! Fine! Have it your way!

Heck yeah I would! Oh look, here's a nice one. I think I'll put it next to the car I downloaded

"Ворованное лучше растёт."

I fully support this sign. I think I'll print up a few dozen copies, and post them at every garden center in the area.

Yes I would! A weed plant!

I grew professionally for many years. That's exactly how it works lol. Consistency is key and cloning is the way. I've sold single clones for thousands of dollars but the 2nd one was always for maybe a hundred bucks.

Sounds like a them problem.

this is legal.

In Germany, taking away trash that isn't yours isn't legal.
- in the US its legal. And in germany crimes dont count

Yes

Great… the pirates now have a new argument to beat everyone to death with.