Except if everyone does it and nobody really gets busted for it, then it is. You just don't like business being run that way.
The end result of 30 years of deunionization and relentless downwards pressure on wage growth and you wind up with employees cheating the system wherever they can.
Something is certainly going to break in this society/culture in the next 5-10 years, because we're not on a sustainable path. A wage-price spiral and a lot of inflation would probably be the least-painful thing to happen.
I understand that the dictionary follows usage, and i get that you have a rhetorical goal, but with that logic Enron was simply overpaying its employees.
I think there's an aspect of whether it's expected or not here.
If the culture of the delivery drivers was that this was a perk of the job that everyone sort of knew about, then I think it's reasonable to call it a type of compensation.
Sort of like how unreported cash tips are a type of perkany rely on, even though no contract could ever stipulate that.
The question, to me, is whether the people with "lost" orders actually got a pizza in the end. If they didn't, then it is theft—if not by the individual, then by the company whose structure incentivizes the individual's behavior. (Similar to how Wall-street investment-auditing firms were ultimately responsible for incentivizing their auditors to mischaracterize the risk of certain asset classes in 2008.)
I thought it was obvious that the delivery person takes the cash at the door in exchange for the pizza and pockets it. If the pizza isn't delivered, there's no cash to pocket.
Oh and I'm not arguing it isn't theft. I'm arguing that the system we've built basically demands that people steal from their employers in order to survive.
If you don't like our sort of downwards spiral into a trustless third-world society where everyone is trying to scam everyone else then you might want to look at what policies you support that crush wages for people who aren't at least software devs.
The end result of 30 years of deunionization and relentless downwards pressure on wage growth and you wind up with employees cheating the system wherever they can.
Something is certainly going to break in this society/culture in the next 5-10 years, because we're not on a sustainable path. A wage-price spiral and a lot of inflation would probably be the least-painful thing to happen.