231–240 of 763 posts
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Is it illegal to sell deodorant you got from the store after they put a tag on it?
Of course not. But it is really hard to turn a profit reselling a product you purchased at retail.
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In the big $8 million bust a few years back in the Bay Area, it turned out that they were paying street criminals more to steal specific items like toothpaste, but the police were frustrated by Amazon’s lack of assistance in figuring out all of the involved parties. Can’t find the specific article at the moment but that really stood out to me at the time. https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Bay-Area-retail-th..…
Amazing that a corpo can get away with "lack of assistance" when it is participating in a crime syndicate. Imagine if you or I tried that.
I've lived in the same city now (not NYC) for 10+ years, so I'm moderately connected with all sorts of people and not just a bubble of affluent tech people. So I'll be real, I know some sketchy people that probably do drugs or at least know where to find some. What I don't know, however, is any "fences". That is, someone that traffics in stolen goods. Or maybe I do, they don't exactly advertise their services. I've n…
Amazon has "Amazon Invoice Verification" for sellers selling large quantities of merchandise. But I personally do not want Amazon trying to check if Mr. Doe just wants to sell a couple extra tubes of deodorant he bought by mistake.
Can that be abused by thieves? Sure, but not everything is fixable.
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Organized retail theft is common in big cities. Most Americans do not live in big cities. This is not an issue for most Americans, and the stores they shop at do not have restrictive shelving nor go out of business do to "shrinking."
The "Most Americans do not live in bit cities" comment caught my eye. I wasn't sure if it was true or not, so I ran some numbers. Using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic... Assuming 331M people in the USA, 164M (50%) live in a metropolitan area of at least 1.6M people. 189M people (57%) live in an area with at least 1M people. 230M (70%) live in an area with at least 500K people. My conclus…
The definition of an MSA is basically the "economic gravity well" of an urban areas. This is casually obvious just by looking at the nice green map they give you on that page.
If you think some guy 2hr northwest of Bangor or 3hr out of Vegas into the Nevada desert is in an urban area I'll sell you some beach front property in Arizona.
It just so happened my wife and I were in a CVS (a US pharmacy chain) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (think pooches inside Gucci bags), and I wanted to get a Deodorant. We had to call the staff to unlock small pigeon hole after another just to see what was written on the labels. As always it is not just one thing - the lady that came to help us was in a Hijab and was studying medicine and was helping her parents…
Maybe I'm not putting all the pieces together correctly. What is the significance of her wearing a hijab? Why is that worthy of mention, or the fact that the owner family was from Turkey? And also the Thanksgiving eve bit?
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Both can be true. Being the street-level operator for a crime gang isn't exactly a union job. The people doing the actual shoplifting are variously unhoused, mentally ill, substance dependent, and desperate. It kind of depresses me how people think it's Kurt Russell with an eye patch stealing Ensure from Walgreens.
It makes the emotional aspect of the public defender more palatable in certain cases if he imagines his clients might depend on shoplifting out of absolute necessity a bit more than may actually be the case.
In case someone reads this as sincere:
This type of cognitive dissonance is neither necessary nor allowed for a public defender. In the first instance the day-to-day reality of unjust governmental administration is so insane that, not only would nobody from outside believe it, but it becomes counterproductive to engage in rationalization fantasies like the parent describes. I don't need to concoct a reason to feel sorry for my client--there are too many obvious real ones. I also don't need to feel sorry for every client to do my job well.
In the second instance, I am actually confronted by evidence all the time in a high-stakes adversarial environment. My client is going to jail for stealing diapers. If he makes up a story that he's not reselling them on ebay and I believe that story, I'd better be sure that I'm not going to get some PayPal statements in discovery the night before trial.
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Blaming Amazon is misplaced. Blame the people stealing and the system that refuses to prosecute them.
You can tackle a problem from multiple directions. So while direct prosecution is important, cutting off a method for converting stolen goods to money is also important. As soon as that method become unprofitable, the activity will either stop or switch to something else.
There's tons of stuff on Amazon that goes for more than retail, and people buy it for the delivery convenience. And there's nothing wrong with that.
This is such a big nationwide problem that Target actually mentioned it during their earnings report (this is stated in the article.) Some states/cities have made it near impossible to prosecute these people, so the risk/reward is very favorable to stealing and reselling. Some stores have even closed down in certain areas because of it. When we talk about "food deserts" in some cities, it could one day be we have mas…
What is the real liability to apprehend when someone is attempting to steal a large amount of merch?
You collect the materials and farm them off to Amazon.
Some speculated that prosecutors had gone soft on looting after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But it is hard to see any such trend in the data: generally states with more shoplifting prosecute more shoplifters The claim is about the time-series comparison, and the rebuttal is about the cross section comparison. Is the journalist in question stupid, gaslighting, or both?
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The struggle to survive is the starting condition in nature. That society doesn’t completely eradicate it (but only makes great strides in that direction) is not an indictment of society.
Some societies do better than others though. It’s perfectly reasonable to set the bar at least that high.