461–470 of 763 posts
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>2019
And? US policy on handling shoplifters has not undergone any meaningful change in just the last couple years; I assume Europe has also largely maintained the status quo.
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…
To further underline your point, if the chain is (thief)→(amazon)→(end user) then the fence isn't "anyone with an Amazon" account: the fence is amazon .
More likely this stuff is sold on ebay
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>If you ran a store that repeatedly sold stolen goods do you think local police and prosecutors would ignore you? Yes, if you operated your business in a way similar to Amazon the cops and prosecutors would in fact almost certainly ignore you.
Really? I just googled my location plus "trafficked stolen property conviction" and found news stories regarding multiple convictions. It sure seems like the police investigate and arrest people knowingly selling stolen property. In what sense is Amazon not doing this, or recklessly disregarding whether or not they are doing this? If I were a multi-hundred billion dollar business operating like Amazon, then of course…
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Without mens rea this is not a crime in (almost?) any jurisdiction, doesn’t matter if you’re Amazon. No matter what kind of weird games you choose to play, there’s no way amazon has a guilty mind here.
Amazon knows very well that people are selling stolen goods on their site. They’ve repeatedly chosen to do nothing.
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>Knowing your suppliers and that their goods are legitimate is a pretty basic function of a business No it isn’t. That’s a pretty basic part of living in a country with rule of law. >calling people progressive to enforce that is a bit strange Indeed, it’s strictly regressive.
> No it isn’t. That’s a pretty basic part of living in a country with rule of law. This is an incorrect framing: the law is that companies must know their suppliers, at least to the extent that they can demonstrate good faith compliance with laws around stolen, counterfeit, smuggled, etc. goods. Given that Amazon has repeatedly been supplied evidence of fencing on its platform, it would be difficult to accept a defen…
> Given that Amazon has repeatedly been supplied evidence of fencing on its platform, it would be difficult to accept a defense from ignorance
That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, Amazon being generally aware that there is fencing activity happening on their platform does not make Amazon liable.
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> So you want that the government do something, but don’t know what? Actually, I pretty well know what, and I'll explain despite your bad faith. * We have a century-old toolkit of ways to deal with legitimate businesses that often end up as fences. Mostly record-keeping requirements and a degree of secondary liability to encourage vetting of where they buy merchandise from. You see this toolkit applied to pawn shops,…
Expert in stolen goods here. I was talking to a NYC colleague the other day about how there are trends in favor of not punishing people for certain criminal activity in the city. We were talking about driving with a suspended license, but I asked about shoplifting. She said, "Oh, no. That's on the opposite trend. Not only are they prosecuting it to the maximum, but they just changed the law to make it easier to hold…
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…
>and it will largely be a government policy failure. You mean feature. If you tell voters in no uncertain terms what will happen if they piss on the electric fence and they piss on it then it's safe to assume they wanted the results. Make no mistake, people were told certain policy would lead to businesses leaving these areas resulting in deserts. Voters voted for it anyway.
Most of the comments here are ignoring the difference between regular old shoplifting and the trend driving the increase discussed in the article, which they're referring to as "organized retail crime". I think it's very fair to have differing attitudes/moral thresholds for an impoverished mother shoplifting a week's worth of baby formula versus "a couple in Alabama [which] pled guilty to shifting $300,000-worth of s…
> I think it's very fair to have differing attitudes/moral thresholds for an impoverished mother shoplifting a week's worth of baby formula versus "a couple in Alabama [which] pled guilty to shifting $300,000-worth of stolen baby formula on eBay". I’ve also noticed a weird tendency to downplay theft lately, either through projecting a theoretical moral justification on to the shoplifter or by insinuating that retail…
Let me try to convince you without defending the morality of the shoplifter or declaring corporations evil.
1. On the totem pole of crimes, petty shoplifting (without violence) is pretty close to the bottom when it comes to harm done the public. Jaywalking and smoking weed are lower.
2. These corporations that are being robbed already build shrinkage into their budgets. $300k of baby food is nothing to Walmart, a rounding error, and I doubt you can even see it in their bottom line. Even a smaller shop is not going to go out of business if someone walks out with all their toothpaste. It’s not analogous to stealing from an individual.
3. There are a limited number of police and I’d rather them be out there deterring violent and serious crime than protecting the inventory of companies. When every rapist, murderer, white collar fraudster, and drunk driver is behind bars, and the police have nothing left to do, then sure, go bust those dastardly deodorant thieves.