Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan

I'm not sure why the fundamental problem here is that people are stealing, rather than that a known billionaire is willing to operate a business that is known to be an attractive way to profit from theft. You almost certainly can't eliminate theft without predictable laws; no one ever has, and to the extent that it's been reduced, the existence of a reliable legal process has been part of it.

And Amazon can't exactly plead "plausible deniability" in an absolute sense here, because they ought to be aware that they're acting as a fence, and they ought to be aware that their processes are insufficient for reducing the degree of theft that's going on. If they've deliberately chosen to be ignorant of those facts, it would actually raise their level of culpability.

Finally, your analogy of legal solutions to technical solutions fails. In a democracy, legal solutions exist to meet the burden of social expectations. They do not stand outside of society. Unlike democratic laws, technical solutions are usually imposed on a community by people with disproportionate power - laws are created on a one person - one vote basis, but technical solutions are usually created on a one dollar - one vote basis. Therefore, technical solutions are usually not responsive to the needs of a society, and are far more likely to represent someone's One Fantastic Idea to Solve All Problems, rather than a compromise of interests resulting in social norms that can be imposed on defectors.

This is exactly an occasion when existing laws should be used, rather than plea for the devaluation of trust and law by ignoring laws simply because they might be applied against a powerful person.

Any individual labeling of goods is not cost-effective even on not-so-cheap items.

I've seen implementing individual labeling of items in two cases first-handed. Both were required by new regulations and both almost kill small companies.

Cost of new equipment (readers, dedicated computer which can work 24/7 in real world in the hands of non-IT people), IT system (you have only one vendor, of course, as it is government-required system, and you can imagine quality of this solution, as it is written by government contractor), support for this IT system and integration with existing POS and ERP (by 3rd party company), all these costs are tremendous in practice. If you are not reseller or distributor but producer, you need additional hardware (typically very expensive one) to apply tags to items on your production line.

Unique tags prices are negligible here.

I've seen this for small custom brewery (with very rudimentary bottling line) and for small imported/distributor of fine and exotic alcohol. Both companies are alive, but they were forced to get loans when implemented new regulations about individual-per-bottle tags, and it was long and painful process in both cases.

Who will pay for this? You. And me. In both ways: some business goes out (think: your nearest papa-n-mama grocery store, which struggles to compete with big supermarket chain already), and other business will rise up retail prices to cover expenses to implement supply-chain control systems. As there will be expenses on all steps from producer to retail store, these expenses will accumulate.

And we already pay (with taxes) for police. Which work is to catch thieves.

UPDATE: And as sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33740337) points out, it is not one-time expense for any business in supply chain, as they will need to scan all these tags, and have (much) more warehouse/retail space workers or pay more for more hours. Always, forever.

> I am suggesting that the direction current prosecutors are going is to not punish theft at all.

Your suggestion would generally be incorrect. Prosecutors in _some_ jurisdictions are choosing not to prosecute petty theft, but when organized crime cases are brought to them, they are prosecuting them.

Police, however, have done a poor job of investigating these crime rings, and in some cases have chosen not to make arrests to push a political agenda.

More enforcement against petty theft won't stop the organized crime problem.

You're going to an extreme on how to stop the illegal sales. Amazon could, for instance, stop allowing sales from any company that has fenced illegal goods through them. They could only allow well established businesses that have existed for x years to sell, or heavily inspect companies younger than x years. They could get lists of well-known resellers from manufacturers and heavily inspect businesses not on those lists.

> deodorant sticks are smaller than what I’d get in Canada.

This must be due to the size of the north american armpit.

> There’s also an appalling lack of variety. In particular, you never see Old Spice.

There aren't any Tim Hortons either but I'm not sure if "Brand X is missing" and "There is no variety" is generally the same thing.