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Comment by DuskStar | Hacker News Reader

A relatively homogenous, high-value good with minimal security controls? I'm honestly surprised that theft wasn't a problem long before this.

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Probably the average criminal just didn't think of nuts as being particularly valuable (even though they clearly are).

Wasn't there a case in Canada a few years back where someone stole a huge amount of maple syrup? That stuff is pretty pricey, too.

Edit: yep, $18 million worth. They were caught, eventually.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/01/27/men-convicted...

Hard to off load 18 million of maple syrup.

Right, the natural barrier to a lot of these crimes is the difficulty of unloading that much product on the black market without attracting attention.

Organized crime won't have much problem, you mix it with other goods of the same type and offload them over a period of time.

Nuts go rancid.

1+ years refrigerated, 2+ frozen.

No, the hard part with Maple syrup is that there normally are only a handful of suppliers from some very limited regions. It's very hard to suddenly appear out of nowhere as a major seller of Maple syrup without any history to go with it.

That's why they suspect organized criminal groups--to get rid of large quantities, you need your own distribution channel. One guy working by himself isn't going to have that.

And a few years ago theft of the laundry detergent Tide became a big thing.[1][2]

You wouldn't think of that as a high theft risk commodity either.

[1] http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/ [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/why-are...

It's really hard to run away with a valuable quantity of nuts though.

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