Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
economist.com
economist.com
Anyway, to get to my point; turns out I do know fences - basically anyone with an Amazon account, and I know a lot of fuckers with Prime. For the low investment of polyfill bags and other shipping materials, and this one weird trick called stealing, you too can make money online! Just take your stolen goods, send them to Amazon, and they'll take care of selling them for you. All you gotta do is some computer shit, and some packaging, and then send it off to Amazon. Because your supply costs are cheap, you can undercut your competitors (but not by too much) and rake in the profit. Amazon supposedly is cracking down on this but I have yet to see any meaningful evidence of any real enforcement.
The economist article avoids naming names, but what you're looking for to get started is Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).
More likely this stuff is sold on ebay
I sure hope so.
Amazon seems to only carry many common household items through dubious 3rd party sellers.
On the subject of deodorant, I've received the wrong type from Amazon multiple times, including some that obviously came from a foreign market. I ordered Dove. That can't be difficult to source from the manufacturer.
I just want Target to bring back Subscribe and Save so I can ditch Amazon completely. Third party fulfillment ruined Amazon's store.
I have doubts about this.
At least it's Amazon losing money then rather than Amazon benefiting from crime against competitors.
Same as if stripe, google ads and shopify were used.
They don’t take possession of the items at any time. Even if they warehouse has them, they are in the same boat as uhaul or a storage company.
or, take the other approach, and sell it slightly higher. this will easily remove the suspicion that you are selling stolen goods. in fact, you might get more sales from people deliberately looking to not purchase from the lowest price seller. it's genius, and i see no fault in this plan whatsoever.
So I steal some consumer goods, put them in individual boxes, send them to Amazon warehouse and they distribute for me.
I simply never put that together.
But surely Amazon is literally handling stolen goods?
Is there a smoking gun email?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Bay-Area-retail-th...
Of course if it's some popular in-demand book, it was almost certainly stolen. Most of the free library books I've scored are 50 year old textbooks about obscure/obsolete topics.
If Amazon were a mom and pop fence, the local cops could bust them in a sting. But Amazon is a huge megacorp, so even if the cops try to catch them in a sting nothing will stick because Amazon will claim their shear scale rendered them completely oblivious to everything and therefore not criminally culpable.
Yeah, it's bullshit.
If you can prove Amazon has or sold your stolen goods you can absolutely be made whole by following a process.
I don’t really think our system errs on the side of justice but I think the remedies available to victims in these two scenarios are about appropriate to the respective scenarios.
It's not as though the thieves hire workers to do this for them. It's something they can do themselves while tweaking.
Blame the people stealing and the system that refuses to prosecute them.
Trafficking in stolen property is a felony. That's true whether you definitely know it's stolen property or if you definitely should have known (recklessly trafficking). You, if you repeatedly did it out of your small business and ignored complaints, would face prison. Why does the law apply differently to Amazon?
My guess is, if you told Amazon's CEO that he had one month to substantially reduce trafficking or face felony prosecution and prison time - I bet you'd see severe reductions.
*of course this does not exonerate the original thieves, but as a matter of practicality it is going to be easier to hit a single large offender than a myriad of small ones.
If Amazon can ship products to my house within 2-hours, it certainly can crack down on selling stolen goods. It just has zero incentive to.
TFA addresses this directly.
It's also interesting how the HN crowd will jump to protect a company's profit except when it's about the few love to hate you entities.
Perhaps thats why I've noticed a large number of complaints related to CVS-type items sold on Amazon: used items, counterfeit items, diluted items, etc..
So many sellers you see selling 5 of some random.
It's basically those guys with a suitcase in markets selling whatever they got hold of that week.
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.
Bodegas.
This is text book rumor-mongering and spreading misinformation.
Amazon should not be required to do anything about this, that’s why we pay cops.
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".
My reading of the article suggests that the trend discussed is a result of the latter, which is more recent and problematic, and not the former. Comments here discussing the morality of crime or a desire for policy change are missing this distinction.
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 stores are evil corporations and therefore deserve no sympathy.
Knowing some people who work in retail, the impact of rampant theft (organized or random) is really quite unsettling on the people who have to be around it. Retail store policies are very much about not interfering with the thieves, but it’s quite upsetting when you realize you’re in an environment where the law doesn’t really mean anything and consequences basically don’t exist for breaking the law. The few people I know in retail (including retail management) are looking to get out ASAP because it just feels so vaguely unsafe and, worse yet, large swaths of the public seem to thing the thieves are the good guys and the retail employees are the bad ones because they’re associated with a corporation.
The most remote, homestead-y places will have unattended "stores" where you leave out goods and people come by and leave money in the basket and take what you have. The least remote, most-managed places have security locks on items over $15. It is impossible to run a friendly, neighborhood-run store when any new customer is a potential thief. When theft goes uncontrolled, owners begin to look at their customers with suspicion. Those who don't like theft leave for more peaceful places and are replaced by owners who will tolerate theft with a big insurance policy and force.
It is continually astonishing to me that so many "community-focused" people don't realize that unilateral actions of harm inside the community (theft, assault, etc.) have ripple effects that harm the entire community. If you grow up in a region where store owners believe you might be a thief unless they personally know you and you have to constantly worry about protecting what's yours, and I grow up in an area where I'm trusted and respected by business owners and I leave my door unlocked when I go to town, how is equity meaningfully achievable between us?
There's a street in northern Baltimore where you don't actually go into any of the shops. Instead, you walk into a foyer-mantrap hybrid made of bulletproof glass. There, the retail employees ask you what you want, you tell them, pay, and then they go get it for you. Experiencing it for the first time was bizarre. Not an area I felt safe parking my car.
What do you think about how this relates to communities shifting almost entirely to the internet?
Happened before in history. See the Russian Revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union. Widespread moral justification for theft of private property on class-based "social justice" arguments. It's even happening right here in this HN thread, people justifying stealing.
Think of shoplifting as "inefficient redistribution".
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.
"Rite Aid, a pharmacy, closed a branch in Hell’s Kitchen in February after losing $200,000 worth of stuff last winter. And last week Target, a big retailer, reported that a rise in “shrink” (to use the industry jargon) had reduced its gross profit margin by $400m so far this year. The National Retail Federation says inventory loss, largely driven by theft, cost retailers a record $95bn last year."
It seems that $300k is several orders of magnitude off.
The harm to the public is when the stores find it unprofitable to exist in certain neighborhoods, which makes the neighborhoods even worse off. If the stores don't close, then prices have to rise to pay for the shrinkage, which the public has to pay for.
Shoplifting results in shops closing down in poorer areas or raising prices. This is quite bad for the poor.
People getting away with shoplifting and seeing others get away with it makes them feel they are not in a law abiding environment and makes them far more willing to break other laws and do things like deal drugs, beat up/kill their enemies and take the law into their own hands. A look at the murder rate in poor areas is suggestive.
Doesn't this just mean that it is priced in? So thiefs are stealing from paying customers.
“Though shalt not steal” - Ten Commandments
“If a man has stolen goods from a temple, or house, he shall be put to death; and he that has received the stolen property from him shall be put to death.” - Code of Hammurabi
Private property is the foundation of civilization and pretending theft doesn’t matter undermines the basis of our world. All theft is wrong.
This is a shortsighted take. This is as stupid as the corporations buying "cyber insurance" not realizing the cases are going up and that prevention and processes are needed. Then comes next year their premiums shoot up. Who would have thought it?!
Yes they "build shrinkage" for a forecasted number. If that number goes up and you get people swiping large amounts of products that number becomes meaningless. Then people wonder why did the store close or why a deodorant there costs $10 and is locked behind the counter
Well... it's not that weird. The big chain stores like Walmart ruthlessly exploit their workers to the point of them being forced to apply for food stamps [1], while the owner class makes literally a dozen billions of dollars a year in net profits [2]. Additionally, Walmart is infamous for killing off small businesses around them [3]. So, I don't have much sympathy at all for these corporations and Walmart in particular.
With ever more and more people being unable to make a honest living - over half the US has less than 1000$ in savings [4] - it's no surprise that shoplifting for survival is on the rise and at least somewhat accepted in society.
Unfortunately, small stores get caught up in the crossfire as they can't afford to bear the rising cost of shoplifting.
We need better wages for the 99% and higher taxes for the 1% so that we can get away from forcing people to steal to survive.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-in...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-09-14/radiating...
[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...
I really don't think these people are choosing between stealing and starving.
What are the good reasons that led to and allows this?
One is harm to capitalism, property and profit, one is harm to neighbours and fellow humans,.
Which one is worse, knowing you can't solve it all?
I guess, but conversely I'd argue that organized retail theft has been around pretty much as long as supply chains have existed. That's the mob's bread and butter. The phrase "riding shotgun" is in common use. Perhaps mass shoplifting from the store is a new tactic, but personally I look at this situation and ask, "what has changed"?
For one, we've sort of collectively realized how terrible modern jails are (Rikers anyone?). And that's good.
A second conclusion I draw is that retail stores have been gutted... walmart-ized... every ounce of efficiency wrung out of them. Have you ever been to one of these massive retail outlets and had trouble finding anyone that works there? A few months ago everyone was clutching pearls about some 150 yd stretch of train track in LA that was continually being robbed... and I can make a wild guess that this was the result of 1) skeleton crews, 2) minimal security on the ground and 3) shipping containers that are running with sub-standard defense mechanisms because they're simply too much work (slows down loading, probably break a lot, etc.).
Yes organized crime should be punished, but these companies seem to throw up they're hands and say "Gee golly, we have no idea why $20 million dollars of merchandise watched by 5 overworked, low wage employees and 1 loss prevention officer is such a target! It's a mystery!"
I don't hate mega corporations (ok maybe a little), but they definitely have a hand in creating this situation. And it's rarely commented upon when discussing the recent rise in shoplifting.
(Edit: I forgot my favorite shoplifting fact... up until recently, reports showed that both shoplifting and wage theft "cost the economy" around $40 billion per year. Comparing prosecution rates of the two crimes is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Once I chased a thief out to the waiting car, and blocked the door from closing, leaned into the car, and came to my senses...
I let them go. It was only worth $750. And I wasn't about to brawl inside a car with two thugs.
I could have been stabbed or shot. It's not worth the risk. And I was the store owner. Let me tell you straight up: it's not understaffing.
I would expressly tell my staff to not risk their safety for merch.
A couple years after I sold the store, they had an armed robbery at closing and lost about a hundred thousand. Also, break-ins went up: they tried cutting the safe out but couldn't reach the rear bolts to cut them. They even stole the security cameras.
I only reported once because I knew the guy and I felt betrayed. I don't know for certain, but I think the vast majority of retail theft goes unreported.
And your favorite shoplifting fact is down-right offensive. If you were more balanced in your counterargument you'd also ask the reader: What is the cost to the public for added security, staff, deterrence tech, and lost merch? And lost sense of safety and security? Those are priceless in the eyes of most reasonable people.
It's sad to think we may have lived through the golden era of retail where stores were relatively safe and pallets of merch could be left out unguarded.
These gangs are ruining it for everyone. We shouldn't even have this discussion. We should all unify with retailers of all sizes. Theft is straight up wrong, and the thieves should be punished.
And note that security measures are deadweight loss to society.
I’m in my 30s and this is the first time I’ve ever actually understood the historical meaning of this
Nobody is going to risk it for 7 euro an hour lmao.
The videos of organized ransacking of stores are honestly insane. The stores are somewhat powerless because of liability, and the new laws that have raised the level in which the law even cares. I don't think the "broken window" policy is the end-all, it has some problems but allowing "small" theft rings does not generally put areas on a good trajectory. These goods are almost always getting 3rd party listed, be it Amazon, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, etc.
As the wage gap and opportunity gap widens in the US, allowing shoplifting is actually an intentional release valve that is being tolerated and even outright legally permitted (California Prop 47), because - without it - we would see more home break-ins, kidnappings of wealthy people and more severe offenses. Instead, shoplifting is relatively harmless and prevents this type of escalation of crime.
“Panem et circenses” said the Romans, shoplifting is a form of “panem”. I think many don’t understand the incredible pressure pot that is the US at the moment with vast negative social pressures and inequality. If it explodes, all bets are off: the US could look a lot like South Africa and Brazil than what it is now.
This plus some political survivorship too: votes are all equal, and when most people are disadvantaged or about to become disadvantaged, politicians cater more and more to them (populism) in order to survive and dominate in the political arena.
This isn't hyperbole, just look at what happens in other countries that lack the ability to enforce their laws.
Well, given that we seem to lack the ability to enforce our laws, what do we have to look forward to?
What a wild theory. I've seen no evidence of this mechanism existing.
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 <thing> deserts. Voters voted for it anyway.
No, it's called not imprisoning someone who isn't an imminent threat for weeks or months without a trial while they're waiting for one.
Reform the court system to get to trial faster if you want a change, in the meantime cash bail is an affront to everyone's rights.
You collect the materials and farm them off to Amazon.
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 people on bail for shoplifting." She made it clear that shoplifting was never a low priority for prosecution, but now it's a higher one.
I understand that the claim in this article is that aggregators/sellers/fences whatever should be surveilled and prosecuted (more), but just wanted to add this tale from the courthouse and emphasize that the street-level shoplifter will be the target of most policy interventions here, which is the least effective and least humane strategy.
> Manhattan D.A. Acts on Vow to Seek Incarceration Only for Worst Crimes
> The district attorney, Alvin Bragg, told prosecutors in his office in a memo that they should ask judges for jail or prison time only for the most serious offenses — including murder, sexual assault and economic crimes involving vast sums of money — unless the law requires them to do otherwise.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/nyregion/alvin-bragg-manh...
And this isn't entirely new with Bragg...
https://nypost.com/2022/06/07/nyc-da-downgrades-macys-loving...
https://nypost.com/2021/10/02/nyc-man-leads-record-shatterin...
Also, the DAs supported the "harm over harm" amendment to bail reform (CPL 510.10(4)t) for the explicit purpose of seeking bail in repeat shoplifting cases. And can you guess how they're using it?
You are conflating DA public statements with actual operational policy. It is nothing new that DAs claim to prioritize things that are not on their roadmaps.
But you're claiming that the DA actually intended to send them to jail. So he was baiting them to commit the crime? I don't buy it.
And you're claiming that his prosecutors have no discretion in prosecuting these cases? I don't buy it, but if you have some references to support that claim, other than word of mouth, I'm all ears.
I can't find precisely what the amendment was and when it took effect, but the subject of the article was a surge in retail theft over several years, so if you're talking about some changes in the past year, then maybe we will be able to see some effects in the next year.
Maybe what you say is true about arraignments. But that assumes that someone has been reported, investigated, and caught.
The crime is perfect.
Not only does Texas have higher rates of larceny theft[1], it is the biggest outlier on the graph in terms of lack of prosecution for it - no other state is further below the trend line.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/232583/larceny-theft-rat...
Getting a low-level criminal or junkie off the street, alive, is worth a lot. You can then offer them a chance to turn their sentence into rehab or something if they don't need jail.
And there's no reason we can't go for the higher ups too, there's (jail)time for everyone!
Off the street and on to Riker's Island. A jail so dangerous that it has a high likelihood of being put into federal receivership in the next year. People are safer on the street. Full stop.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_effect
It would be totally illogical to pretend that such massive sweeping change in public perception of policing would have no effect on the activity of the police themselves.
If cops are standing around doing nothing, it's because it's pointless to engage with a suspect physically, risking yourself while by the way people around whip out their phones to video you, if the suspect will be released on their own recognizance on some lowered charge, if the charge isn't dropped anyway.
You can also add, if you want to criticize cops, that they're civil workers at the end of the day, and most are in for the benefits, such as pension and healthcare, rather than pretending to be superheroes or vigilantes.
Also he mentions social programs as an alternative to incarceration, but are these programs actually available? The crime rate suggests they are not, so reducing incarceration may be counterproductive until they are better established.
It's tied in this foundational belief (and it's mentioned as one of the points) that incarceration leads to more recidivism. How one can reach this conclusion by taking overall violent crime stats into account (also all but one out of seven felony types are up in NYC) requires some logical legwork.
The fact that increases of petty crime and increases of serious crime are both happening yearly should be a red flag that makes us question the policy decisions, which again are based on not 'over policing' or 'over incarcerating'. It could be the two are connected, but you'd be accused of Broken Windows Theory.
It's hard not to see a general chaos as being contributing. The plexiglass seems like a symbol of that to many people.
What's tempting is that there's a lack of punishment. Do you propose we lecture to thieves to dissuade them?
It's like arguing people run red lights because they get distracted due to phone notifications and so maybe we shouldn't punish them with points that could lead to a license suspension.
I leave the problem of getting perfectly upstanding policemen who will not abuse their powers as an exercise to the reader.
There is another engine driving this phenomenon: addicts "boosting" to feed their addiction. Drug use is another crime that society seems uninterested in prosecuting or punishing as of late. Add illicitly manufactured Fentanyl (1) to that recipe and you have an absolute onslaught of retail theft.
In interview after interview with addicts, it's clear that boosting is one of the primary methods of funding drug use. (2) If we are not interested in curbing drug trafficking, sales, and abuse, we will continue to have a huge problem with retail theft. (And also an unconscionable death toll that is growing rapidly.)
(1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34603876/ (2) https://www.youtube.com/@SoftWhiteUnderbelly/videos
For example, Oregon had huge protests and weak government responses, and yet prosecutes large amounts of shoplifting.
Blaming this on the response to BLM seems intuitive, but I have yet to see data that supports it.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/multnomah-co...
There were not protests state wide, they were in a single county, the one in which shoplifting isn't prosecuted as much. A couple miles away, with different DAs, you will get arrested and prosecuted for even very minor theft.
> Unseating [Washington Co DA] Barton has been a priority for national progressive groups funding criminal justice reform in Oregon.
> “Washington County is the most extreme county I’ve ever worked in, and that’s because of the tough on crime, war on drugs, lock 'em up and throw away the key fanaticism coming from the DA’s office,” Decker said.
This is the person responsible for a 93% prosecution rate, being re-elected on the basis of "law and order" and relatively conservative viewpoints, backlash against the BLM protest responses that you talk about.
For example, in Austin, TX, I can't speak for retail crimes in particular but there has most definitely been a change in prosecuting other crimes. Hit-and-runs are an epidemic now in the city, primarily because the police won't even respond unless there is a major injury. I was in a hit and run, I got a detailed description of the car and license plate, and yet there were 0 consequences to the person that hit me. It actually makes more sense to run if you hit someone because there are literally no downsides (except for people with a conscience, of course).
But if you looked across TX as a whole, this data would definitely not show up.
https://abc7chicago.com/smash-and-grab-robberies-chicago-org...
Prosecutor policy, police strike, Covid masking and office closures confounding the operation of the law enforcement system, or something else?
the article says that was speculated but not borne out by the data.
> What is behind this unwelcome rise? 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 (see chart).
Ah yes, because this problem is independent from any other problems such as robbery, car break ins, homelessness, drugs, etc
What percentage of New York makes over 200k? They can stay, the rest can leave.
IOW, it takes all sorts to make a city work, and if you have labor (those people who work, at whatever wage) move away because the policies favour non-labour (those people whose income is from theft) it doesn't really matter how many 200k stockbrokers want to stay - they'll have to move eventually too.
If you scale that 200k for cost of living it shouldn't be very hard to find an alternative
That is, if you're making a $200k salary in NYC, let's say you spend 50k a year on housing and 50k a year on other expenses, but the rest you can put towards savings.
Then you move somewhere that is 50% cheaper, but you make 50% less. So now you can get the same quality apartment for $25k and your other expenses are only $25k, but you're only saving $50k a year instead of $100.
Obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but the vast majority of time if you move to a place with a much lower cost of living, your reduction in salary, if looking at local jobs, is unlikely to make up for it. Never mind the fact that for many industries there are only a few places where you can live if you really want a career: if you work in high finance or fashion in the US, you probably want to live in NYC. Film or TV, you'll be in LA, etc.
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 who immigrated from Turkey and own the operation rights of that store, on thanksgiving eve.
May be I am Old, but I did not mind the locked shelves after meeting her.
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?
If this had been Gary whose worked at CVS for 17 years and hates his job i'm sure the detail would have been left out.
Maybe she's from a conservative part of the world that doesn't have too many woman turning out as doctors. Maybe supporting her family of immigrants, who might not have a ton of money and are dealing with some of the hard things that being new in a strange country brings. Maybe in the deep background you can sense an unhappy reason they left Turkey in the first place. And all this taking place on a holiday eve when she and your narrator would rather be home with a hot tea and a book. She's a fighter, up against long odds, having overcome some adversity to get here. I don't mind a short wait.
Or maybe something totally different.
Sudafed, baby formula, deodorant, and razor blades, together could sound like a Jesse Pinkman shopping list before he found a high school chemistry teacher to help him.
At the same time, since nobody is making retail chains put lock boxes on the deodorant aisle, shrinkage best meets Occam's razor. Or would if it hadn't been shoplifted.
This is a scientific fact supported by all the research. And yet for some reason the FDA approved it as effective.
It's true they removed Sudafed from most (by and large all, except by request) boxes labeled Sudafed (sub-labeling them Sudafed PE), and PE is not effective. Many consumers never realized, and even if they do, they generally do not realize the substitute doesn't really work.
Thanks to https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/docs/pseudo-brief112013.pdf in most states you cannot buy it off the shelf yourself (only behind the counter and often with ID), some locales it's prescription only, and it's only this year that Oregon started letting you get it without a prescription again:
“People shouldn’t be asked to visit a doctor to obtain a prescription for common cold medicine, especially when Oregon is the only state requiring a prescription," Post said in a statement when the bill passed. "We can trust Oregonians more than that.”
https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2022/01...
Take for example Dove Men+Care antiperspirant. In the US what is a rather compact can 3.8oz/107g was on the shelf at $9.55 (plus sales tax). I've just checked a well known UK chemist (boots) and 150ml of the same brand is £1.70 and 250ml is £2.00 (both including sales tax). Not really sure why the US measure aerosols in g and the UK measures them in ml but the price difference alone is jaw dropping.
In 2004 I spent part of my honeymoon in London. At a pub, I paid £10.95 for a burger. At the time it was ~$2 to £1, so it was effectively a $20 burger. My friends thought I was full of it when I said I paid $20 for a burger.
First for the price info. I live in [state capital city] but we're not a big tourist destination and that can ranges between $4.09 and $10 locally. Prices can vary drastically based on the retailer and location in even a city.
For the actual difference in product, I'm fairly sure this is just a misunderstanding (and a reasonable one at that due to our crappy weight system).
The US version is listed at 3.8OZ "NET WT." not "FL. OZ", so the 3.8oz should be the weight of the actual deodorant inside, not the volume of it. Whereas the UK version being listed at 250ml I assume it is the volume.
I don't have a good estimate on the actual volume/weight difference of the two products though.
Maybe someone could grab a can from a US store and do the math on the actual volume of the container?
Moreover the UK has undergone dollar deflation in recent years that we are only just catching up to. The pound dropped from $1.70 to $1.20 in the last decade. But £ inflation over that period was low. So prices were in fact falling in dollar terms until the recent inflationary period.
As for the issue of unhoused people, which I don't think is related to the actual crime rate but is very much related to perceptions of crime, we also have some tent encampments down in my area. In Seattle (I visit the International District weekly) a year ago there were huge tent cities under freeway overpasses, actual structures hacked together on sidewalks, people living in deplorable conditions. There have always been unhoused people in Seattle but it was an order of magnitude worse than normal. In the last several months Washington state and Seattle have made a huge effort to clear the tent cities and get people into transitional housing, and from what I can tell it's working: the sidewalk shacks are gone, the tents are gone, the areas are fenced off, and by all accounts they've gotten almost all the people living there into shelter of some kind. I'm paying attention to whether I hear less squawking about crime now that there's less visible disorder.
Any solution that doesn't segregate the sick can't work.
These are different things, with different motivations, and cracking down on someone stealing because they have nothing doesn't actually prevent that from happening more (you need to address the underlying issue).
The organized crime, however, should be harshly treated, because these folks are doing this to enrich themselves, and it's organized. The biggest problem here is that stopping this requires more than just police arresting people. It requires actual investigation work, and it seems that police funding tends to go to patrols and not investigation. Close rates for investigations are at all time lows. I really wish this was the focus of law & order republicans, rather than "we need to arrest people", because that only catches the easy, petty criminals.
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 conclusion is that most Americans do live in big cities. However, even if all big cities have restrictive shelving practices, there are still 3 out of 10 Americans (outside of the 500K cities) that do no experience these practices.
I'm in an area with 4M people and have seen the shelving practices. So I can concluded that at least 34% of Americans (who are in larger areas) have also experienced these restrictions.
In Australia, spraypaint in a hardware store is locked up but often not much else that I can recall. In Home Depot in the US, power tools even in the $30-80 range can be, amongst other things. In supermarkets in most states/cities I've been to, cheap toiletries can require help from staff with a key, plus some electronics in the automotive section. Seems to be a reaction to targeted theft rather than just value of items.
I live in the kind of city that most HNers would sneer at (we're kind of known for being rough) and it's not like described.
Caveat: In states where the law isn't enforced, people often don't bother to report minor crimes, because there is no point in doing so.
Usually the US (Even the most expensive parts) would be a lot cheaper than e.g. Oslo or Zurich. That's not the case unless there is something else going on here , e.g. that they aren't the same product due to different size and so on.
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.
So you could maybe make a case that Amazon makes it easier for retail theft, but you also have to seemingly ban all online retailing, which seems rather anticompetitive.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004723520...
https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/media/police...
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/666614
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X1...
https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c11849/c11849.pdf
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0032258X156127...
To see when police are absent, look to CHAZ. Did CHAZ not have one of the highest murder rates in the known world?
Given the amount of theft in America, and size of Amazon's American revenue and sales, can we figure out what percentage of Amazon's revenue is generated from fencing stolen goods?
on edit: IIRC AWS is 70%, Ad revenue is half of retail (30%), that means criminal revenue has to be less than 15% and I would think probably significantly less than half of that even. Maybe 2% at most?
on second edit: I wonder if every corporation has a percentage of its revenue that is criminal, like how processed food has a percentage of bug parts. You would think not, initially, but just voicing the idea makes it strangely attractive as a concept.
You guys somehow manage to foster so many bored criminals so as to resort to messing with deodorant in pharmacies. Are they out of banks to rob? Illegal drugs to sell? Come on!
Drop a bag of slime on them as they exit? Make the floor slippery as they try to run out? There are smart people working at target; they need to be less shy about protecting their store, which is an American treasure
They still need a cop to show up and actually trespass the individual. Cops refuse to show up, take hours if they do and perhaps even then still not be convinced to spend their time doing to report. The cops know the person will be back, the company knows the person will be back, and even the person knows they'll be back. Unfortunately there's nothing the owner of the store can do except attempt to reduce all liability of said person being on property.
Sometimes you'll see high-value items (like expensive bottles of alcohol) with security tags that need to be removed at checkout, but I don't recall seeing locked down shelves.
I just visited Texas and they didn't have this problem, but it was hella boring there. A lot of places outside the USA also don't have this problem even in the big cities.
The shoplifting "epidemic" has been due to organized gangs for quite a while as the increasing legality of marijuana is impacting their revenue streams.
lol, lmao
Weasel word dog whistles are fun, no?
$ curl -s 'https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/11/24/why-its-hard-to-buy-deodorant-in-manhattan' | grep articleBody | jq -r .articleBody 2>/dev/null | fmtThis is why I care. Criminals degrade society and we all suffer for their greed.
Pretending that crime is some kind of quirk that you can get rid of if only [fill in reasons here], and that the grey and black markets wouldn't exist if only we didn't have crime, implies a lack of understanding when it comes to socioeconomics.
Unless you know how to get us to a post-scarcity world of course, in which case: please make that happen. We're all tired.
That economics has a just-so story to explain why this is exactly what I should expect doesn't change the fact that I didn't used to have to do this, and now I do have to do this.
One of the basic functions of the state is to make it difficult for people to steal things.
Here on planet earth however, some people are just anti-social and understand nothing except force. No amount of education or counselling or whatever else will change that.
We consider them basic necessities, because we're used to them, but all these new inventions had to be made by somebody. The profit motive seems to be quite good at incentivizing people to do just that. If we discourage that then the basic necessities of tomorrow might not get invented.
Society doesn't conspire to cause poverty, nature already inflicted that upon us.
Your argument would be more sound if the people stealing were stealing for themselves instead of selling them on a marketplace at slightly below retail with a 100% margin. Their theft hurts the jobs and customers (some shops have outright closed) and it also still has the end customer paying basically the same amount.
These people could get a job, they just don’t want to be a “sucker” and work 9 to 5 like some chump.
They can go to a soup kitchen, or a church, or a food panty and ask for basic necessities.
Americans are very generous, especially conservative ones, who lead the world in charity and generosity. There is no excuse to steal when you can just ask.
Petty shoplifters should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Did anyone in particular construct this society, or was it just given?
You can't judge society at large by the same ethical standard that you judge an individual
"Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime"
-- Aristotle
We have a very peculiar "recession" that ultimately seems aimed at breaking labor when, for the first time in decades, people started to see a real increase in wages. That is unacceptable as it reduces profits. The Fed Chair is on the record as wanting to increase the unemployment level.
[1]: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1360890-aristotle-poverty-is-th...
Who are you talking about? Other than the techbros who switched jobs for a $100k raise, which is a tiny fraction of the population, basically everyone else's real wages have plummeted the last two years.
You should mix with different people. When you mix poverty and a lack of education with genetic stupidity you get some pretty obnoxious personal motivations over the population, and those motivations aren't fixed by lifting people out of poverty or trying to educate them. Some people are simply lost causes that society would be better off without, period. Pretending otherwise is naive.