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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> Money falls out of armoured bank trucks all over highways when it’s supposed to be secured in the back sometimes

I had a few classmates back in high school whose uncles could get you cheap Nike, Adidas, Calvin Klein etc that fell out of trucks. Happens all the time. Stuff sometimes just gets lost on the way.

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I'm pretty sure saying goods "fell off the truck" is just a euphemism for them being stolen. That's why they're sold cheap.

Why would they be sold cheaply because they are stolen? If the item is the same, then why wouldn’t the price be nearly the same?

A discount moves the stolen items out of your possession much faster, reducing risk of being caught with them and need for storage.

If the price were nearly the same, why would anyone choose to deal with criminals and expose themselves to some level of legal risk when they could get the same product (with a warranty) in a store?

People "deal with criminals" all the time. They don't all wear an eye mask and striped shirts. Every buy choose something from Ebay or an Amazon seller because it was 5-10% less costly than conventional sellers?

You get downvoted but are describing a nice trend. In the old days all you had were stores and poachers. Who was who was easy to tell and the poachers had to suffer a loss. In the modern days, where say novelty sneakers can be bought via innumerable websites the price difference between stores and poachers must have come down. A smart poachers sells stuff that fell of the wagon at retail via pop-up websites. Anything Amazon sells will have fallen of a wagon here or there.

Happens so often, the evolved euphemism is "fell out the back of a low flying aircraft." Us Dubliners are fond of this one.

That wasn't what "fell off the truck" actually meant.

The ole 5 finger discount.

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