How could 30 of anything stolen from a dollar store be worth more than $30?
For me, this was the kicker:
Williams says tipsters who call Crimestoppers could get up to $2,500 for information leading to the man’s arrest and indictment.
Baffling economics abound.
There’s an underground market for air fresheners? Weird.
If you Google air fresheners from Family Dollar, you learn that their prices are not a dollar. They start at five dollars.
On the other hand, Dollar Tree sells every air freshener for a dollar each.
On a somewhat related note Tide also has a street value
http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/
I don’t understand why this is on Boing Boing. I publish a local paper and we see stupid shoplifting stories like this weekly.
Family Dollar is not a “Everything for a Dollar Store” but a store where a family can stretch its dollars.
I don’t know why folks are so tied up with the idea that dollar stores need to have everything a dollar or less. I grew up in the 70s shopping at the “five and dime” and stuff cost a lot more than a $.05 or $.10.
Forgot to mention they’re heroin scented.
Surely you’ve heard of the Street Value Multiplier Effect. Most commonly observed in drug bust press conferences, but in this case appears to have spread to another product.
And that’s just terrible.
He didn’t take forty of them. He’s not some criminal mastermind in the making.
And now we know where Dollar Tree gets these super-cheap air fresheners.
Oddly enough there’s a huge black market for household goods. When I was living in Brooklyn most of the street merchants and a lot of the bodegas were selling heavily discounted laundry detergent, soap, shampoo, socks, toilet paper etc. From what I gather it was largely stolen, later I read a few articles about how such things had become unlikely barter items in the drug trade. There also seemed to be a lot of smuggled stuff. You know it was labeled for an Asian or South American market, only token English on the label. I also remember a few of the dollar stores in the area getting dinged for receiving stolen goods, or selling expired/tainted food. There’s a lot of people out there who can’t afford much, getting basic cleaning supplies for less then they retail for at any store is pretty tempting and a great way to save some cash. Even if it means buying your socks from some dude with a makeshift street stall who’s got some sketchy connections.
And his stay in prison will cost $60,000 a year.
Oh, no. Stolen air fresheners. It must be the work of the infamous shoplifter, Stinky.
I don’t know how to break it to you, sonny, but “Woolworth’s 5 and ten cent store” was the original name of the chain, and when founded it in fact did limit its prices to 5 and ten cents per item.
<a href=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ptOCAuEHRqu3jCpE7ThBwHdl1CfEHcevDnVz_abTxvg/edit?pli=1>Your friendly link for the day.
“Psst… what you need, brotha? I can hook you up with some of that Classic Pine, Bubblegum, P-Mint, Lemmy-lem… I swear this shit be so fresh you gonna think you’re in a national forest.”
Well, one way to break it to me is not to act superior and insult me. That’d be nice, though unexpected, on a message board or discussion thread. It’s be even better if the point you made was salient and didn’t make my point that for more than half a century stores called five and dimes charge more than five cents and ten cents. We should be used to it, and understand that dollar stores are in the same genre.
The fact is, no one is alive who remembers when Woolworth’s charged no more than a dime for any product since he did that in 1878.
Further, Brainspore (who I responded to) used the generic “dollar store” to ask how 30 items could be worth more than $30, and I responded with the same kind of generic answer about “Five and Dimes.” And many stores were called “five and dimes” beyond Woolworths. It was a generic term for a variety store was smaller than a department story but bigger than a specialty shop.
Hmmm. Not really. I am not disappointed, but confused. This does not rise to the level of “wonderful things” so I am wondering why it got posted. It’s not even a dog bites man story, but more like a dog ate her kibble this morning story.
