Well, it’s about (checks interest bearing accounts, 401k and portfolio) $23k more than mine. Give or take.
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Alternatively:
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I do struggle to sympathize with people who hoard cash and then find their savings wiped out in some tediously inevitable way. At worst they’re obnoxious survivalists who hope to be the last human standing (and ludicrously imagine that they’d be just fine without the rest of us); at best they’re counter-examples we should be using to persuade elderly relatives not to end up like that dipshit on the news.
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Christ, what an asshole we’ve got here.
And this (among other good reasons) is why we have banks, people.
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In this world of paycheck to paycheck living, that is likely much more than most have available in cash.
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Would that be the same banks that forge signatures and can be told to freeze your assets? And in many cases do their best to turn you towards to consumerism and try to get you into perpetual debt?
Yes, storing all your life savings in one place is a stupid idea. Storing them at home even more so.
Keeping a few thousand in cash at home, stored at a reasonably secure place, not so much.
And yes, losing a few ten k is a bad thing. Though something that happens regularly in cash happy Germany, where paying an used car in the 6 to 30 k range in cash is pretty normal.
However, the times where I lost such sums were all cashless, though banks weren’t involved. But I can totally see a low income persons with few available resources to react to being burned by a bank to mistrust them in general.
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Said relatives also fall victim to the Spanish prisoner scam or roofing scams, in which banks rarely catch on when they withdraw large sums.
Frankly, I have a lot more sympathy for this guy then with all the federal employees affected by the shutdown and not being able to pay their credit card debt and financed cars.
Not to shock you about the poors, but there are millions of Americans who do not make that in a year, or they make just about that in a year. I’m unsure how you expect people should be expected to build up savings, when they are barely scraping by on a daily basis.
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Yep. Welcome to the lives of the majority of us Americans. Apparently you’re one of the special ones, if $23K in savings is “pathetic.” Luxuriate.
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I imagined that it was an amount that the thief needed desperately to pay a bill.
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I’m enjoying all the speculation about the missing money…it’s fun to think about how things might have happened…Was it stolen? When? By whom? Why? The reporting is sketchy on details, isn’t it?
I have the impression that the missing $320 may have actually wound up recycled.
The UPI article, that Pesco links to, links to two other articles…
From The Mercury News:
The money could have easily ended up going into the baler if staff weren’t keeping an eye out for it, Wise [Linda Wise, general manager of Recology Humboldt County] said. The shoebox was in a load full of paper, which usually “just goes into the baler,” she said.
From The Press Democrat:
A video feed from inside the recycling facility showed the money — $22,940 — somehow stayed in the box all the way from Ashland to Humboldt, Sollom [Brian Sollom, operations manager for three Recology recycling facilities in Humboldt County] said.
“It only toppled out of the box once it got onto the sorting line,” Sollom said. “We managed to recover all but $320.”
From that, I’m picturing the workers scrambling to stop the conveyor belt and grab as much of the spilled cash as they could before it went past the point of no return. It sounds to me as though they’re saying that $320 of it got away from them and went into the baler. It would be interesting to know if that’s what actually happened, or not. If it is, then someone probably saw it go into the baler…but in any case I guess they’re trusting that the box did actually contain a full $23,000 [Edit: make that $22,940 according to The Press Democrat; $23,000 would be rounding, I guess?] when it reached their facility.
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When you spot it, you can hit the stop
Button.
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That makes sense.
That got me wondering how fast the sorting lines run, and what the job would be like. Here’s a video of a recycling facility in the Chicago area (just grabbing something to look at…I’m assuming it’s pretty typical…) Cued to start at 1:55 showing the various sorting lines. Yikes! It goes even faster than I expected. Looks like a tough and boring job…I hope they get decent pay for that.
I wonder how quickly the money even got noticed, because the workers are watching for specific items that aren’t recyclable, like plastic bags, electronics, and hazardous materials…I mean, even though they were told to keep an eye out for a shoebox of money, they’ve still got to keep their focus on their regular job of spotting the regular stuff to pull out. Mere seconds (or less) would count, it seems. I can see why it was reported that the workers all felt really good about recovering most of the guy’s money!
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Unless it’s heavily unionized, no. Tough and boring are the jobs nearly anyone can do, given enough motivation. (Like not wanting to starve). So they aren’t paid as well as where the pool of applicants is smaller.
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