[HN Gopher] Home Depot is introducing power tools that won't wor...
___________________________________________________________________
Home Depot is introducing power tools that won't work if they're
stolen
Author : nbernard
Score : 178 points
Date : 2021-08-02 11:57 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| hirundo wrote:
| I'd be interested in a feature like this that works for the owner
| after the sale. I assume that would mean that I have to have an
| app on my phone running to use the tool, and that's not great,
| but I could live with it. I have friends whose homes and trucks
| have been broken into just to take their tools. These were
| contractors and it was a major setback for them. Theft deterrence
| is worth a fair amount of inconvenience to many buyers.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| _I assume that would mean that I have to have an app on my
| phone running to use the tool..._
|
| Which won't be updated when your phone OS changes,
| necessitating purchasing new tools. Sounds like a win!
| andylynch wrote:
| Check this out - https://onekey.milwaukeetool.com
|
| I expect other manufacturers are working on similar things.
| 1-6 wrote:
| You'll start to see some people deliberately powering on
| their tools to make it look like they're working.
| ip26 wrote:
| Perhaps it's a dogwhistle, but it reads much more like
| inventory management than work tracking. The equivalent of
| taping AirTags to each tool & adding an odometer.
| d--b wrote:
| Problem is that BT components are somewhat more fragile than a
| drill motor. If the BT component fails, is the tool not working
| anymore?
|
| They say this is to fight organized crime. I am pretty sure
| organized criminal know how to bypass a BT security feature...
| newdude116 wrote:
| Yeah. What a Bullshit. What is the next thing? They change policy
| and charge USD 1 per hole if you drill more then three per day?
| Thanks I pass.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26466515
|
| "The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He
| searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you
| tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it
| remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in
| the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." "I think
| otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you
| signed when you bought this conapt." In his desk drawer he found
| the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer
| to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for
| opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. "You
| discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug. From the
| drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with
| it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his
| apt's money-gulping door. "I'll sue you," the door said as the
| first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a
| door. But I guess I can live through it."
| flowersjeff wrote:
| I honestly see this as the 'things to come' - and sort of
| impressed that these technologies/ideas haven't been used sooner.
|
| With that said, I too think that it would be a HUGE gain for all
| if ownership / control could be transferred. However, most people
| cannot properly control stuff they dearly care for, and could see
| this becoming a HUGE headache for the stores to manage after the
| sale.
|
| Perhaps an after purchase website that you register your info and
| products ( maybe connecting said devices to your phone(s) or
| other BLE devices .) The big issue is, you're on the job - forgot
| your phone/etc...and can't drill a hole. Although, most people
| would be more likely to forget their shoes than their phone.
| rayiner wrote:
| > He made a point to distinguish between "professional
| shoplifters" and disorganized solo thieves. The pros, he said,
| frequently are connected to a larger network that can, in some
| cases, function as a sophisticated "shadow business."
|
| This is the aspect of "defund the police" that people don't seem
| to understand. Police can't stop every, or even most, solo
| criminals. But that's not the only purpose of police. Where the
| police monopoly on violence is weak, organized crime springs up
| and turns shoplifting, robbery, etc., into a business.
| Kaze404 wrote:
| Isn't the point that by defunding the police that they'd be
| relegated to spending the resources they have on the functions
| they're actually trained to do, like the one you mentioned?
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| Pretty much. Even outright police abolition doesn't propose
| simply shrugging our shoulders and ignoring crime, for that
| matter, just that we should figure out how to address crime
| with institutions whose central paradigm isn't threatening
| and committing violence. That's a tall order, and I gather
| there's plenty to criticize in the movement, but most
| arguments against it come across more like arguments against
| Thanos snapping all police officers out of existence.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is pretty hand-wavey, isn't it? If outright abolition
| doesn't propose shrugging our shoulders and ignoring crime,
| what does it propose? That we address it from root causes
| by restructuring the economy to correct the injustices that
| lead to crime?
| ineedasername wrote:
| If the tools can be activate by Bluetooth, seems like they might
| be deactivated that way as well (especially if it was returned).
|
| Given typical IoT security, it would be interesting to see how
| that ends up working out for them.
| wampwampwhat wrote:
| Home Depot could solve this problem really easily by having more
| than two people working in a store at a given time.. It's a
| pretty simple solution. Every single person I know has stolen
| something small (like a box of screws) from home depot in the
| last few years because they got tired of trying to find someone
| to check out with and said fuck it and walked out. Theres other
| examples of that same forced to steal because theres no way to
| pay in this thread, and all over the internet. HD has incompetent
| top down leadership. Fire your C Suite.
| epmaybe wrote:
| If you're upset with the service a place provides, the rational
| response isn't to shoplift, it's to find a different place that
| offers the same service..
| cratermoon wrote:
| Good. Now do it for guns.
| underseacables wrote:
| Going to Home Depot in some places is to be treated like a thief.
| When you use the self check out they have a camera looking right
| at you and they show you looking at you, and they have the
| cameras in the departments that beep, and it's just that much on
| the side of annoying.
| cmcmcmcm wrote:
| I don't mind if the tools would be locked up, I mind that I have
| to spend 10 minutes trying to find someone to tell them I want it
| and then he has to find someone who has the key that I have to
| wait another 10 minutes for the person to come and unlock it and
| give it to me. I would be more than happy if they have a system
| where I can do something to indicate that I want this item and
| then later when I check out it is waiting for me by the register
| or some pickup counter.
| cududa wrote:
| Given how easy it was to breach their POS system, something tells
| me the private key that activates them is going to get stolen
| real fast.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Now just imagine a foreign power being able to brick all power
| tools and blame it on a rogue hacker group.
|
| But at least the stores didn't get tools stolen, didn't need to
| pay more for insurance, and could pocket the profits.
| chelmzy wrote:
| They are using bluetooth. Your scenario is extremely unlikely
| and would only work if some wormable bluetooth vuln was
| widespread.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Something like an app almost everyone uses?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I stole from Home Depo and this is my story:
|
| Dark and stormy night in Pacific Northwest. I've finished a long
| day at work and am heading to meet family at the cabin in the
| woods. I get a text: "There is a mouse. Buy traps before you
| come." So I pull off the highway and hit a suburban Home Depo. I
| grab a wide selection of anti-mouse devices and potions. I try to
| buy my items but, in a deserted store, none of the cashiers are
| manned. The "manager" points me to the self-checkout. Ugh. My
| packing-wrapped packs of mouse traps wont scan. Manager "helps"
| but then turns it over to me to type in the numbers. With the
| manager watching I pay, bag my stuff, and leave.
|
| In the parking lot I spread my assortment of mouse-killing
| paraphernalia on the passenger seat and sent a photo to the
| family at the cabin. Then I notice my mistake. I paid for two
| 2-packs of rat traps when in fact I had taken two _4-packs_. Do I
| go back and correct this crime? Do I talk to that useless
| "manager" and spend an hour struggling to undo my mistake via the
| self-checkout? Do I risk missing the last ferry? I got into my
| car and drove on into the night. I am a shoplifter.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Propane tanks aren't allowed in stores in most places in the
| US. Which causes some problems when the folks working at box
| stores don't know that their store sells (literally) empty ones
| brand new (vacuumed down from the factory).
|
| I had a new one in my cart, and was told no fewer than 3 times
| to take it outside between the aisle and the register.
|
| If I hadn't been feeling so damn honest, I'd have followed
| their instructions to the letter.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Why would one want an empty one?
| t0mas88 wrote:
| To have it filled up outside?
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Exactly: most places do an exchange program in which you
| don't own the tank, and aren't responsible for the long
| term maintenance of it. The propane exchange is marked up
| to cover that. Based on the expected lifetime of the tank
| and how much propane you use , it can make sense to own
| your own tank and pay a lower price per unit on the
| propane (provided there's somebody nearby who fills
| tanks).
| Syzygies wrote:
| Home Depot doesn't sell "Replacement Clamp Pads" for their
| Bessey "Clutch Style Bar Clamp". They regularly go missing.
| You're _supposed_ to shop lift them, then the store sends the
| defective clamps back to be refitted. This is apparently by
| design.
| shaftway wrote:
| They don't?
|
| https://www.homedepot.com/b/Hide-Unavailable-
| Products/N-5yc1...
| Syzygies wrote:
| Those are close but don't fit. They're for pipe clamps.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I used to work retail, and I wouldn't classify this as
| "shoplifting". It is more appropriate to label this as "Shitty
| customer service resulting in totally-avoidable shrink".
| jdc0589 wrote:
| I too unintentionally steal from home depot. If you sell
| assorted individual bolts/nuts/washers, the most convenient
| place for people to put them is their pockets unless you
| provide a better option, which they don't. pretty easy to
| forget about the 3 nuts in your pocket.
| shaftway wrote:
| I grab one of the buckets and use it as a shopping cart, even
| if I'm only getting a few nuts and bolts like that, just so I
| don't accidentally lose one in a pocket.
|
| Of course, that backfired once when I got home and realized I
| hadn't paid for the bucket.
| jdc0589 wrote:
| this is a good idea, because I always need one more bucket
| than I currently own. same phenomenon as clamps
| saalweachter wrote:
| I don't know who would build a paperclip-maximizing AI,
| but I'd totally build a clamp-maximizer.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I used to ride motorcycles, sportbikes. I was in a pharmacy
| once carrying my helmet via the chin strap. Rather than a bag
| or cart I was putting things into the helmet as if it were a
| basket. Store security noticed and confronted me in the
| aisle. They were friendly enough.
| treis wrote:
| I can one up this. Made an order online and had my contractor
| go pick up the stuff. I think it wasn't pulled yet so the
| contractor picked it himself. Few days later I start getting
| "Your order is ready" e-mails and eventually a cancelled one.
| Guess they didn't mark it as completed, re-picked it, and then
| eventually refunded the order when it wasn't picked out.
|
| Though typing this all out it does occur to me that maybe my
| contractor just walked out with all the stuff.
| paul7986 wrote:
| I did similar thing of sorts with a all in one air fryer though
| I went to a manned cashier with it and a few other items. I
| realized once I got home the cashier didn't charge me for the
| air fryer.
|
| So your not alone re: not going back when You had all
| intentions of paying and went thru the right process to do so.
|
| The company I'm sure wrote their error down in their billion
| dollar loss column. Which I shop there regularly and do self
| check out now more successfully!
| mosseater wrote:
| I've had this happen with a blender at a Target, and a
| Christmas tree at a Walmart. The cashiers were very much
| doing it intentionally. That's what happens when you pay
| people minimum wage!
| benlivengood wrote:
| For everyone worried about micro-crime the stores and insurance
| companies already have this priced into "shrinkage". No store
| can keep a 1:1 correspondence between items purchased and items
| sold at intended prices to customers and it's only best-effort
| to approach that correspondence. SLAs of 100% are unrealistic
| for either stores or customers. In this case the average SLA
| due to shrink is about 99% across retail sectors (1.38% shrink
| is the average, 1% the median) [0]. That includes a lot of
| intentional theft which dwarfs accidental over- and under-
| payment.
|
| [0] https://www.bluecart.com/blog/inventory-shrinkage
| dncornholio wrote:
| You did not steal, they charged you not enough. Big difference.
|
| Stealing / shoplifting means you had intention.
| mrweasel wrote:
| A Danish supermarket chain got all pissy about how you where
| stealing from them and you'd get reported to the police if
| you kept the money when their staff gave you the wrong
| change. It last until customers pointed out that their
| recipts where wrong in something like 80 - 90% of the time,
| in the stores favor and they'd now start filling police
| reports rather than just asking the staff to correct the
| error.
| umvi wrote:
| It was self checkout and OP selected the wrong SKU at
| checkout.
|
| The stealing part didn't happen until later when OP realized
| his mistake and intentionally chose never to correct it
| gffrd wrote:
| Is it assisting a crime if a checker improperly scans an
| item to the benefit of a shopper without realizing it ...
| then realizes it later and does nothing about it?
|
| Should they be punished?
| dncornholio wrote:
| Not punished but they should be hold accountable to
| return it or pay the money if returning is impossible.
|
| We've had a few cases where people got 2 items instead of
| 1 delivered. They did not had the right to keep the item,
| but they did not get punishment other then returning or
| paying back.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Nope, the responsibility is on both parties (Home Depot and
| the purchaser) to avoid mistakes like that, because we're
| all human and we all make mistakes.
|
| Home Depot is partially at fault for a checkout interface
| that allows the error to be made in the first place.
|
| OP no more "stole" later on than the store "allowed him to
| take it". It's a gray area where neither party has
| preponderant fault.
|
| It's going to cost the consumer time/money/effort to return
| the item, just like it would cost Home Depot
| time/money/effort to build systems that would avoid more of
| the mistakes in the first place.
|
| In other words, the consumer has no more obligation to
| return the item than Home Depot does to prevent the
| mistakes in the first place. And in the long run it tends
| to even out -- for every free item you accidentally get
| from Home Depot that wasn't worth returning, there's
| probably another item you bought that failed to function as
| advertised that also wasn't worth returning.
| drunner wrote:
| Reminds me of buying beets at the grocery store that were $.99
| "each", but were conveniently bundled in a group of 3.
|
| I got home and was thinking "that was a lot of beets for $.99."
| but I still have no idea if I did the self checkout right or
| wrong when I entered "1" as the quantity.
| dharmab wrote:
| My dad ate lots of guava fruit in his childhood in his native
| country. He buys a few whenever the local grocers have them
| in stock. About half the time, the cashier keys them in as
| limes (about 1/3rd the price) and he doesn't realize until
| he's home and reads the receipt.
| nkozyra wrote:
| I can't imagine confusing them with limes given their size.
| I had a guava tree for a while and it's ... hard to eat
| that much guava.
| mucholove wrote:
| There are several varieties of guava. The really good
| ones are small and lime sized and the really bad ones are
| bigger and crap.
|
| Really good ones have nice, soft red flesh and don't have
| seeds that will break a tooth.
| [deleted]
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I think there may be a labelling law that covers that. I
| believe that they label on any package has to be an accurate
| reflection of the package's price. Things like meat that are
| prepackaged but sold by weight have to be individually
| labelled/priced on the shelf. Each jurisdiction will have its
| own rules but they all came from a time in the 1950s when
| evil supermarkets were attempting to hide higher prices on
| groceries knowing that few people would check their receipts
| against the shelf prices.
|
| https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2017/04/28/US-
| Pr...
|
| Arizona:
|
| F. Except as otherwise provided in this chapter or by rules
| adopted pursuant to this chapter, any package kept for the
| purpose of sale or offered or exposed for _sale shall bear on
| the outside of the package a definite, plain and conspicuous
| declaration of: 4. The price_ , except as provided in
| subsections K and L.
|
| DC:
|
| (6) DISPLAY AND ADVERTISING OF CONSUMER COMMODITY UNIT
| PRICES.--A seller shall conspicuously and _clearly display
| the price per package or unit_ and the unit price in close
| proximity to the display of the commodity
| 1-6 wrote:
| I had a similar experience. I had to ask the self-checkout
| store clerk whether each banana was $0.25 or if it was all
| the bananas. They told me it was $0.25 per banana.
| rubicon33 wrote:
| Oh, wow.
|
| I've remarked to my wife how if I ever go crazy, can't hold
| down a job, and live in the streets that I would sustain
| myself with bananas because you can buy a whole bundle of
| them for pennies.
|
| Woops...
| kbenson wrote:
| That's the trade off of self checkout scales that try to
| match what you're buying compared to those that don't seem to
| care at all. At some stores, it's overly sensitive, and you
| constantly need attention to get past the system thinking
| you're trying to steal, and even adding a paper bag is enough
| to cause problems. At other it doesn't seem like it cares at
| all, and two items can be on at the same time without it
| noticing. Maybe they track it all and just review cameras
| later?
|
| Produce charged by the item is probably hard to account for,
| but three times the normal weight seems like something that
| might be safe to trigger on.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| I really really hate the weighing self-checkout things that
| are so prevalent in the UK (and I guess US?). They require
| a special artform of weighing the things just right,
| putting it one by one in the right basket etc, which is
| slower than going through a normal check-out.
|
| In contrast one of the bigger chains in The Netherlands has
| a self-checkout system where you get a small hand scanner
| to put in a holder on your cart, it doesn't make you weigh
| anything, just show it the barcode before dropping things
| in your cart (or easier: put your bag in the cart, put
| everything straight in the bag). At the exit, drop the
| scanner thing in a charger, hold your phone in front of the
| checkout screen, Apple pay, done, straight to the car with
| your stuff already in your bag.
|
| Their UX guys understand how to optimize. The original
| version made you press a few buttons to select things like
| "card payment" (still takes only 30 seconds vs the Tesco
| several minutes of weighing things), a few years ago they
| made it default to card payment, so you don't have to press
| any buttons if you use Apple pay or similar.
|
| I guess only Amazon has an even better thing with their
| "walk straight our" shop. But it has the same optimization
| idea: Make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy
| things.
| kbenson wrote:
| Yeah, around here Target seems to be easiest. They don't
| care if you use the scale at all. You can just scan and
| put into a bag someone with you is holding, or whatever,
| it never needs to touch the scale. Each self-checkout
| does have a little security screen above it through
| that's about 4"x6" that shows you and says you're being
| recorded, so my guess is that it along with the fact most
| people are paying with credit makes purposeful fraud
| fairly low, or at least low enough to be worth while.
| billytetrud wrote:
| If their labeling is confusing or misleading, that's their
| fault.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Yup!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28038481
| boatsie wrote:
| The annoying thing is that the store again has all the power
| here. If you get overcharged for something that was supposed to
| be on sale, scans as the wrong item, or the price label is
| different than the scan, it is on YOU to notice, then wait in
| line in person to explain the problem and get it corrected.
|
| There is no penalty for the store and you don't get any
| additional compensation, so most people will say, "I guess it's
| just $2 so it's not worth fixing." But suppose this happens to
| thousands of people. The company always wins.
| gkoberger wrote:
| "The company always wins."
|
| You're replying to a story where the company lost.
|
| There's a ton of consumer protection laws. I agree companies
| might have the upper hand, but I think consumers have a lot
| of recourse here in the US. There's tons of laws, the ability
| to do chargebacks, etc.
| akersten wrote:
| > You're replying to a story where the company lost.
|
| When people say "The house always wins" re: casinos, we
| don't take the rare slots payout as evidence that the
| outcomes are not, in fact, stacked against the little guy.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| What makes being overcharged due to errors more common
| than being undercharged? If anything I would expect it to
| be the other way around as it is easier to accidentally
| fail to scan an item than to accidentally double-scan an
| item, and personally I'm much more likely to double-check
| everything when the total comes out surprisingly high
| than when it comes out surprisingly low.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > What makes being overcharged due to errors more common
| than being undercharged?
|
| Design? The people making these systems are doing so at
| the behest of customers who would find overcharging much
| more acceptable than undercharging.
| coding123 wrote:
| For me it wasn't dark and stormy, it was hot and smoky...
|
| I discovered my three "No Trespassing" signs were not on the
| receipt. It is funny that my anti-crime sign ended up being a
| crime. I spend so damn much money with them though, recently
| purchased wood chipper, gas powered post driver and tons of
| other little things. Probably spent a good $2000 in the past 4
| months, so I don't feel guilty.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Your ideas of morality are interesting for want of a better
| word.
| cryvate1284 wrote:
| Is he wrong though? If you went to a shop and spent $2,000
| but forgot to pay for 3 items (say worth $5) by accident, I
| do not think the shop manager should be upset, or that you
| should feel bad about it? If it was a smaller/non-chain
| store, it would probably be free! If anything, the main
| annoyance is probably their stock numbers being out of
| date.
|
| Making mistakes is human, and I do not think they should
| feel bad for what they have done (and for not correcting
| it), and this is coming from someone who cannot steal the
| bags that now cost 20 pence at Tesco and even went to buy
| imaginary food at Waitrose after I forgot to pay another
| time...
| coding123 wrote:
| Just to clarify, yes the 3 signs probably total $6. Would
| I feel guilty if they didn't charge me for a $300 tool?
| Absolutely not, because I would have gone back in and
| told them about it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, he isn't wrong, I just had not thought of it in that
| way. If you spend a fortune in a store then that creates
| a bit more leeway for accidents whereas when you walk
| into a store with the single purpose of relieving them of
| their wares then that gives a completely different vibe.
| Intent is what matters and I had not come to this
| conclusion.
|
| I'm always going out of my way to keep things fair and
| can be quite rigid about this, never even realized there
| are shades of gray there.
| soneil wrote:
| The fun parts of 'shades of gray' is this can actually
| lead to increased sales down the line, if you end up with
| that quiet nagging "I owe them for .." in the back of
| your head. Almost like goodwill that the store did
| nothing to intentionally earn.
|
| Innocent mistakes are incredibly curious beasts.
| coding123 wrote:
| Thanks for the personal insult.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Insult?
| coding123 wrote:
| Morality "is interesting for lack of a better word"
| USUALLY means a negative thing - and you meant it
| specifically about "my ideas of morality" as a whole - so
| yes that is an insult. I didn't get "your morality is
| awesome I wish I was like that" from your statement so I
| do apologize if I reached and I am wrong about what you
| meant.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, I just think it is interesting, and I don't have a
| better term for it. For me - right up until reading your
| comment - such a thing was black-and-white, and I see
| that there is some wiggle room there based on the rest of
| the relationship, so thank you for that. I do believe
| that if you were caught in a situation like that on the
| way to the door from the register that it might cause a
| lot of trouble though, which in turn might end up with
| you stopping to visit that particular store.
|
| I've seen enough of this in a local supermarket (Albert
| Heijn, a large chain in NL), which has switched to self
| checkout + random checks on a lot of checkout lanes.
|
| Older people that are more or less forced to use the self
| checkout because there are now too few cashiers end up
| making mistakes and are then treated like shoplifters if
| they end up with a random check. Quite frustrating.
| coding123 wrote:
| Thanks and I do apologize for the assumption earlier.
| agumonkey wrote:
| i wouldn't qualify that as stealing since it was an innocent
| (although beneficial) mistake
|
| had you plan to confuse the manager to let him ask you to type
| stuff then it would be different
|
| I had a similar issue one day, while showing some prices to my
| mother I had to take one box of something out of the shelf.
| After criticizing the absurd premium of that mall, we walked
| out. 100m outside the store I notice I still had that box under
| my arm.. somehow there was no anti-stealing widget and I simply
| walked out with it unknowingly. It was one petty CDROM label
| sticker press from the early 2000s, $20 top .. mother and I
| decided not to go through the hurdle of negotiating good faith
| return with the security guy. (the irony is that 3 years prior
| I did steal, out of a joke-then-dare moment with a buddy, stuff
| and got caught; so when I realized I did "steal" again .. I
| became livid and started to look at my mother mortified saying
| I swear I swear I didn't while she looked at me dumbfounded not
| understand what the hell I was talking about)
| ssully wrote:
| Went to Trader Joe's last year and "treated" myself to a fancy
| jar of honey. I usually buy the cheap stuff, but this was like
| a $10 jar of New Zealand honey. I probably spent 3 minutes in
| front of the display deciding if I should buy it or my usual
| stuff.
|
| I got in line, grocer bagged (I usually help, but they did all
| the bagging last year), paid and left. When I got to my car I
| saw the jar of honey in the corner of the car outside of the
| bags; they never scanned it. Instead of going back in and
| paying for it, I just left. Still feel kind of bad for it.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Bank error (to use monopoly terminology) isn't the same as bank
| robbery. This is irrevant to what they're trying to prevent.
| frozenport wrote:
| well written but irrelevant to the article's described effort
| to protect high-end equipment against organized criminals
| umvi wrote:
| Well, you can still go back and buy 2 two packs at four pack
| prices and then you wouldn't be a shop lifter anymore.
|
| This post almost reads like "well home depot's UX wasn't very
| good one day and I was in a hurry so that entitled me to steal
| guilt free"
| lostcolony wrote:
| Would you consider it not stealing if it had been the cashier
| who rang him up?
|
| What if he didn't notice it at all? Is he still "guilty" for
| the theft, such that it would be fair for police to show up
| at his doorstep and arrest him if the store detected it and
| correlated it to this credit card? Is it fair for him to be
| put in county jail for six months, which is a possible
| consequence for petty theft?
| umvi wrote:
| The stealing part (or rather "dishonesty part") happens
| when you realize a mistake has been made and intentionally
| choose not to correct it. If a cashier gives me a $10 bill
| for change instead of a $1 and I realize the mistake out in
| the parking lot and choose not to correct it, yes, I am
| guilty of being dishonest and yes, I am stealing from home
| depot even though it was 100% the cashier's fault.
|
| I don't see why this is a moral dilemma. If the opposite
| happened and you got short changed and home depot refused
| to correct it wouldn't you think home depot stole from you?
| michaelt wrote:
| _> If the opposite happened and you got short changed and
| home depot refused to correct it wouldn 't you think home
| depot stole from you?_
|
| If I got short changed at Home Depot, noticed it after
| I'd left the store, then returned and asked them to swap
| $1 for $10 I'd expect to be laughed out of the store.
| umvi wrote:
| Why? I would expect them to count the money in the
| register, find it is off by $9 compared to what their
| computer says should be in the register, and then believe
| your story.
|
| This is a contrived example though. Say you buy something
| on homedepot.com and they never ship it to you and keep
| your money? Would you still expect to be laughed at if
| you call up their customer service and explain?
| argomo wrote:
| During the transaction, yes... it is morally incumbent on
| both parties to ensure they aren't cheating the other.
| After the transaction though, the moral calculus shifts,
| and I'm going to take into account the time/convenience
| cost to myself (among other factors) when I decide
| whether or not to rectify it. (I've found out the hard
| way that companies can make this surprisingly difficult
| or time-consuming.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Exactly. It does get you funny looks though, when you go
| back into the store to try to correct an error like that.
| I've even had employees tell me to get lost because it is
| too much trouble to fix the error.
| lostcolony wrote:
| What about back at home? Are you morally incumbent to
| drive back to resolve it? There was no intention for
| dishonesty on your part; the expectation of you to
| inconvenience yourself for something you did not intend,
| for such a small imbalance, strikes me as an unreasonable
| one. If you noticed it there in the store that they gave
| you incorrect change and said nothing, yes, I'd agree it
| was dishonest to say nothing. But when you notice after
| the fact, the decision to do nothing says more about the
| level of effort involved rather than morality.
|
| It's also why I don't expect Home Depot to find and pay
| me should they shortchange me; the level of effort is too
| large. Is Home Depot morally guilty of theft because the
| clerk shortchanged me? How would that even work, that the
| -company- is morally guilty?
| umvi wrote:
| > What about back at home? Are you morally incumbent to
| drive back to resolve it?
|
| I mean... Abraham "Honest Abe" Lincoln ostensibly did
| just that, so I guess it just depends on the value you
| place on your own integrity.
|
| As for me... if I discovered they had given me a few
| extra cents in change I probably wouldn't drive back (I
| probably wouldn't even discover it because I hardly ever
| count change). But if I realized I hadn't paid for
| something or that I got more than I paid for (i.e. bought
| a can of spray paint online and they shipped me 3) I
| probably would at least contact their customer service
| and ask if they wanted me to send the two additional cans
| back.
|
| > It's also why I don't expect Home Depot to find and pay
| me should they shortchange me; the level of effort is too
| large.
|
| Ok, what if it happened not because of a negligent clerk
| but a negligent programmer? You buy a non-existant
| product on homedepot.com that was there because of a bug
| and your money just goes into a home depot's pocket and
| the product is never shipped to you (because it doesn't
| exist). If home depot discovers this you would expect
| them to track down and refund anyone who bought the non-
| existent product, am I wrong? And if they discover the
| bug and decide to do nothing (because it's too much
| effort to refund everyone) and just keep the money,
| wouldn't that be stealing?
| fuzxi wrote:
| $9 means exponentially more to me than it does to a
| national chain.
| moftz wrote:
| I accidentally scanned a flank steak as a can of beans since I
| was holding the can and flank at the same time. The bagging
| station must have had the weight sensor turned off since I
| didn't notice the mistake until looking at my receipt at home.
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| I had a similar self-checkout error at a home depot. I can't
| remember what the exact item was but I was buying it in bulk so
| probably some sort of fastener or screw.
|
| The packaging was clear and the scanner must have gotten the
| barcode off one of the single items rather than outer bundled
| item barcode. The cart price was high enough I didn't notice
| the price difference on one item.
|
| I called and they said not to worry about it -\\_(tsu)_/-
| tantalor wrote:
| No, theft requires intent.
|
| You can go back later and settle up if you make a mistake. If
| you don't... well now it is theft.
| canadianfella wrote:
| He didn't
| [deleted]
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Been many years now. SOL lapsed long ago. I'm free and clear.
| balls187 wrote:
| > I paid for two 2-packs of rat traps when in fact I had taken
| two 4-packs. Do I go back and correct this crime?
|
| I'm curious what you believe the crime was? It's possible the
| item rang up wrong and you inputted the correct numbers.
|
| And whether you should have gone back--what would you have done
| if you relised you made the opposite mistake--you paid for two
| 4-packs, but only taken two 2-packs?
| toss1 wrote:
| >>...the company's fight against organized retail crime. He made
| a point to distinguish between "professional shoplifters" and
| disorganized solo thieves. The pros, he said, frequently are
| connected to a larger network that can, in some cases, function
| as a sophisticated "shadow business."
|
| OK, so they're fighting pros with bluetooth-enabling the tools at
| checkout. What could go wrong?
|
| The amateurs will certainly be foiled, while the pros will pay
| crackers to build a work-around.
|
| Meanwhile, the enabling device will become another point of
| failure in the product and will cause more warranty claims and
| dissatisfaction - and there's nothing quite as annoying as being
| in the middle of a job and having a tool breakdown, especially a
| newer one that is expected to work for years.
|
| Would also be likely that they'll have miscellaneous connection
| failures while trying to enable the tool at checkout, e.g., just
| from EM interference in random locations; that'll make for happy
| customers...
|
| Sure, it is a serious problem, but I'm not sure this is a good
| solution.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| This is the same Home Depot that had its PoS terminals
| compromised ? https://www.sans.org/white-papers/36367/ These
| people? https://threatpost.com/home-depot-data-breach-order-
| confirma... OK. Maybe trying something to reduce shrinkage is
| good -- AFTER hardening the back end.
| ttul wrote:
| The organized crime groups could not make it happen at scale
| without a few dirty managers. Don't let Home Depot fool you here:
| most of their shrinkage is from the inside.
| wirthjason wrote:
| > "We certainly don't want to affect the 99.5% of our customers
| who are just there to pick up their hammers and nails," Glenn
| said. "We don't want to look like an armed encampment."
|
| This is the best quote from the article. It feels so sensible and
| opposite to how many media companies treat their customers.
| People have to jump through so many hoops and hassle to avoid DRM
| that's it's easier to just get a rip without all the rights
| garbage.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Although you still need to track down an employee to buy
| something (who moves it to a different locked area at
| checkout). And then wait again at checkout to have a 2nd
| employee go fetch it.
|
| Similarly, at Walmart, even the $15 hair dryers are locked in
| glass cases, which the warden must unlock with a large ring of
| keys.
| flerchin wrote:
| Any technical details on this? It better be like a dye-pak on a
| shirt I'm buying, and not like a John Deere tractor.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I imagine in the near future some security company leveraging
| amazon's "No checkout" grocery store AI camera system to watch
| for theft.
|
| You won't be arrested but you'll get blacklisted on a shared
| database across dozens of retailers.
|
| The future is going to be weird.
| kileywm wrote:
| Some stores, like Costco, have an interesting, alternative
| approach. Many items in their electronics department are prepay.
| You can try out the floor model (tethered to the display
| platform), and if you wish to purchase it you pull a cardboard
| item card. That card is scanned during the checkout process, and
| once payment is received, the staff bring the physical item from
| secure storage to the post-paid customer.
|
| With the item card approach, you never have the product in your
| hands until it has been paid for. Between that practice and their
| receipt checking at the exit, I do wonder what their theft
| numbers look like.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| > I do wonder what their theft numbers look like.
|
| Toys'R'Us would know - they were doing that with Nintendo games
| all the way back in the 80s.
| jjulius wrote:
| Toys'R'Us also did that with their larger-ticket items, such
| as bicycles.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Had the same experience buying a CPU from Microcenter. You told
| a store associate what processor you wanted, he wrote it on a
| cardboard slip, then you get the product after checkout is paid
| for. Overall I was pretty happy with the process. Hardest part
| was hunting down a sales associate.
| gre wrote:
| Fry's had a cage behind the registers with all their small
| expensive parts like CPUs and RAM.
| benglish11 wrote:
| At Costco you don't even have to tell a store associate. They
| have a stack of cardboard posters with the item on it and you
| take that to the register
| hatware wrote:
| It's such a simple, smart policy and it doesn't frustrate
| honest customers.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I've never been to Costco, but Toys R Us used to have their
| video games like that in the 80s. We also had a chain of stores
| around here called Best, that I seem to recall having a
| conveyor belt of whatever you bought, and you would stand there
| with your receipt waiting for it to come out. I may have
| imagined that though. Either way, it would be much more
| effective at stopping theft.
| bombcar wrote:
| As we transition to more pickup/delivery-type retail that will
| happen more and more. Expect to see the "counter" move forward
| toward the front of the store as grocery and retail return to
| the "general store" type aesthetic, where most of the stock is
| behind the counter instead of in front of it.
|
| Will also eventually save on packaging too, as it won't have to
| be flashy.
| kergonath wrote:
| Around here in <some European country>, they do this quite
| often with stuff that tends to get stolen (video games and
| such) and stuff that they must not sell to children (like razor
| blades).
|
| You just get a bit of cardboard from the aisle, and either the
| cashier gives you the item when you pay, or you retrieve it
| from a counter, showing the receipt.
|
| It's actually quite mind-boggling that their conclusion from
| their risk analysis is to get this high-tech solution with
| potentially much worse user experience, than the foolproof low-
| tech one that just involves them paying one more bloke.
| toast0 wrote:
| It's not just paying the person to get your product after you
| pay for it; they also need to rearrange their space to store
| those things (many which are bulky) towards the front of the
| store. Locked cases are an in between step, need a person to
| help, but don't need a dedicated space at the front.
| kergonath wrote:
| Fair enough, this needs to be taken into account in the
| stock management.
|
| That said, for bulky items there is either someone bringing
| them over, or a counter closer to where the stuff is stored
| (often in another building). They don't keep stuff like
| piles of large TVs at the front of the store.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| I've got two complaints here as a legitimate and frequent
| consumer:
|
| 1) They already chain down all the tools and/or keep them boxed
| without store displays such that it is very difficult to evaluate
| tools you might wish to purchase. You can't even pick them up to
| get a feeling for the weight. Many of the more robust tools
| (table saws, drill presses, etc) they don't keep in stock either.
|
| 2) So many of the accidental thefts in the comments are due to
| self-scanning. Well - why were consumers forced to self-checkout
| in the first place? Because HD never has enough checkers, their
| checkout areas are poorly designed for the kinds of bulk items
| being purchased, and basically HD is being cheap and wants to
| lower their costs by putting the burden back on the consumer.
| Sure, I do my best to scan accurately and ethically, but I can
| completely see how this happens and it is difficult to blame the
| consumer when HD has deliberately funnel you into self-checkout.
| crummybowley wrote:
| I read your comment without reading the article, then I read
| the article. I am sad :/
|
| While it would make sense for loss prevention at the store, it
| would make more sense if this feature was extended to the end
| user.
| spike021 wrote:
| Reminds me of video games/movies where guns/other weapons only
| work for the enemies or whatever because they have an NFC or
| something that validates them as being allowed to fire the
| weapon.
| oauea wrote:
| Sounds like they're creating a lot of waste.
| javman wrote:
| I started shopping pretty regularly at Home Depot after buying a
| house about eight years ago. I used to be surprised after paying
| when the alarm sounded as I walked out the door. I would stop and
| turn around, and usually a cashier would wave and say "you're
| okay!"... or just wave impatiently... or there would be no
| cashiers. It got to the point where I had a little bit of dread
| every time I walked out the door ("Is it going to go off this
| time?")... It is somewhat embarrassing to have other customers
| look at you like you must've just stolen something.
|
| After a few years of this, I noticed the cashiers don't even look
| at the door anymore when the alarm goes off. I've never seen a
| security person at Home Depot.
|
| I'm more likely to buy tools and parts online now. Home Depot has
| become the last resort unless I need something immediately, or
| need raw building supplies. Because I don't want to feel like a
| criminal moments after paying for what I'm carrying.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| It sounds like the beginning of "power tools as a service" which
| would be terrible.
|
| However, I could see a "power tools subscription model" as an
| interesting idea for contractors and other serious power tool
| users: A contractor pays a monthly fee and gets a steady supply
| of drill bits and replacement power tools.
| adolph wrote:
| I think I would like this service. I already use tool rental at
| HD for stuff I don't want to own.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Would be great to have a neighborhood "lending library" for
| tools.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| You can definitely rent tools, including from HD, but it's much
| more common for pros to use financing from the manufacturer.
| andylynch wrote:
| Sounds like the local hire shops?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| For non professionals you sometimes get community tool
| libraries.
| bartread wrote:
| Riiiiiiiiiight.
|
| So, we're talking about organised criminals here? Primarily,
| anyway?
|
| They steal power tools because they figure they can make a lot of
| money out of them, and there's clearly a substantial market for
| stolen power tools if that's the case. It matters not one whit if
| the goofballs who steal the tools on their behalf are able to
| make them work or not.
|
| Do you honestly think they're not going to be able to figure this
| stuff out and easily inactivate the Bluetooth lockout?
|
| All you're going to end up doing is passing the cost of this
| theatre on to legitimate consumers which, perversely, will
| increase the appeal of buying stolen tools at a discount. Bravo.
|
| Why not use the tagging mechanism you probably already have for
| high value items and which won't require any additional costs/new
| technology?
|
| This has nothing to do with customer experience, or even with
| reducing revenue lost to shoplifting, and everything to do with
| some tech/IT guy's wet dream about control and power.
|
| (Cynically, I wonder if this also provides a route to killing the
| secondary market for power tools, forcing people to buy new. It's
| a long play but it's exactly the kind of thing I can imagine them
| doing, especially with people like Sonos having tried to brick
| speakers to prevent them being resold.)
| throwawaygh wrote:
| I'm skeptical of the effectiveness.
|
| The article states that the reason for this intervention is a set
| of organized shoplifting rings that operate as shadow businesses.
|
| I have a hard time believing that an organized operation won't
| eventually figure out how to enable stolen gear. Maybe via
| technological means by figuring out how the bluetooth "enable"
| protocol works or waiting for a vuln in the tool's bt stack, but
| much more likely by just bribing a cashier or manager.
|
| Keeping valuable merchandise behind lock and key -- or behind the
| counter -- seems like a more effective solution.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Honestly if they do enough volume to spin custom silicon, which
| gets cheaper and more accessible every year, it would become
| impractical to bypass the security. You essentially would get
| an electric motor and would need to rig up your own controller.
| And likely also figure out how to get the DRM battery to work
| with it.
| shawnz wrote:
| It's a power tool, why does it need any silicon at all?
|
| Obviously the primary current path of battery -> trigger ->
| motor isn't going to be able to be routed through any
| integrated circuits. So I have a hard time imagining that
| this won't be trivially bypassable.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The motor is driven by a controller which modulates
| external switching transistors as a function of trigger
| percentage and the direction switch.
|
| It likely also does stuff like battery monitoring and
| thermal foldback.
| lamontcg wrote:
| They can always steal the equipment that unlocks it all.
| There have to be thousands of those pieces of equipment at
| every Home Depot out there. One of them disappears but
| isn't reported as stolen and now you've got your master key
| to unlock anything you want.
| jakemauer wrote:
| Brushless tools, which are increasingly common, absolutely
| require silicon to manage the pulses of electricity to the
| winding groups.
| bradstewart wrote:
| Pretty much all motor controllers these days are silicon
| based.
| [deleted]
| driverdan wrote:
| As a consumer I have no interest in a power tool with BT
| (de)activation built in. I will not buy from them.
| sircastor wrote:
| Me neither, but what do you do if the all the quality brands
| don't offer anything else? Do you prefer the poorly performing
| drill, or the one that works really well and has this thing you
| never use?
|
| I've bought enough tools from harbor freight to be struggling
| with the question.
| lucb1e wrote:
| The question is whether they tell you. It might be like this
| internet-lite (where you share a NAT connection with a dozen
| other customers) that is never mentioned by the ISP, before or
| after purchase, until you notice you can't host games,
| nextcloud, or anything else.
| totony wrote:
| You can just test if it works when picking it up
| lucb1e wrote:
| Sure, and then you drill stuff for a year, something
| rattles loose, and then the device bricks because of the
| DRM which is designed to be hard to bypass (i.e. nigh-
| impossible to repair by yourself).
|
| At least that's what I think their point was and I can see
| the reasoning.
| paulpauper wrote:
| This is the worst way to make money. Yeah, I'll risk many years
| in jail to steal $500 of crap that I can only pawn off for $100.
| major505 wrote:
| fuck that. Then you try to sell it and the godman thing stop stop
| working. I don't want DRM in my power drill.
| est31 wrote:
| Or lose access to it because google canceled your account for
| some reason.
| rs999gti wrote:
| You have remote kill and upgrade in your mobile phone, did you
| get rid of your phone?
| api wrote:
| You can disable it, and anyway a phone is a different sort of
| product. It's a computer product with a local interface
| (making this stuff easy to administrate) and is usually a lot
| more costly.
|
| I think what the parent is expressing is that they don't want
| this kind of functionality in everything, requiring constant
| management of all the DRM in all kinds of everyday items. Too
| much of a hassle for little benefit.
| andylynch wrote:
| My plumber would love this stuff. He's always complaining about
| tools going walking and anything that helps stop that is a win.
| major505 wrote:
| Better way to keep tools for a long time is not to borrow
| your tools.
| dukecitypal wrote:
| Next natural step would be to sell the tools for a lower cost
| than the competitor and start charging for hours of use.
| devwastaken wrote:
| If this is organized as they say, it'll be broken in a week.
| Change the checkout process. Customers can bring a little box
| under the display, and a tool cashier brings out the actual tool.
| Or, when purchased at the front you get an electronic ID for each
| tool you then go back and redeem with an employee at the tool
| isle.
| fmajid wrote:
| And there I thought it was Home Depot selling tools that are
| protected from being stolen at the worksite, a much bigger
| problem that theft from stores themselves.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| How is this gonna stop theft? I have a lot of power tools from
| Home Depot (ryobi) and I take them apart all the time to fix
| them. Power tools are relatively simple in design. A Bluetooth
| anti theft system last as long as it takes to open the tools and
| remove the anti theft and re-solder the parts back.
|
| My dad was a long time construction worker and there've been many
| anti theft devices in power tool. None of them work and are
| circumvented in minutes if you know why you're doing.
|
| This is the dumbest stunt I've seen a company take; this isn't
| anti theft, it's anti consumer.
| paulpauper wrote:
| How is it anti-consumer? If you paid for the tool and it works,
| what difference does it make? It won't stop all theft but is
| just an extra deterrent that does not involve having to lockup
| the tool.s
| starky wrote:
| If the lock is effective, then you are definitely going to
| have cases where a paying customer receives a tool that is
| locked or re-locked itself.
|
| The organized groups on the other hand now just have a slight
| inconvenience (at worst, until they reverse engineer the
| electronic locking) where they have to open and bypass the
| lock before they re-sell the tool. Power tools aren't complex
| enough to be able to make them impossible to bypass without
| the theft still being profitable.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| Have you used a lot of power tools? Because power tools get
| beat up and every anti theft mechanism I've experienced
| becomes the weak point of tools. Back in the late 90s
| Milwaukee started putting key locks in the saws. My dad
| constantly have his saws "repaired" cause the lock would
| slide closed and be unable to function, he started taking
| them apart and removing the mechanism. That's anti consumer.
| If it will be the reason your tool stops working, it's anti
| consumer. If the lock ever turns on when you don't want it
| to, it's anti consumer.
|
| Also, Home Depot calls out on their repair site that they do
| not repair Bluetooth enabled devices, that's anti consumer.
| avhon1 wrote:
| If the anti-theft device is integrated into the brushless motor
| controller, it could require some serious reverse-engineering
| skills to bypass.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| That is going to be the single biggest point of failure. This
| is going to sky rocket tool costs and require specialized
| equipment to diagnose and repair. They're are not integrating
| it in the motor. They will get sued big time for faulty motor
| failures.
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| Home Depot near me has all Milwaukee M12 and M18 tools locked up.
| When the Milwaukee rep was getting something out of the case for
| me, I mentioned how unfortunate it is that they have to do this.
| He said they lost over $700k in Milwaukee tools alone in that
| store last year. Quite amazing and almost hard to believe. I feel
| sorry for these stores trying to walk the line between respecting
| your customers and not being robbed blind.
| TheHypnotist wrote:
| It's a MAJOR issue. Most hardware stores now lock them, have
| cameras, and every time you walk by it makes some obnoxious
| noise.
| spiderice wrote:
| I hate that noise. Especially since they place them on aisles
| with expensive items, which are the same aisles I end up
| spending the most time comparing the different tools. Make me
| feel like I can't move for fear of being beeped at.
|
| Makes sense that they do it if shop lifting is as big of a
| problem as this article suggests.
| mindslight wrote:
| I usually flip off those beeping cameras. The store has
| created an aggressive environment and I'd rather actively
| recognize that, instead of than trying to pretend
| otherwise. I understand that theft is a problem, but they
| shouldn't be taking it out on honest customers.
|
| I bet I'm being downvoted by the kind of people who wait in
| line to exit a store.
| munificent wrote:
| I look at this as yet another consequence of increasing
| economic inequality.
|
| When you have more and more people keenly aware of the unfair
| distance between their economic station and that of others,
| they're going to realize the system isn't working. And once
| that realization kicks in, there is little moral incentive to
| follow the rules. If you can get away with stealing from a
| giant corporation, why not? They are arguably stealing even
| more from you in terms of manipulating the larger economic
| systems of the country.
| cafard wrote:
| You never knew any middle class or upper middle class kids
| who shoplifted?
| munificent wrote:
| I definitely did, but I'm fairly certain that is not
| driving large-scale theft of tools from Home Depot.
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| Assuming an average price of $330, that would be 2000 devices.
| Or ~6 items a day, every single day of the year. that's not
| from shop lifters, that's from the employees out the back door.
| nyjah wrote:
| At the home depot near me if you move the set of sockets an
| alarm will start beeping.
|
| Recently I bought a pressure washer. When I got home I realized
| the hose was missing. When I got to home depot to return it I
| realized that it wasn't even the right pressure washer in the
| box. Clearly someone had bought a new one and then put their
| old on in the box and returned it as new. Home Depot took care
| of me no questions and it made me feel like they must see kind
| of thing a lot.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Returns are a huge source of fraud.
|
| And it's difficult to solve, for the same reasons listed in
| this article: any solution (e.g. checking items fully)
| results in a worse customer experience (longer lines and
| delays).
|
| So, you try and pick a sweet spot along the curve, where you
| prevent the worst excesses but are still able to keep your
| (non-thieving) customers happy.
| oliwarner wrote:
| I wonder why they don't just warehouse the stock, leave demo
| models on the floor and only get out the real one once you've
| paid for it.
|
| A couple of staff to power this has got to be cheaper than
| $700kpa in high value theft.
|
| But I also would have thought it'd be comically easy to surveil
| the power tool area and see who comes in lots but never seems
| to buy a power tool.
| axaxs wrote:
| Yeah, I just returned hundreds of dollars of power tools to
| Lowes because of them locking stuff up. I buy into an ecosystem
| based on how easy I can get items.
|
| Lowes has most of their power tools in cages. But, they don't
| hire people to actually man the area. Last time I needed an
| impact, I had to search to find someone. That person told me
| they can't open it, but would find someone. Five minutes later
| I left empty-handed, and returned the rest of the tools and
| batteries I'd bought recently that week.
|
| Point being: Their 'security' is driving away paying customers.
| bombcar wrote:
| The stores in "bad parts" of town have the cages, and
| sometimes service to match.
|
| The "good parts" of town - no cages in sight and you can grab
| what you need.
|
| It's sad.
| axaxs wrote:
| Very true. Oddly where I live now, the good and bad parts
| of town are very interspersed. You can have million dollar
| subdivisions a mile from a trailer park.
|
| The added bonus is that all stores treat everyone as a
| criminal, apparently :).
| matheweis wrote:
| I went to a Home Depot in Seattle a couple of days ago looking
| for an electric chainsaw (not a Milwaukee). It's a bit of a
| drive and I wanted a particular model, so I checked the site
| for stock before going .. they had eight so off I went.
|
| When I showed up the chainsaw was nowhere to be found, and
| after looking high and low and triple checking their
| inventories, the rep said he figured they must have walked. He
| mentioned a similar figure saying that over $800k of
| merchandise had disappeared from that aisle (yard equipment) in
| the last year.
|
| I think it's real. After the experience repeated itself at a
| second store, I looked on OfferUp and found the exact chainsaw
| "new and unopened" at about half the retail price.
|
| I ended up going to a third store before finding one that
| actually had the tool in stock. That one had installed a
| makeshift rig of steel bars in front of their stock, and a rep
| had to physically follow me to the register and watch me pay
| for it.
|
| There are videos in the Seattle reddits of brazen thieves going
| into stores and walking off with whatever they like.
|
| It's bad enough for the big box stores, imagine being a small
| business trying to survive that environment!
| rootsudo wrote:
| The Aurora store is such a blast too, the area is something
| to witness right around sunset.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > When I showed up the chainsaw was nowhere to be found, and
| after looking high and low and triple checking their
| inventories, the rep said he figured they must have walked.
|
| I've always chalked this up to poor inventory management
| practices. I've gone to Home Depot for first aid kits,
| counter tops, smoke alarms, pipe fittings, etc and had the
| same experience. They show X in stock but none can be found.
|
| We had similar issues when I worked at Office Max in high
| school, it was usually someone putting overhead stock in the
| wrong location because they just couldn't be bothered.
| pvarangot wrote:
| I've talked about this with some liquor store owners in SF
| and also a couple that has a "cute things for your home"
| store. For small stores it's easier to deal with this because
| they, let's say, try to proactively stop theft. Big chain
| stores just usually have some kind of dumb policy to not do
| anything even though they are legally allowed even in cities
| like San Francisco that are notoriously anti-big-bussiness in
| the street. The word spreads around.
|
| For example the spike in theft on Wallgrees in SF did start
| when they changed their policy about a year ago. Before they
| changed it I saw the store manager in the Wallgreens on 23rd
| and Mission literally kick the shit out of people that were
| trying to walk out with merchandise without paying.
| bhance wrote:
| A seriously large amount of the goods on Offerup are stolen.
| It's insane.
| wronglebowski wrote:
| I do wonder how much of the modern app or second hand
| selling community is based on grift and stolen goods. On my
| local OfferUp in Philadelphia it looks like 30-40%
| scams(Giving away for free for my birthday text at XXX)
| 30-40% obviously stolen goods(iCloud locked devices). The
| small remaining posts are clothes and other items, finding
| a legitimate item for sale can be a real struggle.
| mynameisash wrote:
| > imagine being a small business trying to survive that
| environment!
|
| I was just at McLendon's yesterday outside Seattle, and while
| I was waiting to ask an employee a question, over the PA a
| came a message like, "need help up front. A couple just left
| the store with a bunch of stolen merchandise." So the dude
| bolted for the entrance.
|
| It surprised me that the announcement wasn't coded in some
| way (eg, "code 9 at checkout").
|
| It made me feel quite sad, as McLendon's is pretty awesome,
| and I'd hate for them to disappear.
| matheweis wrote:
| Have shopped at McLendon's many times. Preferred them
| before I moved, but now they are quite a bit further.
| That's terrible that it's happening to them too, I hope
| they make it.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I used to be a state security guard. I was required to go to
| a security convention once a year.
|
| Everyone of these talks stressed that employee internal theft
| is bigger than customer theft on the whole.
|
| So managment steals the most, followed by the rest of the
| employees.
|
| This was in the 90's so things might have changed.
|
| Different entities gave the talks.
|
| I don't doubt that 800k number, but I wouldn't rule out the
| reoresenative of Milwaukee, or the closing managers, or
| security guards themselfs.
|
| Everytme I was told about employees theft, they said it's
| retail security's big secret.
|
| Personally, if they treated employees better, internal theft
| might come down!
|
| When I go into HD, and am being filmed at least 10-15 times
| before leaving the store; their us a part of me that feels
| like not paying for that M8 bolt.
| spanktheuser wrote:
| Relevant song 'bout how Johnny Cash ended up driving a
| "...49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 Automobile."
|
| Recorded in 1976 as domestic steel & car manufacturing
| tanked in the United States taking Detroit, Chicago,
| Pittsburg and much of the Great Lakes with it.
|
| https://youtu.be/18cW_yHo3PY
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It's bad enough for the big box stores, imagine being a
| small business trying to survive that environment!
|
| I'd guess that small businesses aren't as targeted by
| organized thieves as "big box" stores are:
|
| 1) They're smaller in size which means the likelihood of
| getting spotted by a staff member during a theft is higher
|
| 2) The amount (and diversity) of available goods to steal is
| lower
|
| 3) "Big box" stores don't have people carrying guns, their
| staff has a "don't intervene, we're insured anyway" policy
| drilled into them, and this is known. A small shopkeeper
| however? A thief can't reasonably know if the shop owner has
| a firearm under their desk or will get confrontational if
| stopped.
|
| > After the experience repeated itself at a second store, I
| looked on OfferUp and found the exact chainsaw "new and
| unopened" at about half the retail price.
|
| The really interesting thing is: why does the police not
| "follow the money" and take out those advertising likely-
| stolen tools for sale in the open?
| orthoxerox wrote:
| > The really interesting thing is: why does the police not
| "follow the money" and take out those advertising likely-
| stolen tools for sale in the open?
|
| Too costly to prosecute. How can you prove that this
| specific chainsaw has been stolen? "Yes, I am selling my
| chainsaw. No, I won't talk to you, officer, unless I am
| under arrest and I have my lawyer present."
|
| Then you arrest them and what? You need something to show
| the jury.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Why don't hardware retail shops use the same method that
| banks and IT retail shops use - tracking device serial
| numbers? When I go to the parts shop next door and buy an
| SSD, I get an invoice with the serial number written on
| it. This small inconvenience for the checkout staff
| should well be worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars
| in stolen equipment...
| drak0n1c wrote:
| Regarding your last question, the city has for a while now
| decided not to prosecute shoplifting cases. Here is an
| article from 2018 about the phenomenon. It has gotten worse
| since then and the open street bazaars of stolen goods have
| grown much larger. I've decided to move to greener pastures
| a few months ago, but during a company event when I
| traveled back the CVS next to the hotel was brazenly
| shoplifted from the two times I stepped inside to buy
| essentials.
|
| https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/tonight-at-5-pm-on-
| kiro-7-o...
| retSava wrote:
| 1) many thieves doesn't care. The most brazen ones simply
| fill up a large sportsbag or similar, then just leave. They
| don't care if someone spots them, they win on signalling
| pure aggression and implicit threat of "if you try to stop
| me I will hurt you". We have that problem at our local food
| store - three guys come in, one holds the bag, one stuffs
| it with all the expensive meat, the third stares
| aggressively on any bystander. Then they just walk out of
| there.
|
| 2) doesn't matter as long as what they have is valuable and
| can be sold on easily. The thieves are not opening a store
| on their own.
| [deleted]
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It sounds like that store has deeper problems. They aren't
| checking thier stock and so do not notice a theft when it
| happens. That has insurance implications. Also, it suggests
| inside jobs. If the staff are turning a blind eye to theft,
| not reporting missing stock, there is a reasonable chance
| that the staff are involved.
| retSava wrote:
| No implication of insiders imho - rarely do reps see
| exactly what is stolen and can -- that line item. Many
| stores do a (costly) stock inventory check once a year,
| literally going from shelf to shelf and counting what's
| there, then that is crosschecked and corrects the store
| inventory database.
| [deleted]
| ethbr0 wrote:
| A Home Depot has somewhere around 40,000 different products
| per store.
|
| The count is _always_ wrong.
|
| It's continually updated, but it's still always wrong.
| Because the amount of labor cost to ensure it's accurate at
| _all times_ would be a silly use of scarce resources.
|
| Sometimes it's as simple as a customer picking up an item,
| wandering around, and dropping it somewhere else. Sometimes
| it's theft. Sometimes it's an incorrect count in receiving.
|
| All of this is an average day at a warehouse store. Walmart
| deals with the same thing.
| danuker wrote:
| > a silly use of scarce resources.
|
| When your losses are so bad, it's time to invest more in
| security.
|
| Accounting together with video evidence can more timely
| detect thieves, and might be worth it.
| repiret wrote:
| Two points:
|
| 1. Unless store security catches the thief at the door,
| many police departments don't have the resources to track
| them down. So finding out that you were burgled within a
| couple days isn't much better than finding out at a
| quarterly or even annual inventory.
|
| 2. It's not that big of a problem. From the article:
| "Organized retail crime costs retailers an average of
| $719,548 per $1 billion in sales". Putting that in a more
| accessible scale, that's 72C/ per $1,000 of sales.
| moftz wrote:
| It's all part of retail business. Whether it's employee
| theft, customer theft, broken items on shelves, or
| returns of faulty items, it's all a part of doing
| business and it factors into the sticker price.
| namelessoracle wrote:
| One point about 1. Even if Store Security DOES catch them
| at the door. What do you do when the person says "I dont
| care im taking this and going" and refuses to stop for
| the security person. The security person is not a cop,
| and is probably not the very expensive armed security
| that banks have. If the person calls their bluff not much
| can be done at that point. And thieves know this.
|
| They then head to their car and leave. You try to take
| their license plate number. Oh wait it says "tag applied
| for".
|
| Criminals regularly take the plates off when they do
| their work, if a cop pulls them over, they can say some
| story about how they needed to get it reattached, and no
| cop pulls over a car just because of a "tag applied for"
| sign because they know it will likely be just that 9
| times out of 10, so if they did pull over that car its
| some other ticket-able offense, but no registration wont
| be likely part of that ticket.
|
| Maybe you got a picture of their face? Except everyone
| wears masks now....
| colanderman wrote:
| In some states (e.g. MA, NY I'm pretty sure) security
| cannot legally prevent anyone from leaving. The best they
| can do is stand in the way to slow someone down. Source:
| heard from an independent jeweler in New York City.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| What is a "tag-applied for" sign? Some sort of temporary
| licence plate? In Ontario, temporary registration is a
| normal licence plate with a "T" registration sticker,
| instead of an annual sticker.
| colanderman wrote:
| Where I live (Massachusetts) it's a barely legible piece
| of paper you tape in your rear window.
| namelessoracle wrote:
| Its a piece of paper that literally says "tag applied
| for". If you buy a car from an individual/non dealer you
| get a certain amount of time (couple of weeks to 30 days
| depending on state) to get a new tag for it. Until that
| point you can drive it basically unregistered.
|
| All the ambiguity involving that means you can basically
| just take off your license plate whenever you want and
| police dont look at as a particularly unusual or
| noteworthy thing to run across. Even if you dont put "tag
| applied for" at all most cops just assume thats the
| situation and wont pull you over for just that unless you
| are having some other violation going on.
|
| I had a coworker who was robbed earlier this year and the
| person left in a car with a you guessed it "tag applied
| for" paper on the license plate section of their car.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| This isn't just a Home Depot exception. All retail has
| shrink around this level. And has for essentially all of
| its existence.
|
| Which is one reason online prices can be cheaper.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Because the amount of labor cost to ensure it 's
| accurate at all times would be a silly use of scarce
| resources._
|
| I'm no MBA, but if a single store is losing $800,000 of
| merchandise a year from a single aisle, you could have it
| guarded 24/7 by guys on $50 an hour and you'd still come
| out $300k ahead.
|
| Far more likely IMHO is that when the rep said "over
| $800k of merchandise had disappeared from that aisle"
| that was actually the loss from all the yard equipment
| aisles in all stores nationwide.
| matheweis wrote:
| Well those chainsaws were worth $300 ... that's $2400 in
| _one model_ of chainsaw alone. I 'd guess that's about
| average for prices of equipment in that aisle, with
| several hundred different items (mowers, weed eaters,
| blowers, etc.)
|
| If they are having $2400 worth of a single model walk in
| a year, over 350 different items, they'd get to over
| $800k in the one store in a heartbeat. My money would be
| on this was in fact just the one store, if not just the
| one aisle.
| ipaddr wrote:
| How many of them are over $500.00? Check those first.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Eight chainsaws? I dont think they are lying in the wrong
| aisle. Powertools and other high value items should be
| stock checked.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Odds are good that they are physically in the store
| somewhere, but nobody knows where, because they are on a
| pallet on a shelf sixteen feet up in the air.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| How often? Daily?
|
| So ~15 minutes / 60 x ~360 days x ~2000 stores (US) x
| ~$30/hr ($20+benefits) = $5.4 M in labor costs
|
| ... and that's just to check chainsaws.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Knock the 30 dollars and benefits down to part time 15 an
| hour employees.
|
| We're down to 2 million.. let's select the 10% worst
| stores.. we are down to $200,000.
|
| They can check other inventory items and check out
| customers.
|
| Cheaper than a one second ad during the superbowl
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _Knock the 30 dollars and benefits down to part time 15
| an hour employees._
|
| So, you're encouraging a business to hire minimum wage
| labor and schedule so as to avoid paying benefits? And
| these people (you've just screwed) are the ones you're
| proposing be granted the responsibility to detect theft?
|
| > _let 's select the 10% worst stores_
|
| Infeasible, as most theft by dollar is organized, which
| targets a somewhat random scattering of stores,
| intermittently. Highest shrink retail stores already have
| additional theft mitigation tech deployed.
|
| > _They can check other inventory items and check out
| customers_
|
| Not if they can't be in two places at once. 15 minutes is
| a fairly middle of the road estimate for: walking to the
| area, checking the on-shelf number, checking above the
| rack, and possibly checking the back. If anything, it's
| already under-estimating the time required.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| The solution is simple. Punish the employees
| Cycl0ps wrote:
| Assume high value items are the majority of the thefts by
| value:
|
| $800'000 in thefts from that aisle * 51% for a (slim)
| majority * 2000 stores = $816M in shrinkage.
|
| If your store is seeing six figure losses due to theft
| you hire out some Loomis guys or rent-a-cops and park
| them at both entrances.
|
| That 800k number does seem to get quoted alot in the
| comments here, I wonder if it's an actual figure or just
| some part of a training video that sticks with people
| CPLX wrote:
| Why do people think giant multi-billion dollar stores have
| "insurance" for shoplifting of various items of
| merchandise?
|
| How would such a policy even work, how would you price and
| underwrite it, and evaluate risk? How would claims be
| processed? Is there any evidence anywhere that this is
| actually a thing?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| At these sizes, insurance is more about taxation than
| cost recovery. Even of they are effectively self-insured,
| Home Depo does indeed have an interest in documenting all
| losses.
| mindslight wrote:
| Are we sure that Home Depot has already paid for the
| items sitting on the shelves? I've seen them do so many
| returns by marking things Return To Vendor. Margins these
| days seem to be based around branding/design/quality
| control rather than sunk production cost, and I'd imagine
| that retail stores have optimized things so that they
| aren't assuming the full wholesale-cost risk of
| theft/damage/clearance.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Depends on how long the item has been sitting on that
| shelf. They usually factor their invoices to attract
| suppliers, so they pay their factoring bank a few weeks
| after the item has been received.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I wonder if it was 700k retail or wholesale? Regardless, it was
| a big enough problem across the chain to justify adding
| complexity and cost to the product.
|
| Retailers are allergic to price increases and manufacturers
| tend to shy away from anything that increases the cost without
| being a marketable benefit or cost savings, so no doubt Home
| Depot recognizing the size of the problem and initiating a
| solution made it happen.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The power tool market is likely more responsive than your
| average supplier.
|
| They sell a huge volume through a limited number of retailers
| (Home Depot & Lowes), and there are a limited number of
| manufacturers [0].
|
| So if retail says there's a problem, it becomes a problem for
| them.
|
| The other side of this is professional customers, who will
| probably use the same technology. A tool that doesn't work if
| it's stolen off a job site is a big value add to professional
| contractors.
|
| [0] https://pressurewashr.com/tool-industry-behemoths/
| np_tedious wrote:
| Crimes (theft, drug seizures, whatever) usually reported in
| largest possible numbers. So likely retail
| Y_Y wrote:
| Exactly. News reports never respect the very important
| difference between a thousand grams and a kilo.
| netrus wrote:
| I think the downvotes are unjust. For those missing the
| point: When large quantities of drugs are seized, often
| times the 'street value' of the drug is reported. But
| large quantities can only be found some steps removed
| from the end customer in the supply chain. Given the
| risks in distribution, the difference in retail and
| wholesale price can be significant.
| np_tedious wrote:
| Agreed the downvotes are not justified. This is this
| clearly what parent meant and what I alluded to in
| preceding comment
| Y_Y wrote:
| Thank you, that is exactly what I meant.
| social_quotient wrote:
| I wonder if this has increased from/due to self checkout?
| zf00002 wrote:
| My local Costco has finally added self-checkout registers. I
| noticed that the receipt is a different color than the ones
| you would normally get if you went to a cashier. I assume the
| exit people who check your receipt look more closely when
| it's a self-checkout one.
| handrous wrote:
| Also, the workers who load your cart at Costco seem to be
| trained to pack it for easier/faster scanability by the
| exit-check people. Plus IIRC the receipts split anything
| they leave on the bottom rack of the cart into a separate
| section. Neither of those things happen with self-checkout,
| I suppose (I've not used the self-checkout yet, because the
| regular checkout is _so_ fast at Costco and they 're well-
| staffed enough that I haven't wanted to)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| My grocery store has an app that lets me scan as I go through
| the store, then just pay in about 10 seconds at the self-
| checkout. I'd love to know what _that_ has done to shrink
| numbers.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| How many cameras are there in the store?
|
| I don't usually pay much attention to self-checkout (call
| me a luddite, but I find regular checkout to go faster and
| with less hassle), but the other day when standing in a
| queue, I looked at the ceiling and saw a ton of cameras -
| one camera per self-checkout station, + some extra in the
| general area. Additionally, each checkout station used a
| big tablet as its main display, and each of those tablets
| had the usual built-in selfie camera - I'd be surprised if
| these cameras _didn 't_ take photos of customers using the
| stations.
| david422 wrote:
| I was using the self checkout the other day and scanned
| some item and put it in my bag. A store employee came
| over and told me it didn't scan. Hmmm? I looked at the
| screen and yes, the item was listed on there. She checked
| some handheld she was using and it wasn't showing up on
| _her_ list. So she could somehow see what I was scanning
| and apparently was watching to make sure I wasn't
| stealing anything? It was kindof odd.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Most of the cameras in the store are for (a) customer
| service or (b) organized crime tracking.
|
| For (a), if a customer comes in with an odd return
| scenario / complaint, a fair number boil down to "what
| actually happened when they were originally here?" Camera
| provides documentation of that, and asset protection can
| review, and the make things right. E.g. the "bought
| thing, but didn't make it into my bag" scenario.
|
| For (b), it's post-hoc identification & ad-hoc warning.
| Organized theft rings typically hit multiple stores in an
| area. Retail has gotten very good at sharing snapshots of
| individuals very quickly in those scenarios. And it's
| worth it, because a single organized theft incident will
| be a couple orders of magnitude larger than all your
| common theft for a month. E.g. $10,000 worth of product
| vs $100.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > How many cameras are there in the store?
|
| Quite a few, but I don't know that they're gonna help if
| I scan the small steak but put the giant one in my bag.
| Again, the scanning isn't happening _at_ the self-
| checkout. They just get used for payment.
|
| I can also void out an expensive item mid-shop. Unless
| someone's getting a real-time ping with my exact current
| location in the store in the security office when I do
| that, no one's gonna be checking.
| bitwize wrote:
| Having a trained cashier quickly scan your items for you
| does indeed beat fumbling with the scanning process while
| the GLaDOS built into the register judges you for not
| doing it properly.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's why the app is nice; it's on my phone, I do it as
| I go along, and there's no scale involved. Faster than
| both self-checkout and cashier, in my experience,
| especially on a busy day.
| doobiedowner wrote:
| Bagging as you go. Yay Future!!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yes. And then you look at it funny and it exclaims,
| "unrecognized item in the bagging area", and asks you to
| assume the party escort submission position, while it
| fetches the party associate clerk.
| ice2000 wrote:
| I've been thinking about this ever since my closest
| supermarket got the same app system. Anti-theft seems to be
| done by random audits of scanning 3-4 items. I've had this
| 3 times out of the 20 or so times I've used it.
|
| In that regard, it seems more risky to try any funny
| business with it. With the traditional self scans, cameras
| aside, it's quite easy to fool them, and they are reliable
| and predictable machines. I'm sure it would be easy to slip
| something at the bottom of your bag, but if you get caught
| on an audit, I'm sure it sets a flag to audit you more
| often.
|
| The scan-at-end checkouts can be used without identity,
| where as the scan-as-you go, at least for my supermarket,
| you have to log into an account linked to your identity
| before it's used. This may deter a lot of casual theft.
| handrous wrote:
| I'd expect pretty much any move to make the customers do work
| that paid employees used to, increases customer theft (which,
| as noted elsewhere in this thread, is far from the only
| threat--employees, including managers and security, steal
| _lots_ ).
|
| I mean, consider a classic old-school store (talking pre-
| supermarkets and pre-big-box stores) where a clerk would
| fetch what you wanted. Much harder to steal there. Save money
| by not paying enough clerks to handle that and making
| customers pick out their own stuff, and now customers can/do
| steal more.
|
| Same with stuff like self-checkout, I'd expect. Might also
| increase the rate of honest mistakes resulting in accidental
| theft, though I've seen so damn many of those errors from
| paid clerks that I wouldn't bet on it.
| eplanit wrote:
| In the bay area and California in general, they've been
| basically been told that they're on their own regarding thefts.
| One can simply walk in and take hundreds of dollars worth of
| merchandise and leave, because the DA will not prosecute.
| Security guards won't intervene, and the thieves know all this.
| It has become a spectacle.
|
| Between online sales and this, I sympathize with anyone in
| brick and mortar retail sales.
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Prop-47-which-reduc...
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/looters-ransack-san-francisco-neiman-...
| theyellowkid wrote:
| In a world of small margins, it's just another small
| advantage that goes to Amazon.
|
| That all assumes that UPS drivers are honest and that Amazon
| 'fulfillment' employees get their daily cavity search of
| course.
| tbihl wrote:
| And that the delivery vans don't get raided while making
| deliveries.
| peter422 wrote:
| I've spent a lot of time at Bay Area Home Depots, and I've
| only seen blatant theft once, and the security guards did
| attempt to intervene.
|
| What is the support for your statement?
|
| Also "the DA" is a ton of different people throughout the Bay
| Area, and the DA that everybody complains about has exactly 0
| HDs in his jurisdiction.
| eplanit wrote:
| 285 murders in San Fran last year, a 35% increase. I didn't
| witness a single one, but I think they really did happen.
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/A-violent-year-
| Bay...
| dsr_ wrote:
| London is about the same population as the Bay Area. They
| had 130 murders, which was about double the per-capita
| rate for the rest of the UK.
| distribot wrote:
| 285 murders in the 15 biggest cities of the Bay Area.
| salawat wrote:
| It was a State level Proposition as far as I am aware, so
| it isn't merely the case of one problematic DA. I could be
| misunderstanding something though.
| beerandt wrote:
| Statewide laws still rely on local law enforcement and
| prosecutors to be enforced.
| tzs wrote:
| The state level proposition does not require DAs to
| ignore shoplifting. It just turns it (and a few other
| crimes) from felonies into misdemeanors when the amount
| involved does not exceed $950.
|
| Misdemeanor shoplifting can still earn up to 180 days in
| county jail and a fine of up to $1000, but only if a DA
| prosecutes.
| Kye wrote:
| This sounds more like a tough-on-crime type fever dream than
| a representative reality. How much does this actually happen?
| Is it more of a harm to society than the harsh sentences
| people were getting for minor thefts? Civilization is a
| compromise between conflicting interests.
|
| Nieman Marcus and Home Depot are still making plenty of
| profit despite this law changing 7 years ago. Is putting
| someone in prison for 8 years and giving them a permanent
| black mark that prevents them from voting and harms
| employment prospects over $200 really worth improving Home
| Depot's bottom line? That's the real question here.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Are we using Yahoo news to launder Washington Examiner urls
| now?
|
| And why do you claim security guards won't intervene when
| your own story said they did?
|
| Oh dear, I just looked up that authors last 5 headlines:
|
| "Sir there's something on your chin": Biden bailed out by
| staffer for apparent crumb on face
|
| Secret service arrest man for jumping fence line at White
| House
|
| Hunter Biden says "f** 'em" to critics of his art sales
|
| All Broadway shows to require proof of vaccination for
| audience members
|
| Trump: Bi-partisan Infrastructure Bill will lead to 'massive
| socialist expansion'
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is mostly bullshit. Crime rates in California and SF are
| comparable to the rest of the country. However there seems to
| be a concerted effort to push back on any reductions in
| moronic "tough on crime" policies from the 80s and 90s.
| Thefts under $1k _should_ be a misdemeanor. How the hell were
| they ever a felony? In Canada theft under $5k is punishable
| by a _maximum_ of 2 years in jail (with most people getting a
| lot less) and retailers seem to be doing ok.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/14/bogus-
| bac...
|
| Edit: The media seems to be in a real crime frenzy right now.
| Exhibit A is this bullshit graph that swaps the x axis to
| make it look like crime is rising:
| https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/06/24/cnn-chart-crime
| CountDrewku wrote:
| >Thefts under $1k should be a misdemeanor.
|
| Why? What does Canada have to do with the US?
|
| >and retailers seem to be doing ok.
|
| I'm sure they big box stores are just fine, they just pass
| the cost on to the consumer. It doesn't end so well for the
| small businesses.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I dunno... the people at our SF office talk about car
| break-ins happening roughly yearly and when I visit SF I
| see signs disclaiming responsibility for theft
| _everywhere_.
| golergka wrote:
| > Crime rates in California and SF are comparable to the
| rest of the country.
|
| I don't know who's in the wrong here, but if the comment
| you're replying to was correct and DA wouldn't persecute
| these cases, wouldn't it also mean that they wouldn't
| appear in statistics you're quoting as well?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I have no problem with any theft being a felony.
|
| You're _stealing_ something.
|
| What makes "stealing less than $1k" more acceptable?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Why not just make everything a felony then?
|
| The purpose of grading is to provide an appropriate
| punishment. I'm my state, the grading for retail theft
| starts low, but depends on the value of the item. After a
| few times it becomes a felony for anything, such as a man
| who was in the news as getting a felony for stealing a
| candy bar. If it's always going to be a felony with
| potential prison time, then people might think "why not
| steal that riding lawn mower if the punishment is the
| same as a candy bar". Same risk, might as well increase
| the reward.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Theft seems pretty clear. Either you pay for something,
| or you don't. If you don't, you know you didn't.
|
| I don't see how "light theft" is something we should
| tolerate.
|
| If we want to talk about humane solutions, carve out an
| exception for food theft. But nobody is stealing a $500
| drill because they're starving for power tools.
|
| (And, this isn't just me expressing personal moral
| preferences. Theft is a tax on everyone who _does_ pay
| for goods, via price increases)
| thatcat wrote:
| So some old lady who doesn't scan a can of beans right at
| Walmart is a felon?
|
| I don't think you've thought this one out.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Either you pay for something, or you don't. If you
| don't, you know you didn't."
|
| That's not exactly true. There can be items that are
| confusing, such as whether or not a bin or bucket comes
| with a lid. With the advent of self checkouts, it's also
| possible that someone rings up an item incorrectly just
| by accident, especially with non bar codes items. People
| could be prosecuted for this depending on the state's
| requirements. The burden of proof can be quiet low.
|
| "But nobody is stealing a $500 drill because they're
| starving for power tools."
|
| Here you are using $500 as an example. Do you feel the
| same if someone takes an extra 10 cent washer?
|
| "If we want to talk about humane solutions, carve out an
| exception for food theft."
|
| I don't think food theft should be an exception - just
| the same as the current grading tier. There are many
| programs and food banks that people can use to get food.
|
| What are your thoughts on other crimes with different
| gradings? Should assault always be a felony? Should
| speeding always be considered reckless endangerment?
|
| Again, the grading is supposed to provide an appropriate
| punishment based on the severity of the crime.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| If a store prosecutes their customers for stealing a
| $0.10 washer, they won't have customers for long.
|
| My personal opinion is that the severity of consequence
| should be relative to the people the crime affects.
|
| Theft (retail, insurance, etc) exists in this weird limbo
| where the primary victim (the business) isn't the
| customer. However, it's ultimately the customer who pays.
|
| So light-touching theft prosecution is effectively not
| caring about taxing customers. Most of whom don't even
| know they're being taxed.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, most stores have limits and try to resolve any
| possible misunderstandings. Walmart prosecutes starting
| at $20.
|
| Maybe your state is different, but I wouldn't call it
| light touching in my state. First offense, is a summary
| offense if the merchandise was under $150. That's a fine,
| restitution, and up to 90 days in jail. So possibly a
| light touch if there's no jail time, but generally going
| to jail means losing your job and such for lack of
| attendance. Higher amounts or subsequent offenses
| constitute misdemeanors (up to 3 years in prison), or
| felonies (up to 5 years in prison. Even without prison
| terms, people can lose their job, be denied jobs, lose
| their rights, etc from these higher level penalties.
| Which I think is fine when there's this step grading for
| value and repeat offenses (still some outliers like a man
| getting a felony for a candy bar, although it seemed like
| he probably had a mental issue that was causing these low
| dollar thefts, so probably needs to have some exception
| to get these people treatment). I believe this serves the
| purpose of preventing and rehabilitating low level
| offenders so that they don't become larger offenders in
| the future, and if they do then they get higher
| penalties.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > If we want to talk about humane solutions, carve out an
| exception for food theft.
|
| I bet then somebody will invent a microchipped, DRMed
| food just for the sake of it.
| stavros wrote:
| Agreed. Also, why have different sentences, anyway?
| Either you get punish or you don't. Just have the death
| penalty for everything.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Then you'd have a _lot_ less theft.
|
| _Edit:_ Not sure people recognized your sarcasm.
| stavros wrote:
| Definitely. And a lot fewer people.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| Any theft? Should a kid stealing a pack of bubble gum be
| labeled a felon?
| minikites wrote:
| If we're talking about the USA, it depends on the color
| of the kid's skin. White juveniles are sent home with a
| stern verbal admonishment, black juveniles are sent to
| prison at the first opportunity.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| If you're gonna race bait at least provide proof.
| minikites wrote:
| Evidence is widely available and not difficult to locate:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_incarceration_in_the_
| Uni...
|
| >In 1995, African American youths made up 12% of the
| population, but were arrested at rates double those for
| Caucasian youths. The trend towards adult adjudication
| has had implications for the racial make-up of the
| juvenile prison population as well. Minority youth tried
| in adult courts are much more likely to be sentenced to
| serve prison time than white youth offenders arrested for
| similar crimes.
|
| https://thecrimereport.org/2021/06/17/racial-disparities-
| per...
|
| >According to the Equal Justice Initiative, Black
| children are more than twice as likely as white kids to
| be arrested, even though they're not committing more
| crimes, but because Black Kids are burdened by a
| "presumption of guilt and dangerousness," which leads
| youth of color to have higher rates of stops, searches,
| violence, suspension, and disproportionate contact with
| the juvenile justice system.
|
| https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/racial-
| dispar...
|
| >As of 2013, black juveniles were more than four times as
| likely to be committed as white juveniles, Americans
| Indian juveniles were more than three times as likely,
| and Hispanic juveniles were 61 percent more likely.
|
| http://jaapl.org/content/early/2019/02/13/JAAPL.003828-19
|
| >However, research has documented the existence of racial
| disparity in the treatment of youth involved in the
| juvenile justice system for several decades. Studies from
| the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated that black juveniles
| were detained and confined at higher rates compared with
| white youth, and that black youth were more likely to be
| sent to correctional facilities compared with white
| youth, who were more likely to be sent to psychiatric
| hospitals. Additionally, recent studies have documented
| the continued trend of overrepresentation of minority
| youth in the juvenile justice system
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Proof of higher incarceration is not proof of unequal
| application of law. Additionally, sentencing takes into
| account past actions of the individual.
|
| Did they commit more crimes?
|
| Additionally if the whole racial bias theory is true (i
| don't agree that it is) then why should be incarcerating
| blacks less? I think the appropriate response would be to
| incarcerate white people more often.
| minikites wrote:
| >Did they commit more crimes?
|
| As I quoted earlier:
|
| >Black children are more than twice as likely as white
| kids to be arrested, even though they're not committing
| more crimes
| stavros wrote:
| Because it's worth less. I don't understand how it's okay
| for punishment to have degrees but crime is black and
| white?
| minikites wrote:
| >You're stealing something.
|
| Should we lock up everyone who downloaded an MP3 from
| Napster or Kazaa?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Imho, fungible and zero-copy-cost goods is a much more
| nuanced topic.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >What makes "stealing less than $1k" more acceptable?
|
| The cost to the victim. Someone grabs a few unsecured tie
| downs off a truck at a truck stop that's a hundred bucks.
| Someone scraps some spools of copper stolen from a job
| site and it could be thousands.
|
| I think having a step function where you define all theft
| below a dollar amount as one type and then above as a
| different type is just legacy code from back in the day
| when it wasn't reasonable for the legislature to just say
| "the fine will be X-times the replacement cost of the
| goods or an equivalent jail time as determined by table Y
| in appendix Z" and expect the courts to be able to
| enforce it in an efficient enough manner.
|
| The fact that we we have basically two classes of crime
| that include both violent and nonviolent crime results in
| a lot of overlap where you can have some pretty bad
| misdemeanors and some pretty mild felonies all depending
| on legal technicalities.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Don't forget summary offenses. Some of them can carry
| jail time. In PA you can get 90 days in jail for having a
| dog get loose from your yard. Additionally, a second
| offense within one year becomes a misdemeanor.
| [deleted]
| sushid wrote:
| This is NOT bullshit. Do you live in SF? I live right next
| to the CVS/Walgreens that are targeted in Soma and I can
| guarantee you you'll see someone robbing them blind if you
| stay in there for about 1 hour in there.
|
| I go in there to buy something small once in a while and 1
| out of 4 times I see some guy just grabbing and walking out
| while the security watches him steal right before their
| eyes.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| If the Canadian maximum is 2years, then that i would be a
| felony by US standards.
|
| Canadian law also has subtle differences such as hybrid
| offenses whereby prosecutors can decide whether to charge
| as a felony or misdemeanor, for exactly the same
| crime/facts. Such a concept would be entirely
| unconstitutional under US law. So direct comparisons
| between the countries re possible punishments are
| complicated.
| refurb wrote:
| Theft under $5k in Canada is an indictable offense which is
| the same as a felony in Canada.
|
| *if the value of what is stolen is not more than $5,000, is
| guilty
|
| (i) of an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment
| for a term not exceeding two years*
|
| https://laws-
| lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-334.ht...
| haram_masala wrote:
| Target has started closing their San Francisco stores at
| 6pm as a response to the increase in theft. Do you really
| think that this wasn't a data-driven decision, and that
| Target as a whole just got swept up in some kind of racist
| moral panic?
| JTbane wrote:
| IMO it doesn't matter if your theft is a felony or
| misdemeanor, police should still patrol and try to pursue
| it. Cops, however, claim they are overworked and
| understaffed to do this.
|
| This is the "broken windows" theory- if you let minor
| crimes like shoplifting go unpunished in a city, more
| people will do it.
| Drunk_Engineer wrote:
| Target has been reducing hours of employees throughout
| the country.
| tbihl wrote:
| This may be true, but that is distinct from closing
| before dark (which I haven't seen in any other place.)
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > This is mostly bullshit. Crime rates in California and SF
| are comparable to the rest of the country.
|
| No, I live in SF and:
|
| 1) the police don't even show up for thefts under $950.
| That's why Target stores have 3x the security staff and
| still close at 6 pm.
|
| 2) so crime stats are not reported, since they're not even
| collected
|
| 3) every time I go shopping, I see shoplifting. The retail
| staff look like they have PTSD - it's really that bad here.
|
| Let me guess - you're some kind of SJW Marxist and hate a
| functioning Western society? Because that's where we're at
| in SF.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| If people have learnt not to report crimes (because it
| makes no difference), the police have learnt to not arrest
| people for non-violent crimes (because the DA won't
| prosecute), do you think that might affect the crime rates?
| If so, in which direction?
| pvarangot wrote:
| > If people have learnt not to report crimes (because it
| makes no difference)
|
| I call bullshit on people saying there's widespread crime
| not being reported. If your car window got smashed if you
| are either:
|
| - A Lyft or Uber driver
|
| - Your car was a rental
|
| - You have a lease on your car
|
| - Have "premium" or expensive home or car insurance
|
| you get actual money from filing a police report from
| your insurance provider.
|
| If your gadgets get stolen in the street a lot of credit
| cards or stuff like Apple care, and also some home
| insurance, will cover part of getting a replacement. But
| you also have to file a police report.
|
| I really doubt most people are "learning to not report
| crime" when they literally can get payed for it.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| When I was in SF I went through 3 windows a year and knew
| several folks in the same boat. Never reported one or
| heard of someone reporting one.
|
| Most rationales were people don't have insurance coverage
| damage or don't have proof of property loss (receipts,
| ect).
|
| Would not be surprised if actual numbers were 10-50x the
| reported
| [deleted]
| matchbok wrote:
| Simply incorrect. Many, many stores have closed or reduced
| hours in SF because of the rampant crime. No other city is
| doing that.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| > However there seems to be a concerted effort to push back
| on any reductions in moronic "tough on crime" policies from
| the 80s and 90s.
|
| I'd say. We just elected one of the architects as
| president.
| evgen wrote:
| The idea that any relaxation of stiff criminal penalties
| for small thefts leads to widespread brazen thefts that
| will soon expand to become a direct threat to suburban
| white people has now become a right-wing talking point, so
| you will see it brought up here by the usual suspects on
| any topic that intersects with retail margins or retail
| theft. It is a type of story that makes for good clickbait,
| so it tends to be repeated by people pushing particular
| agendas.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Theft shouldn't be tolerated from either side.
|
| >repeated by people pushing particular agendas
|
| The irony.... The agenda seems to be it's ok to steal,
| commit crime if you're a specific skin color.
|
| You're right there is an agenda being pushed. I can't
| believe people can be so brainwashed that they'll defend
| crime. I guess you reap what you sow though, just don't
| push your moronic "acceptance" on the rest of the
| country. And please for the love of god stay where you
| are and don't infest other parts of the US with your
| ridiculousness.
|
| If you want to live in a place that supports this by all
| means do it but don't make the rest of us do it.
| evgen wrote:
| > Theft shouldn't be tolerated from either side.
|
| It shouldn't, nor should it lead to long custodial
| sentences.
|
| > The agenda seems to be it's ok to steal, commit crime
| if you're a specific skin color.
|
| Wow. Wasn't even going to go there, but if you are going
| to let your racist flag fly I guess we can just let you
| run with it. The rest of us will continue to explore
| radical ideas like attacking the causes of criminal
| behavior rather than just criminalizing poverty and when
| necessary treating offenders with rehabilitation rather
| than the sort of simple-minded retribution that you seem
| to favour.
| haram_masala wrote:
| That all sounds great, but you'd better be sure about the
| "causes of criminal behavior." Not everyone agrees on
| that, and as such, you might be unpleasantly surprised at
| what ultimately gets "attacked."
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I've heard of the Walgreens issues, the topic, and am not
| doubting you -- however, i'm curious what is stopping more
| widespread theft. Given the no-prosecution stance, I can even
| imagine theft-tourism where people come from other cities and
| states to steal. Recalling NYC in the 1980s, people would
| even reach arms through and under metal hoods to steal, I
| could only imagine what happens if it can be done w/o
| consequence.
|
| What is preventing that? Is it human good nature or is there
| some understanding that blatant/planned cases will indeed be
| pursued?
| newsclues wrote:
| People don't want to be caught on cellphone cameras
| stealing, because of shame.
| [deleted]
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Consider the possibility that the crime wave is not real
| but a narrative being spun up to try to get "tough on
| crime" laws back on the agenda. From:
| https://www.relevantmagazine.com/current/nation/no-san-
| franc...
|
| > The San Francisco Police Department is actually seeing a
| dip in crime in 2021, part of a larger overall downward
| trend. Property crimes are down nearly 8 percent so far in
| 2021, and larceny theft -- the category of crime that
| includes shoplifting -- is down 14.4 percent.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Kind of hard not to see a dip after how summer of 2020
| went. I'll wait to see whether the trend continues.
| salawat wrote:
| That's an artifact of people no longer reporting theft
| for inefficacy.
|
| Why should one go through the trouble of filing police
| reports if they aren't/can't do anything about it?
|
| Ironically this makes your dip in crime statistics as
| cooked up a narrative with rhetorical purposes as what
| you just suggested.
|
| Always take data with a grain of salt, and avoid mixing
| up the map with the territory.
| Kye wrote:
| Police don't do anything about it in other states. It's
| not due to this law. Police steal more than the people
| they're supposed to catch.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| When police serve a search warrant for career criminals
| (e.g. drug dealing, car theft, basically any criminal
| activity that you can make a decent regular income on)
| it's SOP to cross-reference serial numbers on expensive
| stuff that's lying around (power tools, electronics, etc)
| with the list of serial numbers in their DB of police
| reports so they can tack on a charge if they get a match.
| It is absolutely a liability to have a bunch of stolen
| stuff lying around.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is moving the goalposts vs. the GP. He claimed it
| was the DAs not prosecuting that was the problem. Now the
| police are in on it too and not even arresting suspects?
|
| Incidentally, the Walgreens shoplifter was arrested and
| is facing 16 charges:
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/22/us/shoplifting-san-
| francisco-...
| haram_masala wrote:
| Why would the police arrest a suspect if they already
| know the suspect won't be prosecuted That's what's really
| happening here.
| inside6 wrote:
| I'm not in California, but over here, the cops call the
| DA first to see if they will accept charges before making
| an arrest. In which case, it would not make sense to say
| crime is going down based solely on arrest statistics.
| Arrests and crime are not the same thing. What these
| statistics could really be indicating, since arrests are
| down but crime is up, is that accountability for crime is
| down.
| djrogers wrote:
| It's not a matter of being "in on it", it's just the
| reality of a) how policing works and b) California's
| decriminalized crime laws.
|
| Arresting a person takes an officer off the streets for
| several hours, which is a waste of scarce resources if
| the department knows for a fact that there will be no
| prosecution and the arrested person will be back on the
| street with no consequences.
|
| Also, any theft under $950 is a mere misdemeanor - it's a
| ticketable offense, with no arrest allowed.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Just because crime isn't increasing doesn't mean it's not
| a problem. We have no benchmark to compare 2019, 2020 and
| 2021 against and it may be dipping but 2020 likely saw a
| spike in crime so going down from there isn't saying
| much.
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| It literally isn't a problem then. Otherwise you're just
| trying to spin a narrative that doesn't line up with
| facts.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| First off, no one said crime is not a problem, they're
| saying it's not a _new_ problem ramping up. So let 's fix
| that bit of putting words in someone's mouth and see why
| doesn't the logic flow the other way?
|
| Just because crime is increasing doesn't mean it's a new
| problem. We have no benchmark to compare 2019, 2020 and
| 2021 against and it may be dipping but 2020 likely saw a
| spike in crime so going down from there isn't saying
| much.
|
| Seems pretty reasonable right?
| x0x0 wrote:
| There are charts over time available here
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/A-violent-year-
| Bay...
| BoorishBears wrote:
| The entire point is 2020 was a known anomaly (because of
| the tiny globe changing pandemic)
|
| Hence why their quote is about downward trends in _2021_
|
| > The San Francisco Police Department is actually seeing
| a dip in crime in 2021, part of a larger overall downward
| trend. Property crimes are down nearly 8 percent so far
| in 2021, and larceny theft -- the category of crime that
| includes shoplifting -- is down 14.4 percent.
|
| It's too early to start screaming doom and gloom about
| crime taking over
| x0x0 wrote:
| Ah, I was just sharing the data but yeah -- we're
| trending towards returning to the hellscape that was
| 2016. We're all gonna die! (Despite the fact that, well,
| we all lived through 2016...)
| refurb wrote:
| I was the victim of a property crime in SF and I never
| reported it. Why would I? No follow up by police. Same
| with neighbors.
|
| Your stats are _reported_ crime. Not actual crime.
| pvarangot wrote:
| You don't have any insurance? I never directly bought any
| insurance but two of my credit cards and my life
| insurance policy from work cover some amount of money in
| some cases if I get stuff stolen. They just need a police
| report, and that's why a lot of property crime does get
| reported. Apple Care also has a theft and loss protection
| that needs a police report. If your car window gets
| smashed you can get money back from insurance, but they
| will ask for a police report...
|
| This is why I always doubt people that claim that
| property crime isn't getting reported. Of course some of
| it will not get reported, but on the very very very
| unlikely event that you are a victim of property crime in
| SF if you like, have a credit card or Apple Care or car
| insurance, you probably can get free money by filing a
| police report.
| handrous wrote:
| This is normal most places (in the US, at least) AFAIK.
| Cops don't really investigate property crime unless it's
| _very_ serious (I know for a fact that several tens of
| thousands in stolen goods via a break-in spree at
| multiple businesses isn 't enough for them to put forth
| any effort, in my very-much-not-SF city) or someone with
| connections was the victim. They're like "OK here's your
| report for insurance, bye. No, stop trying to show me a
| list of places the culprit and their car's plates were
| assuredly caught on camera, I don't give a shit. Bye."
| Anyone who's been through this once already only bothers
| to report anything if an insurance claim will be made,
| since they know the cops won't do anything even if
| there's a _very_ high likelihood they could track down
| the culprit. Unless they catch them in the act, nothing
| 's gonna happen.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Did that change recently? Prosecution tactics may have
| changed, to even get to the that point the police have to
| be willing to investigate.
|
| I don't think I've ever seen a big city PD investigate
| "petty" property crime unless there was something unique
| about the case, like a gun being involved.
|
| So the stats being compared to have the same limitation
| namelessoracle wrote:
| Police wont investigate armed robbery with a firearm if
| there is no body. They may if you hand it to them on a
| platter (license plate number from getaway vehicle for
| example) or if there is a string of incidents in a very
| specific area and time of day. But string of incidents
| just results in maybe more cops around in that time and
| place and not a real investigation. And most people who
| do the armed robbery racket will tell victims to look
| down and keep their eyes down and respond not pleasantly
| if you do too much to try and identify them very well.
|
| Police dont investigate property crimes unless its
| someone important enough or has sway gets involved or the
| media gets involved.
|
| Murders they do investigate, because they have incentives
| to get a clearance rate down. This does mean they dont
| actually care if you committed the crime, just that it
| gets "cleared". God help you if you dont have a alibi and
| your husband/wife end up dead. Expect ALOT of police
| attention.
|
| Rapes will get classified as he said / she said not rapes
| because that way their clearance/conviction rates stay
| good.
|
| I also find it somewhat odd that people trust what police
| have to say about crime rates, where they have incentives
| to make themselves look good, but dont trust police about
| well anything else these days.
| mrits wrote:
| Why would anyone report something if they know nothing
| will be done about it? Even when the DA prosecutes it's
| still unlikely reporting it will do much good.
|
| My car has been broken into twice in the last few months
| in front of my house. The last thing I want to do is wait
| for an officer to come by 4 hours later to tell me there
| isn't anything he can do.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Because you'll need a police report to file an insurance
| claim.
| mrits wrote:
| I always wondered who paid for those low deductible
| plans.
| kmlx wrote:
| didn't san francisco experience covid and lockdowns?
|
| as a politician said recently: > we know we locked down
| not only the general population, but also criminals.
| adolph wrote:
| > Security guards won't intervene
|
| Weird. Makes me wonder why the guards exist.
| nemacol wrote:
| Previous work experience (at a casino in USA). Security
| existed for customer service, general rule enforcement
| where it could be done verbally, and to observe and
| document activities to be used later - like in court or by
| police. Professional eye witness.
|
| Of course there are times hands-on action was taken but the
| vast majority was no touch communication and de-escalation
| followed by a whole lot of documentation coordinated with
| video surveillance.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| +1
|
| If the military, with their training, has trouble
| calibrating force when interacting with civilians.
|
| And if police, with their less but still substantial
| training, have trouble.
|
| ... Then we probably don't want security guards, with
| even _less_ training, commonly using force.
|
| That some of them are ex-military or ex-police is
| immaterial, because there sure as hell isn't time made in
| their schedule to keep up to date.
| mindslight wrote:
| The lack of calibration is ultimately due to a lack of
| consequences. If security guards are bound by the law, in
| the way that police officers are _currently not_ , then
| I'd rather have security guards using force than the
| police.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I think private security is mostly for deterrence /
| theatre.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| There's definitely a large theater aspect but they also
| act as professional witnesses so to speak. They're
| trained to look for and record a suspect's
| characteristics that a lay person might not notice. A lay
| person might get you a description like "the big dude
| with long hair who got into a silver car" whereas a
| security guard will (should) get you a fairly precise
| height and weight as well as a plate number and the fact
| that the dude had a subtle tatoo on his wrist.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| That's really reasonable. Thanks for the perspective!
| gadders wrote:
| From the headline, I thought this would be for tools that get
| stolen from trades people's vans. _That_ would be useful. It
| seems to be a very common occurrence, and you often see the locks
| on vans upgraded.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Dewalt (and a few others) already have Bluetooth-enabled
| batteries that can do this. You can take some of their "Tool
| Connect" batteries and disable them over Bluetooth, or put them
| into a time-limited "lending mode" that kills the pack after X
| amount of time.
|
| https://www.dewalt.com/products/power-tools/connected-produc...
| andylynch wrote:
| I noticed Milwaukee mentioned in this thread as one of the
| vendors involved - yes, they can do this too
| (https://onekey.milwaukeetool.com/Connected-Tools) - this
| sounds like an extension of the same idea.
| gadders wrote:
| Thanks (& to kotaKat). That sounds like good news.
| leephillips wrote:
| When I lived in Washington, DC, and was fixing up a house there
| were contractors who simply would not take jobs there. They
| knew it meant getting their tools stolen from their vans. They
| would travel long distances for jobs within VA or MD, but
| refuse to drive a few miles into DC.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| > "organized retail crime" cost retailers $719,548 per $1 billion
| dollars in revenue.
|
| So less then 1%. With all the extra inconvenience they put on
| paying customers to combat this, I thought this was a much bigger
| issue.
| three14 wrote:
| Without the (old) extra inconvenience, it would probably be
| higher than 1%. Also, it could be that this mechanism
| substitutes for some of the previous anti-theft measures, so
| it's hard to use the $719,548 figure to conclude anything about
| whether this would be cost effective.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| A huge fraction of that 1% is probably concentrated in a few
| locales that have some nonstandard law enforcement policies
| enable repetitive shop lifting to be a viable source of income
| for the low level people in the scheme that actually take the
| stuff so while it may be a small percentage overall it likely
| makes a large impact on the viability of the many stores in
| those areas.
|
| Their power tools are probably an outsize contributor to their
| overall profit margin so if there's something they really don't
| want being stolen it's those.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| So California
| chadash wrote:
| Home depot has an 11% profit margin. It's not a Google (30%
| profit margin) or an Apple (26.7%) that prints money. So it
| cuts into 9% of profits, which is pretty significant.
| Kye wrote:
| ~$3 million out of ~$4 billion profit just in the first
| quarter of 2021 is still not worth this.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It is per 1 billion in revenue or 95 million per year.
| Kye wrote:
| You're right. Doesn't change the point. It's not worth
| the harm that was done by the law.
| djrogers wrote:
| What law?
| jrm4 wrote:
| One wonders if "plans to" is simply "plans to?" It would be
| really cheap to just sponsor this article and then just not do
| it; like putting the alarm system stickers on your house, but
| not actually getting the system...
| dangrover wrote:
| Margins can be low in some kinds of retail. Not sure how it
| stacks up for Home Depot
| shuntress wrote:
| Of note in the article: _" There are very organized groups where
| the leaders at the top are recruiting people that are drug-
| dependent, homeless, or down on their luck and offering them
| incentives and providing shopping lists to go out and bring back
| certain products"_
|
| In the broader context, attempting to thwart shoplifting directly
| is essentially treating the symptom rather than the disease. This
| is not caused by homeowners looking to save a buck on tools for
| yard work. It's organized crime taking advantage of vulnerable
| people.
|
| Social programs to help remove this source of cheap/willing labor
| combined with thorough investigation-based law enforcement is a
| better solution than theft resistant tools.
| Angostura wrote:
| Next stop:
|
| * You need to use the same technology to activiate premium
| features via a subscription
|
| * You cannot resell them
|
| etc etc
| hedora wrote:
| Well, that's dystopian!
|
| If they're going to all that effort, allow the end user to lock
| and unlock the friggin tools too!
|
| I'd happily pay more if I could bluetooth tether my power tools
| to a few cell phones.
|
| Tool theft is a huge problem for contractors and home owners, and
| this would put a huge damper on it. I guess reducing theft after
| it leaves the store would interfere with planned obsolescence.
| 1-6 wrote:
| I think power tool theft goes beyond retail. If they could use
| the same Bluetooth tech so it's associated to the owner, it would
| prevent a lot of jobsite theft and theft from contractor
| vehicles.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Most tools are motor and batteries and small control board. They
| don't have much to drm. So probably it will be trivial to solder
| something that is able to control the stolen merch good enough.
| fakename wrote:
| "Organized retail crime costs retailers an average of $719,548
| per $1 billion in sales" Seems like a lot of work for 0.07%
| crazygringo wrote:
| That's because you're calculating the percentage wrong.
|
| The relevant percentage isn't against sales but against
| profits. Home Depot has a profit margin of around 10%, so it
| would be $719,548 against $100M in profit, or 0.7%.
|
| If you can increase profits by nearly a full percentage point
| that's _huge_. That 's how companies grow, after all -- a
| percent here, a percent there, and all these little things are
| what make the stock price grow.
|
| Sure it's a "lot of work". That's what companies _do_. If it
| were easy we 'd all be billionaires.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| So you're claiming they just like upsetting customers and
| spending money to stop theft for the hell of it? I suppose we
| should trust some rando on hackernews over the people running
| the business. Yeah.... hmmmmm
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| > Organized retail crime costs retailers an average of $719,548
| per $1 billion in sales, a 2020 survey from the National Retail
| Federation found -- a nearly 60% increase from 2015.
|
| Interesting way of saying < .1% Bullshit that the tool
| manufacturers are going to install bluetooth tech in every device
| for purely on/off purchases. They are going to track the shit out
| of that tool, mark my words. Also, it will fail on occasion,
| likely more than .1% of the time. If they don't want to effect
| 99.9% of the legit purchasers, they wouldn't be putting this
| power consuming device tracker in 100% of devices.
| mdip wrote:
| I couldn't help while reading this thinking 'Security is in
| charge of Customer Experience'. Obviously theft is a serious
| problem for the likes of retail -- and shoplifting is something
| that isn't 100% preventable. You can reduce it, but you can't
| stop it. And every step you take to reduce it risks alienating
| customers.
|
| For example, we've all encountered those silly alarm systems at
| the doors. As I've never been a shoplifter, I've never had those
| go off on me except in error. When I worked at CompUSA for 5
| years, we had a greeter at the door who told me "they've never
| once, in 15 years, caught a shoplifter". They went off _several
| times a day_ , so the only people being stopped at the door were
| people who had purchased their goods being _treated_ like a
| shoplifter.
|
| I'm assuming this system will work a lot better than the old, but
| if I got my tool home and it simply didn't work, I'd be extremely
| frustrated -- especially if I could have avoided both drives to
| the retail store and had the product delivered tomorrow, instead.
|
| The alternative is to turn the whole thing upside down. Change
| the way shopping is done so that shoplifting doesn't work. I fill
| a cart, walk through the gate out the door and receive a total,
| passing my card/phone over a sensor to pay. Of course, this means
| it's on Home Depot to get it right and I'm sure there will be
| ways to defeat the system. If they fail to ring up an item
| because it's not detected in the cart, I'm not sure if they have
| legal recourse at that point, but it also serves to motivate them
| to make the system a lot more reliable than the current ones are.
| And you stop treating your customers like shoplifters :)
| dtjb wrote:
| If Home Depot could somehow extend this anti-theft protection
| to the original purchaser, that would be a huge positive to
| customer experience. Tool theft at job sites is a massive
| problem, especially because most workers are responsible for
| providing their own tools.
| flareback wrote:
| Future Headline "Construction halted across US as hackers
| prevent power tool usage"
| sethammons wrote:
| That's what I thought the title was referring to and my
| initial thought was it would be brilliant to "lojack" your
| power tools.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Honest question - where do professional tradesmen buy their
| tools?
|
| Mechanics (auto, airline) don't normally go to HD or Lowes -
| they buy from SnapOn, Cromwell, or Mac - all three send
| salespeople in large box trucks full of tools to work site.
| And all three offer credit and payment plans. And when tools
| break, those trucks come by with replacements.
| wastedhours wrote:
| Depends on the tool and the usecase - our contractors
| always had proper pro-level drills and powertools, but
| their handtools (especially more consumable ones that get
| lost during day to days when they're mobile, like
| screwdrivers and stuff) looked to be from DIY stores.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| Fastenal is one of the places you'll probably see tradesmen
| buying tools and hardware. They certainly sell stuff that's
| several notches above what you can get at a big box store
| (both tools and hardware), and it's geared to be more
| friendly to those that know what they're doing.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Well, the guys that built my shed/workshop/mancave had the
| cheapest big box store power tools and a hammer that looked
| (and likely was) older than me. I've never seen anyone
| brandish one of those 36 or 40V batteries either.
| moftz wrote:
| All the contractors I've had at my house usually have
| Dewalt electric tools. I think it's a convenience factor,
| they are already going to Home Depot during their lunch
| hour anyway to buy whatever small thing they need to finish
| the job.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Tool truck these days are for suckers and everyone under
| 35-40 knows it (everyone over 40 knows it too but fewer of
| them will admit it). Back in the day the price differential
| was less and the quality differential was more and a lot of
| people are stuck int their ways. People will still pay for
| tool truck convenience when they need to though. Most
| people have a mix of everything from Harbor Freight to
| Craigslist/ebay/pawnshop to tool truck to Home Depot to
| Amazon. Nobody is really buying expensive tools on the
| regular because that's a lot of money. People will
| generally buy expensive power tools when they see a good
| sale or have a specific job to justify it.
|
| The white collar internet loves to blindly fetishize
| "quality" tools but professionals are always trying to
| strike a balance because every buck spent on overhead is a
| buck you're not getting paid and having breadth of tools is
| often more important than quantity since having the right
| tool matters a lot more than having a nice tool and if you
| don't buy nice tools you can afford to have the right tool
| more often. For secondary "luxury" tools that just make a
| job faster (like a ratcheting box wrench) many people buy
| the cheap stuff whereas tools you only use when you really
| need them (like flare nut wrenches) tend to be higher
| quality.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I worked for years with Craftsman and Husky (and some
| Harbor Freight) hand tools. I later splurged for some
| secondhand SnapOn ratchets. They are unquestionably
| better and totally worth the difference in price to me.
| Similar story with Wera screwdrivers being noticeably
| better than Craftsman.
|
| I still buy some Harbor Freight tools, especially if I
| only need it for a one-off job, but the higher-end tool
| names are often genuinely better, not just higher priced.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Go watch the Project Farm torque wrench test where the
| Harbor Freight was more accurate than Snapoff.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| It's not totally inconceivable that there are Harbor
| Freight torque wrenches that are initially is on par with
| a CDI, Precision Instruments (both of whom Snap-On
| rebrand), or the Tech-Angle with regards to torque
| accuracy, but good luck ever getting a reputable
| metrology shop to touch a Harbor Freight torque wrench
| (or one that isn't American made, for that matter) when
| it inevitably comes time to do a re-calibration.
| namibj wrote:
| Not even like Knipex, Wera, or a similar German tool
| company?
| rpcope1 wrote:
| If it's manufactured in a western country, it's probably
| fine, I don't think you see too many like that here in
| the U.S.
|
| It's usually either American, Taiwanese or Chinese, and a
| reputable shop like Angle Repair, for example, absolutely
| will not touch a Chinese torque wrench, and might only
| ever touch a Taiwanese torque wrench if it's a warrantied
| item on one of their supported brands, and probably only
| with some arm twisting on the part of the vendor they're
| doing warranty work for.
| michaelt wrote:
| Oh, expensive tools are very _nice_ , certainly.
|
| But if you're a young guy just getting started in a
| trade, and you can choose between a cheap socket set plus
| two dates with your girlfriend, or a premium socket set?
| 9/10 guys would choose the former.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| You never get more than you pay for but you can always
| get less.
|
| Whether a fancy ratchet is worth it depends a lot on how
| much you use your impact wrench. People tend to buy high
| end versions of the tools they use the most. There's
| plenty of professional roofers who have a $400 nail guns
| that weigh nothing and a couple clunky old HF framing
| guns on the truck. An electrician probably has a pawn
| shop or harbor freight hammer drill. The plumber probably
| has a nice hammer drill.
| munificent wrote:
| _> The white collar internet loves to blindly fetishize
| "quality" tools_
|
| I don't know how much this is fetishizing versus simply
| having different priorities.
|
| White collar tech people using tools are more likely to
| be doing so for hobby or recreation. They have spare
| money and their goal is a maximally enjoyable experience.
| With those priorities, it makes sense to buy better tools
| than you could justify economically.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _The white collar internet loves to blindly fetishize
| "quality" tools but professionals are always trying to
| strike a balance because every buck spent on overhead is
| a buck you're not getting paid_
|
| That certainly wasn't my intention. My last roommate was
| an auto mechanic, then later a SnapOn dealer. He and the
| techs at the shops he serviced had massive rolling carts
| that cost $20k+ filled with another $30k in tools.
|
| Certainly there were some cheaper tools in those carts,
| but as far as I could tell, they were mostly SnapOn or
| Mac.
| jccooper wrote:
| The building trades mostly go to the big box home centers
| just like the rest of us. In construction, most hand tools
| aren't high precision and are semi-disposable, so there's
| no reason to go above prosumer grade.
|
| There are some specialty tools that are sufficiently rare
| or expensive they'll get at trade-specific supply houses.
| Plumbers in particular can do the job either with a $5 saw
| and a bottle of glue or a $500 PEX expansion tool,
| depending on material.
|
| The exception is something like high-end finish carpentry
| or furniture-making, which is high-precision, and does
| reward having professional tools and taking care of them.
| They have brands like Festool, which are available at
| specialty retailers.
| sonofhans wrote:
| When I was gutting/rebuilding my kitchen years ago, I had
| an unexpected water leak. I'd driven a screw into a PEX
| line while installing cabinet bases (I missed installing
| one cover plate before I drywalled). I'd done most of the
| plumbing myself, but didn't have the PEX expander tool
| you mention, just because they're so expensive.
|
| I called my plumber late in the day and he stopped by on
| the way home from another gig. He didn't have the tool on
| him, so instead he spent about 15 minutes forcing the
| handle of a socket wrench into the PEX so he could
| manually cram in a connector. It was remarkable, like
| watching someone tear a phone book in half. PEX is tough
| as hell.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| My brother and father are high end renovation carpenter's,
| as far as I'm aware they typically get tools at Home Depot
| or similar places.
| namelessoracle wrote:
| When tools break and they need them today (because the job
| needs to be finished today because there isnt time on the
| schedule next week to go back to this job site, also most
| customers get upset if you leave their home in a state of
| disrepair....), they DO go to HD or Lowes.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| There's a whole parallel universe of suppliers out there.
| Some stuff comes from muggle stores like Home Depot or
| Lowes because they're ubiquitous or the tools are
| sufficiently interchangeable or some wizard brand gets
| stocked there anyway (Klein, for instance).
|
| Good stuff largely comes from wizard stores. They're mostly
| locally owned or small, regional chains with a few national
| chains most muggles haven't heard of. Electrical stuff
| comes from Needco, Rexel, and Graybar where I live. I
| bought some Klein screwdrivers at a Rexel, because Klein
| (and maybe Wera) are the last ones making decent
| screwdrivers generally and cabinet-tip screwdrivers
| specifically.
|
| They were $9-$10 a piece instead of that much for a set,
| but they're made right, and they're readily available if
| you know where to look.
|
| My handheld power tools mostly come from lumber yards or
| local hardware stores. And I happily pay more for Makita
| over DeWalt, Milwaukee, Rigid, etc from the box stores. Not
| looking to start a flame war over who makes better tools,
| but the Makita stuff is consistently excellent and priced
| fairly for the quality.
|
| I've probably used a wider variety of routers than any
| other type of tool, and it's true that you get what you pay
| for, especially for plunge routers. The plunge action is
| just smoother and more precise as you go up in price. Bosch
| also makes a pretty good one, for what it's worth.
|
| Though I build furniture, not houses, I end up shopping at
| a lot of the same places as carpenters. You consistently
| see Festool for handheld power tools (and I do own a
| Domino), Stabila for levels, Freud, Whiteside and/or Amanda
| for router bits, Freud or Forrest for saw blades, and
| Tajima for a wide variety of layout and hand tools. Tajima
| makes an outstanding chalk line and the nicest caulk gun
| I've ever laid my eyes on.
|
| You might see Freud router bits at a box store, but never
| the selection that a wizard store stocks. You'll pay more,
| but the sales people know their stuff, and you can get it
| today, not tomorrow. That's worth a couple bucks if time is
| money. Incidentally, Freud also makes the Diablo saw blades
| that you find at box stores, and they're excellent value
| for the money.
|
| Tools truly specific to furniture making are usually a
| specialist supplier. You can buy an approximation if a
| combination square or marking gauge at a box store, but
| it'll be less irritating to just take your money and light
| it on fire. Woodcraft and Rockler both have decent stuff if
| you're near a brick and mortar location. If you aren't,
| they sell online as does Highland Hardware, and a bunch of
| other vendors.
|
| How do you know if you're in a wizard store or a muggle
| store? Wizard stores usually keep hours that reflect the
| fact that most of their customers are there during their
| workday, not on their time off. If a store closes by 5:30
| and aren't open on the weekend, guaranteed they're a wizard
| store.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| I can't speak for other trades, but I have enough
| experience doing carpentry (mostly on the side, but paid)
| to say that Home Depot/Lowes/Local equivalent building
| supply stores are where carpenters and general contractors
| buy their tools, or at least that we're buying the same
| models that are available at Home Depot regardless of
| source.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Interesting. In my limited experience with pneumatic
| tools, SnapOn is much higher quality than the brands
| available at big box stores. Probably not worth it for
| typical homeowners, but my old roommate ran a SnapOn
| truck.
| dylan604 wrote:
| My dad's company was hired to do work inside a facility
| that made sockets. At the end of the line where the
| sockets were being prepared for packaging, the sockets
| would get separated and sent down various lines where
| they were stamped with brand info like Craftsmen, SnapOn,
| Husky, etc. They were all the exact same socket. It's not
| like they ones that passed a 16 point QA went to SnapOn,
| the ones that only passed 12/16 points were stamped
| Craftsman, and the ones with lesser scores stamped Husky.
| They were all identical.
|
| If the sockets were this way, I would also expect that to
| be the same across the things like wrenches as well. The
| great thing about SnapOn is that truck. They will show up
| without the need for you to go somewhere. Their warranty
| wasn't any different than Craftsman's life time warranty,
| except you had to find a Sears.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I recently had the opportunity to take apart somebody
| else's MAC battery-operated impact wrench, and found it
| was exactly the same as the DeWalt one on my bench. It's
| just molded in red plastic instead of yellow. The
| advertised torque rating is slightly higher than the
| DeWalt, so maybe there's a subtle component difference in
| the (epoxy-potted) motor control module. I hope the guy
| didn't pay too much extra for it though.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Anecdotally, I use my Harbor Freight (non-impact) sockets
| on my impact gun. I've never broken one. I've broken tons
| of Craftsman sockets with far less force.
| aeturnum wrote:
| SnapOn is famously desirable and expensive. I think part
| of this is that there are very few truly "premium"
| construction tools because, well, they are used in
| construction. Your drills and saws and the like are
| expected to get beat up and may need replacing. You may
| need more tools if you get more workers one day and fewer
| tools the next. Obviously there is still a range in
| quality and I'm sure we've all noticed the difference
| between a good name brand tool and a more budget option,
| but I think the ceiling is intentionally kinda low.
| ToFundorNot wrote:
| Small construction tools (drills, portable table saws,
| angle grinders) is largely done at big box stores,
| however smaller stores sell a fair amount, plus specialty
| product, but the bread and butter small tools are big box
| stores. Quality is the same, and prices are generally
| lower.
|
| Shop equipment used to be done by trade show, not sure
| how it works these days.
| caf wrote:
| Reading the headline, that's actually what I thought it was
| going to be.
| ianhawes wrote:
| This. I was excited seeing the headline, but disappointed it
| only applied to purchasing from Home Depot.
| moftz wrote:
| My Makita batteries have an anti-theft feature built-in that
| offers a way to disable the battery after a certain date or
| number of hours or days. You have to plug the battery back
| into a special terminal to "recharge" the day or hour timer
| or to set a new lockout with a PIN. It comes with warning
| stickers you can put on your batteries. The system is mostly
| just meant to prevent workers from borrowing equipment for
| weekend side jobs or keeping batteries after the job is
| finished. It doesn't actually stop someone from stealing them
| (or even the tool the battery goes with) but hopefully they
| read the sticker and realize that it's not worth stealing
| what will soon be a worthless battery. I've never used this
| feature but it's a neat system. Sometimes the tools
| themselves have anti-theft tags inside that will set off
| sensors but I don't know if anyone actually uses that outside
| of the store you bought the tool from.
| toxik wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you can just open the battery pack up and
| disconnect whatever circuit lives in there. The batteries
| are just packs of chemicals.
| snypher wrote:
| Maybe some time ago. Now the tool+battery has handshakes
| and all that; https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products
| /power/battery-ma...
| giantg2 wrote:
| The easiest way would be to implement the smart gun tech for
| tools. Keep the paired bracelet at the counter, then the user
| can wear it when using it. If the bracelet isn't in range,
| then the tool won't work.
|
| I'm guessing people wouldn't be very happy with this user
| experience though. Cost for biometric implementation would
| likely be cost prohibitive.
| ggreer wrote:
| I don't think a smart gun has ever been sold to consumers
| in the US. The technology simply isn't reliable enough to
| be useful. The one model that a company did try to market
| was so expensive and unreliable[1] that no store imported
| it. Also people were worried about the built-in kill
| switch.
|
| 1. https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2014/8/8/wha
| ts-s...
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| why does it have to be biometric at all? Just make it 2FA.
| Make it so that the bracelet and the tool have to be
| within, say, 1m of each other and that seems like a viable
| solution (And obviously have the ability to disable this
| feature if the user wishes)
| giantg2 wrote:
| "(And obviously have the ability to disable this feature
| if the user wishes)"
|
| True, that didn't really come to mind since they don't
| generally talk about allowing that for guns. The best
| thing is probably using one's phone as the token since
| the phone has bluetooth and this article mentions that
| the tools are unlocked with that.
|
| The reason I brought up biometrics is that the unlocking
| 'token' is less likely to get lost than the bracelet,
| etc. But that does bring up another good point, that some
| of the common biometrics like fingerprints wouldn't work
| since many people wear work gloves.
|
| Although, it would provide a good large-scale proof of
| concept for smart gun tech if it worked the same as the
| proposed smart gun tech.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "Lost my phone and now I can't use my power tools...."
|
| -- Future internet of shit post
| giantg2 wrote:
| Not if it's using an app that stores the info in some
| manufacturers database (just imagine the marketing
| goldmine of tracking users usage).
| nimbius wrote:
| i wrench in a shop all day long, and let me tell you what
| works. Pink tools.
|
| My pocket knife is hot pink, my socket wrenches are dipped
| pink, and most of my powertools have a flair of pink
| somewhere from a can of Krylon. Pink is natures danger color
| for the average nail swatter pounding monster energy and
| fried cake from the 7-11 at 4 AM. my job boxes are covered in
| unicorn stickers and rainbows.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| That only works because the people who'd steal your tools
| would steal them to use themselves.
|
| There's a reason every large facility that provides its own
| tools has a tool crib where they track who checked out
| what.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And not just the tools, also the consumables. Endmills
| and such grow little legs as soon as they're out of the
| central depot. And that stuff _really_ adds up.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I've heard that pink cars are the least likely to be
| stolen.
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm a musician. I make my own cables, all green.
| brk wrote:
| I used to do a lot of product demos that involved network
| equipment. All the patch cables I carried were either pink
| or purple. They were never confused with customer cables,
| and I do not ever recall one of them being stolen.
| soneil wrote:
| I was actually relieved to find the opposite, that this only
| concerns the store until it goes out of the door.
|
| There was a story the other day that Office 2010 was no
| longer activating in some regions because the activation
| servers just aren't there anymore. The downside of having an
| iphone-esque "activation lock" is that you could be left with
| a 10yo drill that isn't permitted to turn on because the
| activation servers have been abandoned - and any sensible
| workaround negates its use as a theft deterrent.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
|
| Power tool DRM would, inevitably, be used in an anti-consumer
| fashion.
| floatrock wrote:
| PTaaS - Power Tools as a Service.
|
| Tesla makes software performance unlocks, K-Cups have DRM
| on their pods, and your xbox or playstation hardware is
| subsidized by the license costs on the games you're gonna
| buy in the same way your printer is cheap because the ink
| cartridges are expensive.
|
| Only a matter of time before you can buy a $20 cordless
| drill but the charger requires a $15/mo Battery
| Conditioning Cloud subscription.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Looks like Right to Repair has a loophole :-)
| whymauri wrote:
| "Firmware Error: this Ryobi drill will automatically turn
| off and stay off until security patch 11.045. Please
| connect to a stable Internet connection and set up your
| Home Depot Builders(TM) account to use your drill."
|
| Watch pre-DRM and 'jailbroken' power tools become highly
| sought after, lol.
| spartas wrote:
| Yup. Just watch what happens when the tools reach end-of-
| life. No more security patches and they will stop
| working, like all of those early smart TV apps that have
| been unsupported for years.
|
| You could buy a third-party manufacturer's tools because
| they're cheaper, but when they can't keep the lights on
| and they shut off the authentication servers, well you're
| SOL
| baybal2 wrote:
| Sounds laughable, but I'm already on, I think, 5th such
| "Product as a Service" contraption, and refused a 6th one
| because of client's business model been extremely
| unethical, and borderline fraud:
|
| A WiFi MP3 player with "unlimited music through life" and
| few paid premium tracks, which the client planned to
| suddenly switch into not so unlimited, and subscription
| only in the course of 2-3 years through the power of fine
| print, and legalese. Bait, and switch.
|
| Stuff like DRMed consumables for water filters, coffee
| machine capsules, subscription only air fresheners, and
| _DRMed packed fresh food_! is already a reality.
|
| And if you don't believe about microchipped, DRMed food,
| here it is:
|
| https://ibb.co/b65kHfY
|
| https://ibb.co/19L9fw3
|
| https://ibb.co/bvD7NcJ
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| I'm curious about the DRM food, but I can't tell what's
| happening in any of those photos. Can you provide a
| translation?
| baybal2 wrote:
| It's like the Juicero, but for food.
|
| Each pack is made of a very, very sturdy piece of
| plastic, and an NFC chip, and a single use QR code which
| will invalidate itself after a single online lookup for
| an unlock key.
|
| User puts this "food cartridge" into the machine, and
| scans the code. The machine will cut open the cartridge,
| and cook the stuff inside.
|
| It will of course refuse to cook if your "food
| subscription" is expired, or if it thinks the NFC chip is
| fake. Or at least this is how they wanted it to be in
| their original design proposal.
|
| Whatever engineering company who took them as a client
| probably managed to tone down their fantasies a bit.
|
| Brave new world...
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| The toolmakers have already done this:
| https://onekeysupport.milwaukeetool.com/en/knowledge/ios-
| too...
| moftz wrote:
| That's a neat system. Looks like it works by allowing any
| phone with the Milwaukee app to identify a nearby tracked
| tool regardless of who actually owns it. You'd really only
| be able to keep using a stolen tool as long as the lock-out
| time is still active and no one with the app comes in
| range. I wonder if they are able to integrate it with Apple
| Airtags to at least provide location data.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Security is always a trade off with user/customer experience.
|
| It's much more convenient to just not have a door or always
| leave it unlocked.
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| they are not really meant to catch shop lifters, they are meant
| to deter shoplifting. And to that extent, they likely work.
| Maybe not from "professionals", but from little smart ass tikes
| whom would otherwise think to be 'clever'.
|
| Source: I used to shoplift as a kid. Don't grab the shit with
| buzzers.
| tpxl wrote:
| > For example, we've all encountered those silly alarm systems
| at the doors. As I've never been a shoplifter, I've never had
| those go off on me except in error. When I worked at CompUSA
| for 5 years, we had a greeter at the door who told me "they've
| never once, in 15 years, caught a shoplifter". They went off
| several times a day, so the only people being stopped at the
| door were people who had purchased their goods being treated
| like a shoplifter.
|
| A cashier once forgot to remove the alarm thing on an item I
| purchased after checking me out. The alarm went off about 20
| feet before I was at the sensor, by the time another group was
| passing through. The security guard checked them and their
| receipts and let them go. When I passed through no alarm went
| off.
| [deleted]
| moftz wrote:
| I used to wear a fleece-lined sweatshirt that would set off
| the sensors at Barnes and Noble every time. I checked all
| over for the anti-theft sticker and had washed it multiple
| times but it must have been inside the jacket.
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| The simple way already effectively used by companies like B&H
| is that for high price items or things easily shop lifted, you
| take a ticket for the item, it's brought to checkout by
| employees or in b&h's system conveyor belts, and then you
| purchase it and they hand it to you. This is a solved problem
| without need for complicated and expensive solutions like yours
| (which cuts out people paying in cash which is a lot of home
| depot) or this new solve.
| minikites wrote:
| >and they hand it to you
|
| This involves paying someone to be the "they" to hand it to
| you and companies don't want to pay employees if they can
| possibly avoid it.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Costco manages it just fine. Want an iPad or iMac? Take the
| cardboard sheet and hand it to the cashier. Granted, Costco
| is always staffed, but it is possible.
| bradfa wrote:
| Locally, right now, it's hard to find ANYONE in the local
| Home Depot or Lowe's stores who actually works there. The
| registers have a skeleton crew, there's basically no one
| "helping" in the aisles, and usually only 1 or 2 people at
| the customer service and online order pickup desk.
|
| The people you are able to find seem to be brand new at the
| job and are basically useless, even for simple things like
| getting the right online order picked from the shelf behind
| them as they have no idea what the organizational system
| is.
|
| It's not just that you have to pay someone to do this, you
| have to be able to simply hire a warm body, and right now
| that seems horribly hard in retail where I am.
| lief79 wrote:
| No surprise there, construction is booming ... why take a
| low paying side job when you can make more doing what you
| know.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I suspect that those beepers do work: they discourage actual
| shoplifters to the point that they don't catch them anymore
| because those shoplifters will move on to stores that don't
| have the beepers or they successfully lose the tags because
| they know that they are going to shoplift.
|
| And then there are these thingies:
|
| https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-security-tag-detector...
| tomjen3 wrote:
| My mum worked in an upscale retail store back in the day when
| they introduced the first version of that system. As you say
| they went of on customers all the time, so she or a coworker
| would be ready with a box chocolates and an apology. This
| wasn't cheap at all, but it was still worth it because it
| prevented so much theft.
|
| I don't know if that is still the case, or it is just that
| thieves go for the easy stores that don't have any security.
| Back before reddit banned r/shoplifting I lurked there out of
| curiosity, and it seemed that those who posted there had pretty
| good ways around that security.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > As you say they went of on customers all the time, so she
| or a coworker would be ready with a box chocolates and an
| apology.
|
| You have been randomly selected to receive a door prize! We
| just need to confirm your receipt first...
| mannerheim wrote:
| > but if I got my tool home and it simply didn't work
|
| I have bought items without the anti-theft devices being
| removed, everything from guns to booze.
|
| In the latter case, on one of the occasions when that happened,
| it was possible albeit slightly challenging to simply wriggle
| the anti-theft device off.
|
| In other cases, though, I had to return to the store.
| s5fs wrote:
| A few years back I purchased a deer rifle from a local
| sporting goods store and when I got home I realized they had
| forgotten to remove their trigger lock. It was about a 30min
| drive back to the store so I just picked the lock and tossed
| it aside. Naturally, the next day the store calls looking for
| their lock and they are very adamant I should return their
| equipment, but they were less inclined to actually drive over
| to my place and pick it up.
| basseq wrote:
| We're all playing armchair strategist here, but I really don't
| understand the thinking or the decision here.
|
| I mean, they kind of thought about CX! They didn't want to go
| with locked containers because they "don't want to affect the
| 99.5% of our customers who are just there to pick up their
| hammers and nails". Those 99.5% of customers who would _see_
| (not interact with--just see!) said locked container.
|
| Then they go with this complex supply chain solutions that
| requires additional complexity (e.g., bluetooth technology) to
| be incorporated at the _design_ step with vendors to make it
| all work.
|
| That has to be multitudes more expensive than security tags and
| gates.
|
| What's the error rate on that process? How many legitimate
| customers are going to be negatively affected by a miss in the
| "tool activation" step? And think about it: you're not going to
| figure out that they missed a step until you get home. Not like
| the alarm going off when you try to walk out the door before
| they forgot to remove it. Annoying, but at least you're still
| at the store!
|
| All this in the name of _deterrence_. Those "silly alarm
| systems" aren't designed to _catch_ shoplifters... they 're to
| discourage people from shoplifting. Same thing here.
|
| After all, it's not like the shoplifters are going to _return_
| the tools that don 't work!
| dwater wrote:
| When I worked at CompUSA, our door greeter did pursue a
| shoplifter who pushed him down on the way out, resulting in a
| sprained wrist. They ended up firing him because the explicit
| policy was not to pursue shoplifters for the very reason that
| risk of injury is too high.
|
| I learned a lot of basic retail stuff at that job, like the
| fact that, for emergencies, all automatic sliding doors have to
| be capable of being pushed open. It seems like all the
| shoplifters knew it, there were a few times I saw someone bang
| straight on through them.
| speedgoose wrote:
| In my opinion, the alarms at the doors are there to dissuade
| non experienced thiefs.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| If the alarm goes off just hold up any piece of paper that
| looks like a receipt and keep walking. That's what I do when
| I'm _not_ stealing anything at least, but nobody 's ever
| stopped me to find out.
| jaywalk wrote:
| There's no reason to even bother holding something up. Just
| keep walking. It's what I've always done, and it's never
| once caused an issue even if there's somebody at the door.
| speedgoose wrote:
| If you are a dad with blond hair and blue eyes, that may
| help.
| kmlx wrote:
| it's not only your opinion, it's an actual fact.
|
| these are called deterrents. same as cctv and other tech.
| they're not bulletproof, their aim is to make life harder for
| the perp.
| ancient_art wrote:
| Not being treated like a potential shoplifter would be nice!
|
| A friend of mine and I had these door alarm systems go off
| while ENTERING a store.
|
| We (around 13 or 14 at that time) had to take off most of our
| clothes in front of other customers (in the middle of the entry
| next to the registers) until the "store detective" found out it
| was my friends cap, wet from the rain that day, that triggered
| the system.
|
| Never told anyone because we were ashamed af.
| kiba wrote:
| In some of my encounter with alarm systems at door, there was a
| gap in which a person can just walk through and not trigger any
| alarm.
| callesgg wrote:
| You dont have to go to prison for prison to have an effect on
| your mind.
|
| Do you get the analogy?
| Closi wrote:
| > I couldn't help while reading this thinking 'Security is in
| charge of Customer Experience'. O
|
| > The alternative is to turn the whole thing upside down.
| Change the way shopping is done so that shoplifting doesn't
| work. I fill a cart, walk through the gate out the door and
| receive a total, passing my card/phone over a sensor to pay.
|
| Your post seemed to start with criticising security being in
| charge of customer experience, and seemed to end with proposing
| changing the entire shopping experience to avoid theft.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Sure? The problem isn't that security is integrated into the
| way the store works, the problem is that security is making
| things harder for the customer. The proposed solution reworks
| the store, true, but it does so in order to maximize
| convenience for the customer.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That's an effective deterrent from a certain type of theft.
| Mostly casual/thrill seeking thieves.
|
| CompUSAs big shrink issues were more organized criminals
| popping boxes open or flooding the store. I worked at one that
| was hit by a crime bus -- 50 mostly non-English speaking Asians
| would occupy every employee and loot the place. (They hit all
| of the big box retailers in our area). The biggest issue was
| internal fraud.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| That's awesome
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > Change the way shopping is done so that shoplifting doesn't
| work. I fill a cart, walk through the gate out the door and
| receive a total, passing my card/phone over a sensor to pay. Of
| course, this means it's on Home Depot to get it right and I'm
| sure there will be ways to defeat the system.
|
| This sounds an awful lot like how the Amazon retail / grocery
| stores work. You arrive, scan a QR code at a gate as you walk
| in. You take whatever you want, and then leave without dealing
| with anyone. A bit later, you receive a bill in your email and
| a charge is made to your card.
|
| It's seamless and super convenient. It's also super creepy once
| you think about how it must work. I don't think I'd go back
| after that one visit.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > I fill a cart, walk through the gate out the door and receive
| a total, passing my card/phone over a sensor to pay.
|
| More technology? Maybe the wrong direction.
|
| Oldest "hack" in modern shoplifting is to swap the contents of
| the boxes. You open two boxes on the floor, swap tools, get the
| better tool charged for the lesser-priced tool.
|
| Or as you suggest, merely remove the identification tag so it
| is not charged at all.
|
| Maybe just bring back cashiers to ring people up?
| ineedasername wrote:
| I remember that, shopping at CompUSA. Even more annoying we're
| alarms in items themselves, display items. Turn the item around
| to look at it and the alarm could go off, and take a staff
| member 5 minutes to walk over and deactivate it. Then a few
| minutes later it would happen again with a different product.
| [deleted]
| Merad wrote:
| Alternative headline: Home Depot discovers a way to introduce
| power tools that can fail due to software bugs.
| sombremesa wrote:
| Good to see Glowforge's pioneering work is starting to have an
| industry-wide effect. /s
| CTOSian wrote:
| ok, so someone can't simply crack them open, take off the "smart
| controller" and install one of those adjustable speed control
| from china ? I doubt this is something (eg like firmware)
| embedded on the motor.
| dugmartin wrote:
| When I read the headline I thought it meant stolen post-purchase.
| When I lived in Chicago in the '90s I heard stories (never
| validated) that contractors would show up at the Maxwell Street
| Market on the weekend to re-purchase the tools that were stolen
| from their jobsites during the week. I can validate there were a
| lot of really, really used power tools for sale there.
| wirthjason wrote:
| Did they get them with mustard and onions? As a fellow
| Chicagoan I went to know.
| dnautics wrote:
| It would be huge if they gave the customers the ability to use
| the same tech.
| newsclues wrote:
| Almost certainly it will, likely starting with the high end
| contractor line of tools.
| h2odragon wrote:
| It wasn't quite _that_ bad; but yeah there were some places in
| the Chicago area where you could go and be likely to find
| anything you 'd come up missing. It was cool to see what was
| "OK" for those markets and what they wouldn't buy and sell;
| police mobile radios should've been a lot more valuable than
| that.
| z3ugma wrote:
| Even in the mid 2010s I saw some questionable power tools at
| Maxwell Street Market that "fell off a truck". I have a
| specific memory of a hammer drill that had splatters of very-
| fresh cement on it.
| [deleted]
| erdos4d wrote:
| How is this realistic to implement though? Unless it is done in
| the motor itself, I have to believe someone will have a hack for
| it very soon.
| weare138 wrote:
| So what happens if this bluetooth device fails and bricks your
| drill after you bought it? These things are used in construction
| and take a constant beating. They last for as long as they do
| because they're simply and reliably designed. Why not just put a
| bluetooth tracker in the box that's disabled when purchased?
| swalls wrote:
| I'd say they probably considered that a feature.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Next thing you know they'll turn themselves off if you don't
| renew your support contract, or try to use unsupported screws.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if "unsupported screws" was already a
| thing with some high-end products.
|
| I've once had in hands an advanced automatic torque wrench that
| had a built-in barcode scanner in front - ostensibly so that it
| could tell what part of an assembly you're screwing in, so it
| can pick the correct torque settings from a pre-programmed
| database. But it's a short hop from there to verifying you're
| using fasteners up to spec, and this can be trivially extended
| to ensuring you're using the _right_ fasteners :).
| TheHypnotist wrote:
| I get the impression there might be a hurdle with building
| regulations.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| The industry standard for this is manufacturers of
| siding/windows/etc calling out that improper installation can
| void the product warranty.
| sircastor wrote:
| That's the (adjacent) premise of Cory Doctorow's "Unauthorized
| Bread"
| junon wrote:
| I get where you're coming from but that's a bit extreme. It's
| pretty clear Home Depot doesn't like doing this.
| sneak wrote:
| They already don't mechanically fit any batteries but the
| OEM's.
|
| The lock-in is real.
| ntkachov wrote:
| There are battery adapters from amazon and 3rd party
| batteries available readily. Your argument doesn't hold
| water.
|
| And oem batteries have systems in place to prevent over-
| use, over-heating and will shut off to prevent battery
| damage. So its less like DRM for batteries and more like
| each tool is designed along side its battery for
| performance.
| snypher wrote:
| Good luck using a non-One-Key battery in a Milwaukee
| tool.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Details: https://www.protoolreviews.com/milwaukee-one-
| key-technology/
|
| Supports location tracking and geofencing
| gabereiser wrote:
| lol, I came here to say the same thing. John Deere style. Or
| K-Cup authorization. It's only a matter of time.
| f6v wrote:
| I was hoping we're that far in the future that the tools would
| scan your DNA by drawing blood every time you pick them up. Or at
| least have a fingerprint sensor.
| CivBase wrote:
| This is the most unnecessarily expensive and convoluted solution.
| Every product would have to be updated to support this system and
| it only works with electrical devices.
|
| Here's a better idea. If a product is liable to be stolen, just
| keep it locked up and require the clerk to get it for you at
| checkout. It's probably less work for the clerk to do that than
| fiddle with this new system and it would require much less error-
| prone technology or cooperation from manufacturers. Most stores
| figured this out decades ago.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| i liked what office (depot|max) did... one demo item on display
| to explorer. if you're ready to purchase there is a slip you
| take to the counter and the cashier pulls the item for you.
|
| fry's electronic / cosco has people at the door searching every
| customer and checking their documentation. i believe you can
| tell them to fuk off. "can i see your receipt?" "no" lol.
| ranrotx wrote:
| Fuck Home Depot. First they killed off all the mom-and-pop
| hardware local stores. Now we shop there because that's usually
| the only choice. Are we supposed to feel sorry for them? It's bad
| enough that they've turned me into their employee with their
| self-checkout system.
|
| Someone at HD made the calculation that by not employing as many
| cashiers, the personnel savings will be profitable even in the
| face of shoplifting. But now, they are just putting another
| burden on their customers and vendors.
| taf2 wrote:
| Anyone else expect in 10 years we have subscription tools... they
| only work and they get software updates but only if you pay....
| The model is simple, no upfront cost to get access to any tool.
| Just pay a monthly subscription fee...
| aembleton wrote:
| I wouldn't mind that if I could have access to a large array of
| tools that I just return to my local hardware store when I'm
| done with them. Most of the time, I'm not using them and I only
| live 15 minutes walk from my nearest Screwfix and Toolstation.
|
| If I could pay say PS5/month and get access to any tool even
| for just a few days a month that would probably be worth it for
| me.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I'm eagerly awaiting social pushback on the spreading cancer of
| SaaS everything.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| It won't happen. We're indoctrinating the young early with
| Spotify, Netflix, etc. It'll just be normal to pay the
| electricity bill, the music/movies bill, the Internet bill,
| the tool bill, etc.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's an obvious idea so there must be a reason it's not
| implemented - I'm curious what that reason is though, so here it
| goes:
|
| Why don't they just take the batteries and/or motors out of the
| products on the shelves?
|
| Instead of adding complex computer shenanigans, why not design
| the product so that the most expensive part (e.g. a battery in
| portable tools, a motor or gearbox in mains-powered ones) is
| removable, shipped to store separately, and installed (or just
| given out) by the check-out clerk separately? Surely this must be
| simpler overall than adding digital complexity to where it
| doesn't belong[0].
|
| The only reason I can think of is logistics - a wireless kill
| switch doesn't take extra space in the store, and doesn't create
| extra burden for inventory tracking. On the other hand, any
| wireless kill switch that doesn't involve turning the device into
| an always-connected surveillance system, with a built-in SIM card
| and crypto chip and all, will eventually be defeated by some
| trivial bit of DIY electronics (and the plans for that will
| spread among thieves quickly[1]).
|
| --
|
| [0] - Not in this century, anyway. Maybe 100 years from now we'll
| be able to routinely make cheap computer add-ons that don't suck.
|
| [1] - Like the plans for breaking into cars in era before
| advanced electronic countermeasures. Almost two decades ago, I
| once saw a bundle of such files on someone's computer, collected
| by the owner out of general curiosity - IIRC, it was a bunch of
| PDFs with diagrams showing, per make and model of a car, into
| what shape you need to bend a piece of metal, and where to slide
| it, to defeat the central lock.
| tyingq wrote:
| They have to sell replacement batteries, so the power tool
| would still have a high value.
|
| But, I have seen places where you just take a piece of paper to
| the checkout rather than the tool itself.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I think most stores with construction materials will allow
| the "pencil and paper" purchase flow, because it's needed for
| purchasing big/heavy stuff or buying in bulk. You give the
| note to the clerk, pay for the stuff, and arrange delivery.
| bluedino wrote:
| >> But, I have seen places where you just take a piece of
| paper to the checkout rather than the tool itself.
|
| That's how we bought video games in the 80's from Toys R Us.
| Loughla wrote:
| >But, I have seen places where you just take a piece of paper
| to the checkout rather than the tool itself.
|
| How is this not the solution, and more technology is? The
| local hardware store has cardboard slips you take to customer
| service for high-end/expensive tools, they then ring you up
| and you walk out with your newly purchased tool.
|
| They've done that since the 90's. It's not that hard to
| figure out. Why does every problem need a *TECHNOLOGY*
| solution? I'm genuinely confused by all of this.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Why does every problem need a *TECHNOLOGY* solution?_
|
| Cynical view: because a third party vendor bullshitted a
| company into thinking they _need_ this overcomplicated
| contraption that they 're selling, and the manager being
| bullshitted is too far away from the shop floor to realize
| it's a dumb idea (or they just don't care).
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| What about weight? With some of that removed you get the wrong
| feeling for how it handles. Not exactly unimportant for power
| tools.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| It won't work for them to lock the tools by Bluetooth. Open the
| tool, remove the deadman switch, and the tool works. A power
| tool is a switch that connects the power source to the motor.
| hedora wrote:
| Most tools are battery operated these days. The batteries
| have a computer in them. You could have it refuse to deliver
| power if the tool isn't properly activated. Similarly, the
| vario-resistor in the trigger could be replaced with a
| computer.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| They're not going to throw their existing batteries away,
| so the computer will be on the switch. The switch is a
| variable resistor and easy to bypass to remove the anti
| theft. This will have the same consumer push back as the
| last time Milwaukee tried to put anti theft in their tools.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I can see the totalitarian-minded mining this for a revenue
| opportunity to create an exciting new era of subscription-based
| power tools. You could have geofenced tools (your licensed job
| site) and tools that only work during specific hours or for a
| specific period of time. Higher torque settings or speeds could
| be unlockable features. Accessories would be DRM-locked (for
| "safety" and to "prevent theft").
|
| This already happens in earth moving equipment.
|
| The design of the tools will become increasingly complicated to
| tightly couple DRM functionality to prevent the trivial DIY
| electronics hacks that you describe. (My sci-fi brain is
| imaging motors with wacky windings that need specially PWM'ed
| streams of electricity to spin effectively, etc...)
|
| I hate our industry so much.
| 2001lodyssee wrote:
| > I can see the totalitarian-minded mining this for a revenue
| opportunity to create an exciting new era of subscription-
| based power tools.
|
| Think bigger. Power tools that phone home describing their
| use and location, all tied to an individual via credit-card
| checkout (or face recognition) and/or warranty sign-up.
|
| It's probably best to think of the modern world as being
| constructed with the substrate of a Las Vegas casino.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Could this also give unions control over what tools are
| approved for use on specific jobs or in specific regions? Or
| be used to detect when a union worker is doing a job they are
| not allowed to do? This is a thing. I had to "look the other
| way" when a person was sanding some wood, as if I cared.
| There was a specific union that was supposed to do the
| sanding and this was preventing the framer from completing
| their job.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The number of people who just take state regulatory
| enforcement action as something that's good by default is
| much larger than the number of people who give unions the
| same benefit of the doubt so we'll probably see geofencing
| tied to professional licenses at the state level before we
| see it on the facility/jobsite level and tied to unions.
|
| Large equipment in industries that can afford it is already
| activated by employee badge for QC and employee tracking
| purposes so what you're describing already exists in some
| settings.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Just wait until government and industry lobbyists get their
| hands on it. The powered PEX expander or wire terminal
| crimpler will need someone who's in the database as having
| the proper license in order to enable it after you buy it.
| You cross state lines and your tools won't work because you
| won't have the valid license. You try and use your tools near
| the property line and it won't let you because the DB has the
| wrong coordinates and thinks you're trying to work at the
| facility next door and you need to be in the union to do
| that. Of course the company will sell you the unlocked
| version of the $200 tool for $3k. If you bring too many power
| tools from different owners to a the same place and that
| place isn't in the DB as having a building permit the
| building inspector will show up with some thin veneer of
| parallel construction.
|
| (Hopefully pressure from the low end tool manufacturers who
| try and compete on value keeps these kinds of things from
| happening.)
| kergonath wrote:
| > Hopefully pressure from the low end tool manufacturers
| who try and compete on value keeps these kinds of things
| from happening.
|
| Looking at the sad state of TVs (where the cheap brands
| just hop on the bandwagon and make a quick buck), I am not
| very hopeful. Everyone will be as consumer-hostile as they
| can get away with if they think they can make a few cents
| that way.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > Higher torque settings or speeds could be unlockable
| features.
|
| Diabolical. "Scan this QR code to watch an ad and unlock 30
| minutes of 3x speed!"
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| "please submit proof of your <trade> license on our website
| to unlock this feature"
|
| Can't have scabs who aren't several years invested in the
| system doing work. (i'd /s it but the people who push these
| things will unironically say stuff like that).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yeah. I was desperately trying to be charitable, but I
| suspect you're correct and this is the motivating reason.
|
| > _My sci-fi brain is imaging motors with wacky windings that
| need specially PWM 'ed streams of electricity to spin
| effectively, etc..._
|
| After having recently read too many military sci-fi novels in
| short succession[0], I started to think how warring alien
| species would secure their military hardware against reverse
| engineering. I came to a similar conclusion - there would
| likely be a whole field of making every possible bit of a
| device coupled with every other bit, kind of like homomorphic
| encryption, but done with atoms and fields instead of bits.
| Like you said - windings that only work if you PWM the
| voltage precisely, perhaps according to some algorithm that
| compensates for those windings being scrambled, softly
| shorted, and otherwise smeared across half of the device's
| interior surface. Etc. Impossible to fix, but also impossible
| to figure out without original schematics.
|
| And yes, the way the market is heading, I suspect we'll start
| doing this to ourselves to secure sales and protect IP.
|
| --
|
| [0] - The _Expeditionary Force_ book series.
| [deleted]
| jsymolon wrote:
| Shades of "software dongles"
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > Why don't they just take the batteries and/or motors out of
| the products on the shelves?
|
| In really durable tools, motors are mounted deeply and securely
| in the case. They have to be. Removing/replacing a motor in a
| power tool is an involved time-consuming process that is prone
| to many errors. Of course, it would also require cooperation
| from the tool manufacturers concerning warranties and to to
| accommodate their product-design to a process like that (ain't
| gonna happen-- even the best tools are relatively low margin
| product, with much of the mark-up taken by sales channels).
|
| And even if that's possible, it would be "easy" only for a
| highly-compensated, skilled mechanic with the right tools and
| 5-20 minutes of time. That's never going to be the case in
| neighborhood Home Depot's.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Of course, it would also require cooperation from the tool
| manufacturers concerning warranties and to to accommodate
| their product-design to a process like that_
|
| I understand they're already involved - you can't _just_ add
| an electronic kill switch after market, it has to be built
| into device, or else it would be too trivial to bypass.
| dahart wrote:
| > Why don't they just take the batteries and/or motors out of
| the products on the shelves?
|
| I don't know, but two reasons I can imagine are:
|
| - It may be much more expensive to have to install motors at
| checkout. That would mean needing all motorized tools to be
| designed with removable motors, which most are currently not.
| That would almost certainly mean a skilled staffing increase
| company-wide to find & fetch & install motors, a reduction in
| customer experience having to wait for it, running the risk of
| having the motor out of stock, etc. I'd speculate that a
| commodity chip inserted into the power circuit is a very cheap
| solution in comparison, and perhaps something Home Depot can do
| now without asking the manufacturers for anything.
|
| - The cutoff circuitry can potentially be sold and marketed as
| a consumer feature. If the customer can also walk away with a
| tool they can disable, then the solution helps second-hand
| theft too. I'd bet that contractors would absolutely love the
| ability to disable and even track their tools using a smart-
| phone app.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Wow, this quote: _Organized retail crime costs retailers an
| average of $719,548 per $1 billion in sales, a 2020 survey from
| the National Retail Federation found -- a nearly 60% increase
| from 2015._
|
| The cost of all this shoplifting is 0.7% up from 0.45%.
|
| Meanwhile, over the same period, the cost of using your credit
| card at home depot went up over 1% from 1.3% to 2.4%.
|
| Who is the bigger threat to your business here, really?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Meanwhile, over the same period, the cost of using your
| credit card at home depot went up over 1% from 1.3% to 2.4%.
|
| Did it? I suspect that large retailers like Home Depot can
| negotiate substantially on the credit card fees.
| handrous wrote:
| Can absolutely confirm that these numbers are negotiable. If
| you have any amount of scale, ask your processor (places like
| Stripe or Authorize.net or PayPal for online CC processing).
| Just bringing it up with sales or customer service, without
| even having a competing offer, might well get you a "gimme"
| amount off the public figure. And do shop other providers, if
| you're processing even tens of thousands a month they might
| make you a better offer than what you're getting and than the
| public prices.
| Y-bar wrote:
| > $719,548 per $1 billion in sales [...] The cost of all this
| shoplifting is 0.7% up from 0.45%.
|
| Wouldn't that be 0.072%?
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| yup. they are installing trackers and justifying it with
| nearly inconsequential losses. patriot act all over again.
| oehpr wrote:
| wait... are we sure we're reading these numbers right?
|
| that $1 billion. is that the income earned from the sale? Or is
| that the profit the retailer keeps all told?
|
| As an example, how many chainsaws does Home Depot have to sell
| before it pays for the theft of one chainsaw? I would assume
| much more than one.
|
| I think the NRF are just listing the sum MSRP's of legitimately
| sold items vs stolen items. You can't just divide that to get
| the "portion of harm"
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I agree that there are a number of sources of possible error,
| from the retailer to the reporter that is summarizing from a
| much larger report.
|
| That said, the computation of 'shrinkage' has been defined as
| MSRP of products that are stolen and/or damaged, divided by
| the gross sales of all products. The number captures "lost"
| revenue.
|
| My nephew, who is working at a large nationwide retailer and
| has access to all of this data for their stores, has told me
| in the past (and I presume it is still true), that the
| largest component of "loss" experienced on the retail side is
| through employee theft, either directly, or by assisting a
| partner to evade the payment systems. The smallest portion of
| this loss is from people who come into the store and take
| merchandise without paying for it.
|
| The "interesting" thing about that story, is not that it
| makes it harder to sneak out a tool, but that it requires a
| _register transaction_ for that tool to work. Combined with
| inventory management of that tool, internal theft rings are
| uncovered because the employee facilitating the theft has to
| use their register to do so. But the stores won 't tell you
| that of course.
|
| Just like back in the day getting out of a Fry's Electronics
| was like being released from a SuperMAX prison lockup with
| all the gates and checks and re-checks. They too were much
| more worried about employee theft than individuals stealing
| stuff.
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