> The person stealing doesn't need to know who hired them
I think you're vastly underestimating how difficult it is to anonymously recruit and pay thousands of thieves from all over the country to target one particular brand and ensure they actually do the job.
Maybe one could offer some sort of buy-back program to maybe induce this behavior, but that would be quite expensive.
CVS is defending against hundreds, maybe thousands of small time crime rackets.
But imagine you’re Black and Decker, and you want to hire thousands of thieves around the country to target tens of thousands of your customers (People who bought DeWalt, Stanley, etc).
How? Is there a budget line item for market development? And you convert maybe $20m into cash, and have reps in major metro areas? Do you fire low performers who don’t steal enough?
The whole thing collapses when you think about the logistics. No different from the “1000 people were paid off to falsely claim they saw an airplane hit the Pentagon, but nobody has come forward with receipts” nonsense.
Normal business is impossible to get right. These kinds of conspiracies are just fantasy.
> Is there a budget line item for market development?
Sure.
> And you convert maybe $20m into cash, and have reps in major metro areas?
You’ve seen examples in the thread. Flea markets, online marketplaces, injections into clean retail supply chains. (Amazon)
> Do you fire low performers who don’t steal enough?
Yes.
The existence of small time crooks doesn’t prove that organized crime is a myth. Getting stolen at scale commodities to market is not so different than managing global supply chains of cocaine and heroin. The street level people are independent contractors who make near minimum wage. The best example of business that skirt the line between legit and criminal enterprise are Chinatown busses… they provide cheap, unsafe travel and fuel the human trafficking pipeline of sexually exploited women as well as economically exploited restaurant and other employees.
I didn't attribute a difficulty ranking to it or suggest any particular scale, or suggest I'd be the one to do it, but I have no doubt it would be difficult.
Would it not be in the same ballpark of reasoning though as updating your older products to intentionally slow them down and influence more sales, or updating your trains to conveniently not work when they're at a competitors depot?
Sure it'd be a more blatant demonstration of sociopathy and criminal intent to commit widespread theft of tools, but really we'd only need one missing detail, and that's a connection back to the companies, the theft is already happening.
In this case it doesn't seem it's nationwide or one particular manufacturer, but if you're in a position to even consider such a thing, I'd think you either don't care or don't anticipate being caught, and perhaps don't care about precision or results, which really reduces the problem. Like if you're a popular retailer of many brands, but seeing sales slump. Now you can just find someone who already coordinates thieves to steal any equipment in some region, and if all you care about is that warehouse is filling up and your sales are increasing, your first problem is solved.
I think you're vastly underestimating how difficult it is to anonymously recruit and pay thousands of thieves from all over the country to target one particular brand and ensure they actually do the job.
Maybe one could offer some sort of buy-back program to maybe induce this behavior, but that would be quite expensive.