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Comment by fercircularbuf

3 days ago

As someone living in Japan, the sheer number of instances of theft in your description shocks me. Is this that common there?

4 comments

fercircularbuf

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mattlondon  3 days ago

Often happens in the UK for things like bags of screws or bathroom/plumbing fittings.

The charitable view is someone is opening the packaging to e.g. make sure that the thread is the right size (in the UK especially we suffer from annoying mixture of old legacy imperial measurement era pipes/threads/etc as well as metric).

The unchartiable view is they are opening the packet and stealing the bit they need/lost/broke 45 minutes earlier and need to finish the job.

kube-system  3 days ago

Depends on where you are at. Shrinkage runs around 1.6% on average in the US, but it can vary quite a bit by location. If you are in a rich quiet suburb, you will probably not see it. If you are in a rough neighborhood, or a very dense urban area, you probably will.

I have lived in neighborhoods where theft is unheard of, and I have lived in neighborhoods where I checked to make sure each item hadn't been opened before putting them in my cart.

codingdave  3 days ago

Nope, I've never seen anything like that. To be fair, I'm sure some stores have higher crime rates than others, and just knowing human nature, people whose experiences are pleasant and uneventful probably aren't taking time to share anecdotes about their local stores.