SAP VP Arrested In False Barcode Scheme

redletterdave writes "With barcode scanning being so commonplace, nothing seemed out of the ordinary when Thomas Langenbach, the vice president of SAP, was found scanning boxes upon boxes of Lego toys before purchasing them. Little did anyone know, the 47-year-old Silicon Valley executive was actually engaged in a giant scam. Langenbach would visit several Target stores and cover the store's barcodes with his own, so when he would bring the boxes up to the register, Langenbach would pay a heavily-discounted price. For example, this tag swapping allowed him to buy a Millennium Falcon box of Legos worth $279 for just $49. Once he bought the discounted Lego boxes, the SAP executive would take to eBay (under the name 'tomsbrickyard') and sell the items. Langenbach reportedly sold more than 2,000 items on eBay, raking in about $30,000. He was finally caught by Target security on May 8, and he was arraigned on Tuesday on four counts of burglary."

Comments

Common Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't anyone at the store find it suspicious that an expensive big Lego set would suddenly be heavily discounted?

Re:Common Sense

[MickyTheIdiot]

So you expect the drones at the cash register to know the prices of a billion different store items? You'd be tough to work for...

Re:Common Sense

[alphax45]

The drones at most of these stores don't care; I should know I use to be one and I was the "odd man out" that would notice these things and say something. A lot of times as a cashier speed (items per hour) matters more than accuracy. Your bonus can depend on it, so doing any kind of "checks" hurts a lot.

Re:Common Sense

[Rockoon]

Which part of $8/hour confuses you?

Work just enough not to get fired, paid just enough not to quit.

Re:Common Sense

[egandalf]

Somehow I doubt that the cashiers follow Lego pricing so closely. To someone with any amount of ignorance on the merchandise, $50 may seem like a reasonable price on a large box of plastic foot needles.

Also keep in mind the repetitive, mind-numbing task cashiers perform. After a while, I doubt they even notice what it was they rung up. Scan, bag, repeat x N. Total, swipe, next. Try that for five or six 8-hour days in a row, for hundreds of customers, then see how much you notice or care about the merchandise.

Re:Common Sense

[SlippyToad]

This sounds like brain-dead retarded management policy. Stepping over a dollar to save a dime.

They didn't deserve you.

Re:Common Sense

[dominux]

I would expect them to see that the description that comes up isn't what the product is. The price isn't stored in the bar code, you can't change the barcode to make the product lower priced, but you can print a bar code for a cheaper item and stick it on the expensive one. The till would bring up the product description and price of the cheap item, so they need to be selling a cheaper item with a sufficiently similar description that it would not get noticed by a sleepy drone. This is a pretty high risk method of stealing stuff.

Re:Common Sense

[Rhys]

They probably figured someone at the store blew it.

One time we hauled a pallet's load worth of Jones soda out of our local sams club. They were apparently discontinuing carrying it (it hasn't reappeared in the 3 years since). I think they'd *tried* to price it at 12-something (12.38?) per 12 pack. They instead managed to fat-finger it at 2.38 per 12 pack.

We saw it, said, "no possible way." Took it to a scanner, yep 2.38. Took one up to a cashier, "can you price check this?" "2.38" "Seems odd" "That's what the computer says" "Okay, I'll be back" -- and I was, with their whole stock of it.

I don't remember what our total bill was that time, but we bought them out. We had a ziggurat of soda, waist high, in our garage for months... maybe over a year. It was awesome. 20 friends over for BBQ? Bust out the Jones!

Mostly its too much trust in the machine.

Re:Common Sense

[Rob the Bold]

With the "self-checkout" machines popping up everywhere so stores can cut down on employee costs, I'd be shocked if anyone noticed.

I assume he replaced the barcodes with UPCs for cheaper, but similar products so that a cashier wouldn't be particularly suspicious, particularly if it's a line of products with which they're not familiar. The self check might actually be harder to get by than a human, since those have a scale on the bagging side.

Re:Common Sense

[Lumpy]

Welcome to retail sales. Management = retarded.

Re:Common Sense

[PPalmgren]

I should know I use to be one and I was the "odd man out" that would notice these things and say something.

(emphasis added)

I see this line of thinking a lot, and there's a key factor people tend to forget. There's a reason you've moved on to bigger and better things, and a reason some people continue to do that menial work for a decade. When you hire low wage employees for a while, you begin to realize that any "good find" won't be there for long, because they're meant for something more important.

Re:Common Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

After a while, I doubt they even notice what it was they rung up. Scan, bag, repeat x N. Total, swipe, next. Try that for five or six 8-hour days in a row, for hundreds of customers, then see how much you notice or care about the merchandise.

I sure hope that's not true. If so, then buying all those boxes of XL condoms from that cute cashier at the drug store was a total waste of money?

Re:Common Sense

[sideslash]

Cash register workers are smarter and more observant than you may think. Purchasing a $280 Lego set for $50 will raise all kinds of eyebrows. Shucks, I bet some of the workers ran back to see if they could buy one themselves. So Tom was definitely an idiot, risking his entire career and reputation like this. I expect that he would have been apprehended much sooner if not for most people's intimidation by technology -- being unaware of how easy it is to create a fake bar code.

Re:Common Sense

[NerdmastaX]

Didn't anyone at the store find it suspicious that an expensive big Lego set would suddenly be heavily discounted?

first of all this is old news compared to the couple that did it at Walmart... but was that on Slashdot? no that was probably before Slashdot started posting crap that has no tech value other than brushing up against technology(literally) [found this from two years ago which is almost an exact repeat http://triblocal.com/des-plaines/2010/12/17/cops-fake-barcodes-lower-lego-price/%5D Next Topic: Larry Page doesn't pick up poop in park... (this would make Slashdot headlines if it happened... and you know it.)

Re:Common Sense

[ByOhTek]

Not really high risk as you might thing, a lot of places like that pay rather low salary, and so their employees, and it's a rather boring job - those employees aren't going to have that much concern.

People autopilot a lot, especially when bored. And if you are *really* smart, you put the stickers on a few extras (make sure they don't have your prints), and then you can say you didn't do anything, or say 'all of them had stickers like this, I thought it was some new way of doing things'.

Re:Common Sense

[sideslash]

Somehow I doubt that the cashiers follow Lego pricing so closely. To someone with any amount of ignorance on the merchandise, $50 may seem like a reasonable price on a large box of plastic foot needles.

Also keep in mind the repetitive, mind-numbing task cashiers perform. After a while, I doubt they even notice what it was they rung up. Scan, bag, repeat x N. Total, swipe, next. Try that for five or six 8-hour days in a row, for hundreds of customers, then see how much you notice or care about the merchandise.

Wow, you have a high opinion of human beings. /sarc

It actually works pretty much the exact opposite way from what you said. While a beginning cashier may be flustered, the more experienced cashiers actually observe more details, because they're no longer stressing with the basic mechanics of checkout, and they also are more familiar with the products. The human mind is a restless thing. You better believe they notice what you are buying.

Re:Common Sense

[squiggleslash]

If he finds the right swaps, then it's not going to be a problem. The descriptions are rarely that informative, and it's quite possible that "LEGO SW MIL.FALC" replaced by "LEGO 700PC SET" would be missed by someone trying to ring up items in a hurry, especially given you're not going to be expecting the wrong barcode to be scanned. You have some big box of lego, are you really going to look at it that hard?

Now, some Scented Holiday Candles being rung up for a dollar on the other hand...

Re:Common Sense

[ByOhTek]

Smarter? Probably, but this is a matter of being observant. Pick someone bored looking, towards the end of their shift, or go when lines are long. They won't care due to either boredom or stress. The smarter ones will be more vulnerable during the boredom times, the less smart will be more vulnerable during the packed times.

Re:Common Sense

[rjstanford]

This sounds like brain-dead retarded management policy. Stepping over a dollar to save a dime.

They didn't deserve you.

Except that in this case it was stepping over a dime to save a dollar. The truly vast majority of barcode scans are correct.

Re:Common Sense

[c0lo]

Didn't anyone at the store find it suspicious that an expensive big Lego set would suddenly be heavily discounted?

you mean that Target doesn't offer self-serve checkout?

Re:Common Sense

[NerdmastaX]

you couldnt pay me 2.38 to drink a CAN of jones...

Re:Common Sense

[Brad1138]

I worked sales at a car stereo chain (well known in the NW) and was yelled at on the floor, by the manager, for selling the customer the better product instead of the one with more profit. I won't work sales anymore, my favorite line is I would rather chew on broken glass and razor blades than do sales.

Re:Common Sense

[Myopic]

Perhaps. Or perhaps that store owner crunched the numbers and determined it was cheaper to deal with the loss, than to slow down the lines.

Re:Common Sense

[vlm]

Somehow I doubt that the cashiers follow Lego pricing so closely. To someone with any amount of ignorance on the merchandise, $50 may seem like a reasonable price on a large box of plastic foot needles.

Its an age thing. When I was a kid, $50 for a big box of lego would seem a bit high, so as a childless adult if I scanned a box and it said $50 I would not be overly surprised but kind of pissed off that prices have gone up so much.

Now a days I shop for lego for my kids, and some of the largest movie-tie-in licensed items are more expensive than a car loan payment.
Another example, basic stereotypical "Lego house kit" prices have gone up by percentage more than real house prices went up during the bubble... and haven't come down yet unlike real house prices.

This would NOT work with apple i-devices or similar things a retail droid could be expected to purchase and know about.

Re:Common Sense

[ZorinLynx]

Now if only this would happen with the premium beer. :)

Re:Common Sense

[mwvdlee]

You know what else is (mostly) charged by weight? Transport and storage cost.
Adding all that extra weight (and likely also volume) to expensive items also makes them more expensive to produce, transport and store. The additional cost may very well outweigh the occasional losses due to sociapaths.

Re:Common Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

The scale on the self-checkout doesn't do any sort of sanity check; it just makes sure the weight changes after scanning an item to ensure you've placed it in the bagging area.

This is not true, or at least, not true everywhere. The local grocery store chain has self-checkouts that reject things that aren't the right weight. From personal experience, I know that if get a coke out of the freezer case and drink half, then try to pay for it, you have to get a store employee to override the system.

Re:Common Sense

[Rob the Bold]

The scale on the self-checkout doesn't do any sort of sanity check; it just makes sure the weight changes after scanning an item to ensure you've placed it in the bagging area.

I never shopped in a Target with a self-checkout, but I have used some at Home Depot and grocery stores. Those bitch at me if I put something too long and narrow in the bag and part of the weight is supported by leaning on the register part. Since the weight does change, but not by as much as expected, this occasionally requires human intervention to override the weight check.

I would think that this would be a standard practice, since doing the UPC switch would be almost trivial at a self-check -- you can do it without removing stickers or pasting new ones on at all. For instance -- and this is just one example of many possible scenarios -- just scan one cheap item 4 times while putting 3 pricier ones and the cheap one in the bag.

But again, as I say, I have never used one in Target, so I could not testify under oath that they do any intelligent weight checking there.

Re:Common Sense

[dyingtolive]

I think he's pretty accurate actually. Way back in the day when I was in retail, I loved going to work because then I had time to just let my brain 'switch off' and I could think about whatever I wanted to. It was actually a restful break from classes and homework. Nowadays, I dread going to work, because I have a big boy job and I'm paid to think, not to do.

Re:Common Sense

[wjousts]

Exactly this. You pay people barely above minimum wage and expect them to give a shit? I remember being in a Walmart once and somebody clearly had something stuffed up their sweater, and I mean clearly, it was a large bumpy item. He was standing right in front of the customer service desk and the drone behind the desk didn't bat an eyelid.

Re:Common Sense

[mwvdlee]

They were apparently discontinuing carrying it (it hasn't reappeared in the 3 years since).

You might actually have been the cause of that.

I once made a remark about a wrong price on a specific flavour of dessert I bought at a supermarket. They removed the label right away. After that, they didn't restock it for about a year afterwards, even though the other flavours of the same brand were still sold. It wasn't until they reorganized the store before they stocked it again. Sadly, the specific flavour was the most popular one (judges by allotted space prior to removal of the label).

Re:Common Sense

[flirno]

Target has not.

Re:Common Sense

[dyingtolive]

The apple stuff is pretty good. Certainly better than the majority of what you'll get out of a vending machine.

Wait... it comes in cans now? I've only ever seen it in bottles.

Re:Common Sense

[BetaDays]

By the pound is already being used at Goodwill http://www.goodwillnne.org/updates/press-coverage/goodwill-opens-buy-pound-store/ so you are not too far off on it being a common thing.

Re:Common Sense

[alphatel]

In final act of desperation to avoid sentencing, SAP VP turns himself into a lego set

Re:Common Sense

[Gilmoure]

Once my grocery store had some single malt scotch on sale for $15.40 a bottle (big display in center of liqueur section). They already had another single malt for sale for under $20 so I thought this was a similar cheap one. Got home, took a sip and had to look it up. Yeah, turns out Highland Park 12 year old is not a $15 a bottle scotch. Went back the next day but by then they had the correct price of $54.00 a bottle up. Still, got turned on to a nice scotch.

Re:Common Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a manager at a Sams Club in Buffalo NY while at college and there is some good reasoning behind this, even if you/I don't agree with it. Most large retailers goal is to boost profits but cutting expenses; one area to do this is in personnel. If you have fast cashiers, then you need fewer of them. The overwhelming majority of studies in the early to mid nineties showed that the majority of theft was employee related, so to spend a lot of time worrying about customers would be focusing on the wrong area, or as you put it, you would be stepping over millions of dollars to save a few bucks. Another study showed that very few customers who did steal, did it as a one-time deal, it would usually turn in to a pattern and unless your the luckiest man/woman on earth, you're going to get caught eventually.

As a side note, both Target and Walmart are profitable, so they can't be stepping over too many dollars...just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean it's bad.

Re:Common Sense

[Gilmoure]

I think the tie in for /. is SAP VP. Folks that you contract to to run your business from a technical stand point, who aren't above scamming Legos from Target to make a few bucks; you should trust them!

Re:Common Sense

[jd2112]

I once visited England and bought everything by the Pound.

Re:Common Sense

[Norwell Bob]

Same here. As a high school senior, I used to work at (now-defunct) Fretter, which was a local appliance and electronics chain before Circuit City came to our area and closed them down. I was put, predictably, in the computer department. I would get hassled (and also much smaller commission checks) for selling people on the superior AST computers as opposed to the garbage (but higher-profit-margin) Packard Bells.

Honesty was not the best policy if you were trying to make a living as a salesman there. Several of the other guys would simply outright lie to customers, and it blew my mind that management had no problem with it. I swear, one of the guys was a pathological liar... but, man, he did OK for himself.

Re:Common Sense

[tubs]

In my university days, I worked in a shop and got caught in something like this - and was pulled up by the manager for letting this go through.

Seems like the guy had been doing it quite regularily through the week, but the sums involved were tiny. He's swapped the sticker for "thermos flask" (met flsk) for "drinks flask" (pla flsk) and saved himself £5 when he came through to me. (oh, restricted characters we love you!)

I quite fairly pointed out that it is a flask, it came up with a flsk on the screen. Of course I didn't elaborate and say that I'd actually turned my mind off as he was probably the 80th customer that day I'd served and all of whom had probably more than 10 items each, and as long as the barcode beeped I didn't really care, so I kept my job at least.

Re:Common Sense

[kelemvor4]

I would expect them to see that the description that comes up isn't what the product is. The price isn't stored in the bar code, you can't change the barcode to make the product lower priced, but you can print a bar code for a cheaper item and stick it on the expensive one. The till would bring up the product description and price of the cheap item, so they need to be selling a cheaper item with a sufficiently similar description that it would not get noticed by a sleepy drone

When I worked retail management at a supermarket 20 years ago this was NOT the case. Had a little situation with a guy slapping "gound beef" price stickers on beef tenderloin steaks (this is about an order of magnitude diff in price). Deli workers were known to do similar foolishness with price per pound of various products... If the deli girl liked you, you got the cold shrimp pesto salad ($10/lb) for the price of the generic bulk coleslaw ($2/lb).

In the modern era of self checkout grocery stores, especially if you're paying cash and have no loyalty card, every produce item is lettuce per pound. I donno how they stay in business like that.

In the long run I think the "dollar store" concept of $1 per package is going to eventually disappear and instead of RFIDs for each can of soup in the market, they'll simply weigh your cart and charge you a flat rate per pound. The "crab legs and beef tenderloin" problem is solved by making the packaging inconveniently hard to open and inserting bricks or corn or HFCS in the package to bring the cost per pound to a standard weight. Imagine a giant supermarket with only one cashier and checkout takes 15 seconds per cartload. Or packaging deals of cheap bulky stuff with expensive stuff, so buying expensive per pound stir fry meat is impossible alone; you have to buy it with a 10 pound rice sack. Or can't buy steaks or charcoal, must buy steaks and charcoal.

Since everything in walmart/target/whatever comes from China, and everything is made of plastic, I could see charging stuff from those stores based solely on weight. Here, you get 5 pounds of Chinese lead painted plastic. Is it a millenium falcon lego, or a dora the explorer vacuum cleaner, who cares, its 5 pounds of plastic and that'll be $X/pound.

The companies who put those little logos on the products won't have any of that. Say, Lucasarts who can add a starwars logo and increase the price people are willing to pay for 1lb of plastic 100 fold (that might be a bit conservative of a guess). The basic problem you are failing to see is that the "value" (even if it's only a value perceived by a customer and not a measurable one) is not simply derived by the value of something a product it is made from.

I'm sure retailers wouldn't have any of it, either - since they make more selling starwars legos, or Dora doll parts for $100/lb than they do selling regular legos for $10/lb.

Re:Common Sense

[ArsenneLupin]

Welcome to the real world. Management = retarded.

FTFY

Re:Common Sense

[__aaeihw9960]

I worked retail management for about 3 years while I was finishing my masters. I don't mean to toot my own horn (okay, I kind of do), but they were desperate to keep me. Why? I was a terrible manager - I let the employees get away with murder, as long as the work got done. I was insubordinate - if the policy was stupid, I didn't follow it. I told the head of the store that I hated my job and I hated the store - every day for two years.

So, why were they desperate to keep me? I could think. The regional actually told me that he would be sad to see me go, because critical thinking is rare in retail. They dangled long-term job offers, travel, higher pay and increased benefits to try to get me to stay. Again, why?

Because I could think. They know that if you have any sort of brain, that retail is just a temporary gig on the road of life, and it makes them sad on the inside.

Re:Common Sense

[spiffmastercow]

Was it by any chance Outrageous Audio? It would be hilarious to see that guy from the commercials freak out on somebody.

Re:Common Sense

[Calos]

Well, that's certainly one way to go about life. Says an awful lot about the people that do that, too.

Re:Common Sense

[Kreigaffe]

Not to say it was, but it could have been an insulin pump or colonoscopy bag

Re:Common Sense

[Theophany]

He was custom-making the barcodes, I'm pretty sure the guy's smart enough to have them run up 'generic lego item name' that some drip getting paid minimum wage isn't going to give shit about following up.

Re:Common Sense

[hairyfeet]

I think the bigger questions are "WTF was the VP of SAP doing pulling a cheap ass eBay scam like what your average meth head would pull? Is he a kelpto? Is the company in trouble? Is his pay THAT shitty?" These questions sound more relevant to me than how long he was able to pull this shit off.

Because frankly go to any Walmart at rush hour and the checkout girls ain't looking at shit, they are just rushing that shit across the scanner as fast as they can to try to lower the lines. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised that if in most of these chains they probably get bitched at if the line gets too long so looking at what the scanner pulls up is probably the last thing on their minds.

Re:Common Sense

[David Chappell]

Didn't anyone at the store find it suspicious that an expensive big Lego set would suddenly be heavily discounted?

I Lego fan might, but would the average person know that a plastic toy should cost more than $50?

Re:Common Sense

[ccanucs]

That must have been a quite a while ago - it's been a criminal offense to sell quite a lot of things by pounds weight in the UK for some time. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-1074249%2FMetric-martyr-trader-gets-criminal-record-selling-fruit-veg-pound-stall-set-mother-Blitz.html&ei=gfu8T4L0IqbG6gGHr_Va&usg=AFQjCNEbzPLm9SDij6B0yK_7-th0-PEXrA&sig2=I2BPME0SSMgJC0zarfpTrQ

Re:Common Sense

[networkBoy]

I worked in a camera chain that went to 100% commission. We had two cameras in the store that paid a negative commission. Somehow they were all defective/damaged packaging/lost in transit/never received. Eventually the home office got the hint and quit trying to re-stock the stores with them, but I have to think they lost more money on that then they would have if they simply ponied up a $0.50 commission on those things so that they were worthless, but not actively hostile to being sold.
-nB

Re:Common Sense

[neyla]

The description isn't a novel.

Slap a barcode for a $39.95 lego-boat on a $129.95 larger lego-ship and the scanner will say something like "lego boat".

I don't know how you expect a bored cashier at minimum wage to catch that.

Re:Common Sense

[n7ytd]

I worked sales at a car stereo chain (well known in the NW) and was yelled at on the floor, by the manager, for selling the customer the better product instead of the one with more profit.

I used to get yelled at working at Best Buy for the same thing. It is also why I am no longer in sales... not cut out for it.

If someone looks me in the face and asks, "What would you recommend," I have to be honest.

It always makes me sigh when I walk into Best Buy and hear the sales people parrot "and I'm not on commission!", as if that's some sort of guarantee that their advice will be unbiased. Sure, maybe they're not out to screw me, but I'm not convinced that the store isn't trying to squeeze maximum profit out of me-- as witnessed by the cashier who also "is not on commission", but is required to up-sell me on a protective sleeve or an extended warranty.

Re:Common Sense

[sideslash]

Yep, true observations. It's fun to approach illegal activities as an engineering problem. But pretty stupid to act on them!

Re:Common Sense

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention it depends on what the store displays. I know in my local wally world many of the displays is some small description followed by a number so I have no doubt Star Wars lego would be "LEGO STWRS #(number)" which how many minimum wage earners are 1.-Gonna know what the value of some geek franchise toy is and 2.- Gonna risk pissing everyone off (including her manager) by holding up a line for a price check?

People seem to forget how damned crowded these places get at certain times and how much emphasis is placed on getting people through the lines. Hell my town is only around 15K people but you don't go to Wally World on Fri after 3PM or Sun after church because you can't even move. As long as the scanner dings they are just gonna try to get them through the line.

Re:Common Sense

[michelcolman]

Who says he was talking about weight?

(penny dropping in 3...2...1...)

Re:Common Sense

[networkBoy]

I ended up in an infinite loop.

Placed item in bag, computer bitched that it was an unexpected item, removed the item, computer bitched that an item was removed, replaced item, computer bitched...
Tried this cycle 2 times then said fsck it, and since the "watcher" was busy flirting I cancelled that item and just left it in my basket. Now, it was only a 50c part in a total purchase of ~$100, but gah! make those systems a little more forgiving about exactness of weights will you?
-nB

Re:Common Sense

[BetterSense]

``Imagine a giant supermarket with only one cashier and checkout takes 15 seconds per cartload.''

Better yet, imagine a giant supermarket with RFIDS or smarphone-scannable barcodes so that I can just load my cart up and leave, and I don't HAVE to checkout at all.

Re:Common Sense

[networkBoy]

Yeah, I would have bought them out that minute.
I got a good deal on Makers Mark once $9.99/750mL. Asked the cashier if it was a mistake because that seemed a bit over half off. Was assured it was not a mistake, so I spent about $400 on booze. That lasted well over two years! :)

Re:Common Sense

[LunaticTippy]

That was my first thought as well. I am surprised to read so far without anyone questioning this. I presume the VP of SAP would make 7 figures salary+benefits+options. This is a rounding error in his income so clearly something irrational is happening.

I've known people who get a thrill from outsmarting the system or for punishing a company. Perhaps he had a grudge against Target and got pleasure from stealing token amounts from them.

Re:Common Sense

[evilRhino]

Windmills don't work that way.

Re:Common Sense

[mallyn]

The Goodwill outlet store; aka the 'bins'; already does that. It's by the pound.

Re:Common Sense

[operagost]

Product descriptions can also be a problem. Sometimes there are perhaps 20 characters available, so you end up with things like "LEG SW MIL FAL SET" and it's hard to tell those apart. Then you have the typos, and the descriptions that are terse just because the person entering them just didn't understand the product.

Re:Common Sense

[LunaticTippy]

That is depressing. Reminds me, I got lucky with Packard Bell myself. I bought a Pentium Pro PC for about $2k and was very happy with it. The power supply died after about 5 years, so I took a standard power supply that wouldn't fit in their retarded form factor and bolted it to the side. My Frankenputer kept humming for another 5 years until I retired it, still functional.

Re:Common Sense

[ccanucs]

Who says he wasn't - or that I didn't understand that ;-)

Re:Common Sense

[JGuru42]

I worked a liquor department and I saw this happen a few times with different things.

Once they managed to screw up the price on 24 pack cans of Bud Light when they priced it at the sale price for the 12 pack cans. The shelf had the correct price on it but the computer did not. Customers went nuts and after I tried to get the pricing department to fix it and got blown off I actively started to tell the customers about it. It was scary to see how customers loved "putting one over on the man".

Another time they took a $19.99 bottle of Jameson's Irish Whiskey and repriced it to $1.99. That day I took them all off of the shelf and did not put up the price sign until I got pricing to fix it, which was a few days. I figured the first customer to try to buy one would take the whole stock anyways.

Re:Common Sense

[operagost]

I like Jones, but I would have been pretty tempted to ebay some of it. I found that an online music supply retailer (which is now my FAVORITE online music supply) had marked $35 trumpet mouthpieces down to $6. I think it was some sort of mixup where a minor change was made to the product labeling or the box and this triggered putting them on clearance... this really shouldn't happen IMHO-- there's no way that 80 year old company was going to change the functionality of its mouthpieces. I ended up ordering a mess of them... tried out a few sizes to see whether I liked them, then sold those as "barely used" and the rest as new for a nice profit. Totally legit!

Re:Common Sense

[mspohr]

The Swiss grocery chain Co-op already does this. They give you a cart with a built in scanner. Just bag and go.

Re:Common Sense

[Hognoxious]

I presume the VP of SAP would make 7 figures salary+benefits+options.

And what's he making now?

License plates. drrrTISH!

Re:Common Sense

[mikael]

The same thing happened at an onlien bookstore. A $300 textbook on dynamic systems was on sale for $30. They didn't really specialize in technical books, so I guess they thought the $300 was a misquote.

Re:Common Sense

[WillyWanker]

Yeah, you'd think, but it doesn't really work that way. Most cashiers are performance-rated by how fast they process orders. They don't have the luxury of questioning every item that comes thru. Their job is to scan the items and collect the money, not loss prevention. Now if they were paid more and not treated like human hamster wheels then maybe you'd have a point.

Re:Common Sense

[mikael]

You have a safe stable job where there aren't any internal politics over who does what. I know some stores had a seniority system with shelf stackers,bag packers and cashiers. Remember seeing one guy with a serving you for 20 years badge ... but he had bought a house all that time ago and had paid off the mortgage many years back. Meanwhile house prices had inflated all around. He could walk to work while everyone had to drive to work.

Re:Common Sense

[oldmac31310]

I think you mean colostomy.

Re:Common Sense

[Slashdot Parent]

I think you might have missed the whole "title inflation" phenomenon that's been going on for the last 20 years or so. Don't be ashamed. Whomever wrote the "fine" article made the same mistake, giving the impression that the accused was the second in command at SAP Global, or something.

His official title is "Vice President, SAP Integration & Certification Center (ICC)". That means he's not an executive VP at all, and his title is specific to only one of SAP's businesses. That puts him in the highest rungs of "middle management". He probably reports to the guy who reports to the guy who reports to the COO, an actual executive.

Regarding his compensation, it would be solidly in the 6 figure range. So $30k would be more meaningful to him than a mere "rounding error", but it wouldn't make difference in his standard of living, in any real sense. Having been around the block a few times, he was probably bored as hell at his job, his wife probably ignores him, and he was probably sick of the fact that his kids were the only ones in the house who had any excitement in their lives at all. It had probably been so long since he felt he was even alive, he needed the adrenaline rush just to check and see.

Re:Common Sense

[Slashdot Parent]

Cash register workers are smarter and more observant than you may think. Purchasing a $280 Lego set for $50 will raise all kinds of eyebrows.

The facts would seem to contradict your expert analysis of the situation.

The accused sold 2100 items on eBay in the past 12 months. That's a lotta legos, and not a lotta eyebrows.

Re:Common Sense

[X0563511]

What description? All 5 characters, none of which are vowels?

Re:Common Sense

[Slashdot Parent]

It always makes me sigh when I walk into Best Buy and hear the sales people parrot "and I'm not on commission!", as if that's some sort of guarantee that their advice will be unbiased. Sure, maybe they're not out to screw me, but I'm not convinced that the store isn't trying to squeeze maximum profit out of me-- as witnessed by the cashier who also "is not on commission", but is required to up-sell me on a protective sleeve or an extended warranty.

I can confirm that, while BB salespeople are not directly on commission per se, they definitely do get team bonuses for meeting certain metrics. You should definitely consider them to be "biased", and I'll note that many of them have insufficient training to give informed recommendations, anyway.

Re:Common Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that rather few Lego elements, are made in China -- requiring very high quality mold work (I'm a mechanical engineer working in a mold shop, so I'm in a position to know that Lego moldmakers are gods by moldmaker standards) as they do, most of the components for the US market are produced in the US itself and Mexico, with the mold work done in the US. European market and some components for other markets are produced in Denmark, Czech, and maybe a couple other European facilities. Some non-critical components are made in China, but it's a minority.

And yes, the intricate mold work, even if they could/would trust Chinese factories to do it in-house and hold the tolerances they demand, would make them significantly more expensive than most Chinese injection-molded parts.

Re:Common Sense

[StikyPad]

my favorite line is I would rather chew on broken glass and razor blades than do sales.

You must pick up some real freaks.

Re:Common Sense

[squidflakes]

Ahh yes, the outlet of the mid-life "what the fuck happened to me? I should have been a rockstar." crisis. Some guys buy fast cars, some guys get in to extreme sports, some guys get in to Asian sex tourism. I suppose, by those standards, that this was one of the more mild mid-life freakouts.

Re:Common Sense

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Sounds like when I worked at a gas station in high school and college. I was the assistant manager and was frequently offered my own store, probably 5 times in 3 years, but didn't want to spend my life managing a gas station only to eventually become a district manager. Early on I learned that a good regular, non management, retail employee was one that wouldn't steal, showed up on time, and could fog a mirror. The overnight guy met these criteria but when I first started I though he was worthless as he never got anything done. When I bitched to the manager he educated me that Ron was the ideal overnight gas station attendant as he loved working the overnight, didn't steal, showed up every day, was on time, and stayed awake. Later in my job there as assistant manager I trained a number of managers on how to manage a gas station. The sad part was how many of them had a 4 year management degree and thought they were gods gift to management. Problem was that you can't just tell a high schooler to go plunge out a toilet and expect them to do it, they need to see you go plunge one out first. Also they never understood that you can't just fire a high schooler until you have a trained replacement unless you want to pick up their shifts. The worst manager trainee we had I ended up telling him "I turned down the job you went to college to get so that I could go to college so I won't have to manage a fucking gas station the rest of my life." because he was such a condescending ass hole. One of my managers at the gas station also pointed out that he would much rather higher college students and pay them a slightly higher wage and also the tuition reimbursement (it was from the company and something like an extra $1/hr) because they were motivated workers, wouldn't just up and quit, and would show up for work unlike those who only graduated high school.

Re:Common Sense

[WRX SKy]

No, parents purchase of Jones Soda would have registered as a high sales volume in the inventory computer and they would have restocked it if they had some available. Your scenario, they just ripped the label off - effectively blocking sales of the item. The inventory computer would see zero (or very few) sales of the item until the product was discarded and it's very likely they wouldn't reorder it.

Re:Common Sense

[dcw3]

Thanks for the laugh. I believe you meant colostomy bag

Re:Common Sense

[metalgamer84]

Actually that accurately sums up most of the corporate America work force.

Re:Common Sense

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I am more surprised that the Targets with grocery sections bag your stuff.

Re:Common Sense

[Vip]

I have a similar story about patio furniture. The store, a large national hardware chain, had the patio chairs for $24.99, tables were something like $150 with umbrella.
I went to the store, asked for some help, the guy helped me load 6 chairs and 1 table onto a cart. I went to pay and the helper guy left to...I don't know, just left.

The cashier scans and says, "That will be $26.74." (ie. $24.99 + 7% tax, the cost of one chair) Needless to say I was shocked. I asked her to scan again, so she did. "26.74"

A lady who was near the cashier then says, "What's the issue?" "He just asked me to rescan." The nametag on this new lady said, "Asst. Mgr."
So I say, "I have 6 chairs and one table set, can you scan once more?"

This Asst Mgr scans it and says, "Yeah, $26.74."

I put away my credit card, paid cash and got out of there...

Vip

Re:Common Sense

[Slashdot Parent]

Ahh yes, the outlet of the mid-life "what the fuck happened to me? I should have been a rockstar." crisis. Some guys buy fast cars, some guys get in to extreme sports, some guys get in to Asian sex tourism. I suppose, by those standards, that this was one of the more mild mid-life freakouts.

Hmm. I'm starting to get into midlife crisis territory myself, so thanks for the handy list of suggestions.

Of the above, the Asian sex tourism bit sounds the most appealing. Any more options to choose from, or should I just stick with that?

Re:Common Sense

[squidflakes]

There is an electronics superstore here called Frys that does this exact same thing.

If you bring back any sort of product, even defective, they will open the box, make sure that all of the parts are there, inspect it, and then re-shrinkwrap the box and slap on a 10% off price sticker.

They do this with everything. The worst is electronic components that are static sensitive, as the inspection involves taking the item out of the static bag, handling it, then putting it back, all without static protection.

Re:Common Sense

[Khashishi]

Yeah. Most people aren't sociopaths. The stores would be much better off with face recognition software and a database of CEO photos, which triggers an alarm.

Re:Common Sense

[blippo]

From my perspective in the software industry I think this business as usual at SAP.

When they sell stuff, they put a sticker on with more features than they have, and bump up the price...
I figure that when they're buying, they think it's fine to do just the opposite...

Re:Common Sense

[wjousts]

Unlikely. This thing was huge, like the size of an xbox (in a box) large and stuffed directly up the front of his shirt.

Re:Common Sense

[Gordonjcp]

bring the cost per pound to a standard weight.

So since one of the cheapest things in the supermarket (5l bottles of generic mineral water) is also the heaviest, does this mean that we can look forward to depleted uranium flavour crisps?

Re:Common Sense

[AnonyMouseCowWard]

The summary is misleading, there is no "VP of SAP", instead there are many, many VPs for different sections (stuff like "VP Mobile Dev Palo Alto"). They're not really "executive" level, as VP is the step up from "Development Manager". A VP at SAP Palo Alto would be paid decently, probably in the 175-250k range, but above VP is when you start getting into real executive level (and most probably pay).

I'd have to say this has nothing to do with SAP; it's just a dude that likes Legos and wanted to scam the system.
Disclaimer: info is 2 years old by now.

Re:Common Sense

[SydShamino]

$0.10 per piece has been my standard target price for Lego sets since the late 1990s, when I bought (legally) discounted sets at retailers post-holidays and resold the parts on eBay for profit. Only pieces with bulk bricks differ - those should be $0.03-0.04 per piece. Minifigs are more - $0.80-$1.00 each.

I don't see that prices have changed all that much. Sets usually run $0.10-0.13 per piece base price, $0.08 or so on clearance.

Re:Common Sense

[delphi125]

Capital, old chap!

(Capital P in Pound implies Stirling, since you didn't understand the first time. Nice try at covering up though!)

Re:Common Sense

[JDG1980]

I think the bigger questions are "WTF was the VP of SAP doing pulling a cheap ass eBay scam like what your average meth head would pull? Is he a kelpto? Is the company in trouble? Is his pay THAT shitty?" These questions sound more relevant to me than how long he was able to pull this shit off.

The VP title means less than you think. At some companies, they hand these out like candy. He could easily have been making under $100K a year.

Re:Common Sense

[jdgeorge]

Kinda reminds me of this guy.

Re:Common Sense

[Barlo_Mung_42]

>just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean it's bad.

In this case, now that I understand it, I think it's bad.

Re:Common Sense

[sideslash]

That's not what I was saying. They could know something was wrong without figuring out how he pulled it off. A raised eyebrow doesn't imply a pursuit and tackle.

Re:Common Sense

[adamstew]

UPC barcodes don't work that way. UPC barcodes have two pieces of info encoded on to them as one 12 digit number: Manufacturer and Product. My understanding is a little rough, but the first digit of the code represents what type of code it is (coupon, product, etc...) The next 5 digits are a unique number assigned to each manufacturer, the next 5 is a unique number assigned by the manufacturer to that specific product, and the last digit is a basic checksum to detect errors in scanning or manual entry.

In order to generate a product description and price, the register has to look up the 12 digit number in the store's computer database and retrieve that information. None of that information is encoded in to the actual barcode itself.

probably what he did is find another lego product with a lower price and just put it's UPC code on the more expensive product.

Re:Common Sense

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

He's making Bubba a very happy guy!

Re:Common Sense

[Rinikusu]

Correct, that's the common scam. You scan a bunch of "similar" items and see what they're attached to in the system (easy test: buy a bag full and match up to the receipt). Then pick the ones the look "close enough" on the description with the right price delta that won't trigger the mental "no way this 52" Plasma TV is a pack of bubblegum" from a cashier, if you're not using the self-checkout. If using the self checkout, just use the "skip bagging" option to avoid the weight check (if used) and go for it.

Re:Common Sense

[PeanutButterBreath]

Cash register workers are smarter and more observant than you may think.

Probably. But if they actually are smart and observant, they would observe that the smart thing to do when they are offered minimal pay is to provide minimal effort.

Re:Common Sense

[mattack2]

But you're still 'scanning' things when you add them to your cart, right? It's not somehow automagically scanning them (i.e. multiple readers from different directions so you're likely to see the UPC regardless of orientation).

Seems like a nightmare as far as removing something from your cart... Especially if it DOESN'T always scan, why can't you just put things in your cart and walk out the door? It doesn't do the weight comparison too (like self checkout lanes do), does it?

This seems convenient, but seems to allow easier theft by those who lack morals and will do it. (Which of course ends up raising the price for all of us.)

Re:Common Sense

[luis_a_espinal]

I would expect them to see that the description that comes up isn't what the product is.

No. You expect wrong. Cashiers are expected to scan and charge, not to do verification and validation. Moreover, at least in Florida and other states IIRC (from the time I used to work in Home Depot), the law typically mandates that you, the seller, must charge what is in the label.

In most cases, you cannot go tell a buyer "naaaaah, our bad, we slapped the wrong barcode, and we have to charge you the actual price which is more than what comes off the bar code." You typically have to sell the advertised price, even if it is wrong. Typically that is done with some type of mark down. Then you write that as a loss, and you check your inventory and labels to make sure things are kosher.

So, no, you don't expect your cashiers to be the first line of defense against this kind of fraudulent activity.

Possibly after seeing several incidents, similar mark downs and inventory check-ups, Target must have concluded that all of these were the result of fraudulent activity, and finally caught up with the offender (a filthy-rich VP for SAP's everlasting shame.) And that's how it is supposed to work - not by expecting your cashiers to be the all-aware-sentinels. There are a million practical reasons why you do not want to do that as it typically puts cashiers in a clash course with customers. That is the job for people assigned and trained for that type of work. Cashiers ring products and collect the moolah, that is all.

Amazing that the OP was scored insightful.

Re:Common Sense

[plover]

many of them have insufficient training to give informed recommendations

No, they're plenty well trained -- by the Monster Cable factory reps. "Tell them that our HDMI cables will really bring out the reds!"

Now, if they had actual training, they probably would just sell good equipment at fair prices, and that wouldn't make HQ happy at all.

Re:Common Sense

[luis_a_espinal]

That was my first thought as well. I am surprised to read so far without anyone questioning this.

Don't be. This is slashdot, not a place where logic or questions about the nature of morals are at the forefront (not without involving logical fallacies and breaking Godwin's law.)

Re:Common Sense

[luis_a_espinal]

I think the bigger questions are "WTF was the VP of SAP doing pulling a cheap ass eBay scam like what your average meth head would pull? Is he a kelpto? Is the company in trouble? Is his pay THAT shitty?" These questions sound more relevant to me than how long he was able to pull this shit off.

The VP title means less than you think. At some companies, they hand these out like candy. He could easily have been making under $100K a year.

What "VP" means is really non-sequitur, peanuts as far as logic goes when it comes to asking WTF is a decently paid professional, 6-figure or not, pulling a cheap-ass ghetto scam at a local store.

Re:Common Sense

[luis_a_espinal]

Smarter? Probably, but this is a matter of being observant. Pick someone bored looking, towards the end of their shift, or go when lines are long. They won't care due to either boredom or stress. The smarter ones will be more vulnerable during the boredom times, the less smart will be more vulnerable during the packed times.

Having worked in pretty boring cashier/salesperson positions, I call bs on it. People do not necessary act on it, but they tend to note discrepancies and alert management. Yes, there is always the emo kid who doesn't give a crap about anything, bored as hell behind the counter. But those are the exception rather than the rule, whether blue collar or white collar (I've been both.)

Re:Common Sense

[mattack2]

but I'm not convinced that the store isn't trying to squeeze maximum profit out of me

Of course they are, it's called capitalism. (I mean, even without lying to you, that is their goal.)

Re:Common Sense

[SQLGuru]

Many stores (Target, Walmart, and ToysRUs come to mind) make it really handy. They put price check stations throughout the store. You don't even have to buy them for it to pull up the price and description.

Re:Common Sense

[MushMouth]

Maybe he needs an income stream that is hidden from his wife. He wouldn't want to clue her in on how much he spends on hookers and blow.

Re:Common Sense

[Slashdot Parent]

I said "training", not "marketing".

Re:Common Sense

[m2pc]

I believe Target (and other retailers) _do_ encode pricing information when marking down items for clearance. That way they can keep marking the price down and not have to create separate products in their database. The barcode often contains the markdown info as well as the SKU. I bet he was sticking red "clearance" stickers on these items and setting his own price, encoded in the label.

Re:Common Sense

[SgtXaos]

Unlikely. This thing was huge, like the size of an xbox (in a box) large and stuffed directly up the front of his shirt.

Maybe he had the all-you-can-eat taco bar for lunch, and just had not had a chance to empty it...

Re:Common Sense

[b1scuit]

This would make inventory/stock management a goddamned nightmare.

Re:Common Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Critical thinking in retail will eventually get you fired. I had a store manager that improved store sales by nearly 30%, even though customer traffic was down. Mostly smarter merchandising and better customer service. The new district manager set out to fire him (found petty little things) from the day she started and had the support of the higher-ups. When your claim to lead/manage is in threat of exposure as a sham, you get scared. They were all threatened and chose to feel safe in a dying, backwards company. He got fired, about a third of the store walked out that day. Only a couple months later, the store is rumored to be closing when its lease is up.

Re:Common Sense

[Darinbob]

When I was younger, and dinosaurs ruled the earth, a lot of checkers in grocery stores were expected to memorize prices on a lot of items, especially on produce. Even if you were paid minimum wage you would be expected to learn most of this stuff and be able to give change correctly. Today though with more automated registers and checkout systems the brains of the workers aren't used as much.

Re:Common Sense

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

See, this is why they should block posting from new uids for at least six months.

1) Clean up your link. We don't need google's click-tracking, thanks.
2) Whoosh.

Re:Common Sense

[Alioth]

The dumbness of some of these systems (specifically including the humans) can be staggering. No one thinks, they just accept the numbers at face value.

My dad used to work for B&Q (a home improvement/hardware store). The big bosses in head office look at the trends of how certain things sell and when, which is all very good. But the dumbass managers see in, say, May that there was a huge spike in sale for a right angled copper pipe coupling in one store. So the next May they order a huge ton of right angle copper pipe couplings because they excitedly think thers's some seasonal trend here at that particular store. Not that, say, a plumber had a.one off large last minute job and happened to need a one off purchase of these things...

Re:Common Sense

[Darinbob]

This is SAP, normally their scams are much bigger than this!

Re:Common Sense

[interkin3tic]

Retail management is no one's first choice.

Re:Common Sense

[interkin3tic]

Negative commission? So you would have had to pay to sell those items? How in the holy hell did that happen?

Re:Common Sense

[tompaulco]

If you bring back any sort of product, even defective, they will open the box, make sure that all of the parts are there, inspect it, and then re-shrinkwrap the box and slap on a 10% off price sticker.
Sounds like Lowes and Home Depot. "Well, someone ran a forklift fork through the front door of this $1,500 refrigerator, so we'll let you have it for $1,449".

Re:Common Sense

[SpzToid]

Replying to un-do mod-points. This comment was at two when I tried to add points, and I tried to mod it insightful (and the confirmation said insightful) but the score registered was '4 funny'. This was NOT my intention when I applied those mod points. And this is not the first time I have witnessed this quirkiness on slashdot, however this instance is the most egregious violation.

Re:Common Sense

[squidflakes]

Oh, there are tons of options. If your tastes lean toward the gourmand you can select any continent that suits your fancy. I hear that Antarctic Sex Tourism is a real challenge, while Eurasian Sex Tourism is satisfyingly simple.

If you're more the gourmet type, you can really narrow it down for maximum enjoyment, Red-Headed Flemmish Goat-Heard Sex Tourism for example is considered by many to be the brass ring of the hobby.

Really, you're only limited by your imagination and budget, so get out there and live it up!

Re:Common Sense

[Slashdot Parent]

Man, and I thought that Thai stripper who could manipulate chopsticks with her pussy was exotic!

Re:Common Sense

[Rockoon]

What does it say about them?

Re:Common Sense

[bws111]

There is absolutely no reason for the cashier to even look at what the register says. If they got the beep, the item scanned correctly. If it scanned correctly, there are only a few options: the price is correct (%99 of the time), the price is too high (the customer will complain and get directed to customer service), or the price is too low. If the price is too low there are two options: the store made an error (most places have a law that requires the store to honor the scanned price), or the customer is committing fraud.

It is far more important to the store that they keep the lines moving (stopped/slow lines really piss off customers) as opposed to the cashier stopping the line and accusing the customer of fraud.

Re:Common Sense

[squidflakes]

Pffft, that's a high school elective in Thailand. Along with Moped Driving and Staging Military Coups.

Re:Common Sense

[networkBoy]

Correct, it happens because the company has a minimum margin to sell a product, commission is based on a percentage of whatever is over that margin. If the product is being sold for less than the minimum margin commission becomes negative.
i.e. widget costs $100 and has a minimum margin of 5%. If it sells for $105 then there is 0 commission, if it sells for $110 then the commission is $2.50 (assuming 50% commission on above margin value). if it sells for $100 then commission is -$2.50.

It should come as no surprise that items with negative commission fail to be sold, and may end up in unsellable state to ensure they are not sold.

Re:Common Sense

[Carnildo]

I got a $250 digital camera for $100 through what I figure was some sort of miscommunication in the marketing department. My best guess is that they wanted a 20% discount to draw people into the stores, but the memo was sent to too many people. Net result? Advertised price of $200, minus a $50 in-store rebate, minus a $50 mail-in rebate.

Re:Common Sense

[tompaulco]

No way a cashier would notice, but someone monitoring inventory might
I would think the POS system might notice that today x of these were sold when only x/2 of these were on hand.

Re:Common Sense

[Cederic]

Hmm. Things I've considered as I approach my 40th:
- partner dancing (I went Modern Jive and WCS, but whatever works for you)
- round the world cruise
- hiking across south america
- buying a biplane and flying to south africa (from England)
- becoming a gigolo
- go gay for a bit
- get a new job
- suicide (ideally after blowing my entire net worth and whatever loans I can raise on some or all of the above)
- motorbikes (like fast cars, but faster, cheaper, and often negate the need for the above option)
- shooting shit (I use a bow)
- start a business

Several of those aren't really appealling to me, but it'll be more fun if I let you imagine which.

Re:Common Sense

[Slashdot Parent]

Interesting ideas. Here are my thoughts on those:

- partner dancing (I went Modern Jive and WCS, but whatever works for you)

Assuming you're a guy, I highly recommend this! I took Salsa lessons for a while back when it was popular. Female to male ratio is pure awesome.

- round the world cruise

I love to travel, but I despise cruises. It's impossible to really get to know a place that way.

- hiking across south america

Sounds like fun!

- buying a biplane and flying to south africa (from England)

Do you know how to fly? A buddy of mine just got his license. He seems to like it.

- becoming a gigolo

Let me know how that turns out!

- go gay for a bit

You know, it's funny. When I was younger, that idea would have been 100% abhorrent to me, but now it's only more like 90%. Perhaps as I get older things will change.

- get a new job

Ave! Duci novo, similis duci seneci!

- suicide (ideally after blowing my entire net worth and whatever loans I can raise on some or all of the above)

And miss the Dirty Old Man stage?

- motorbikes (like fast cars, but faster, cheaper, and often negate the need for the above option)

I once met some insane Scottish people who had biked across Europe and had made it all the way to Egypt (where I met them). I couldn't understand 80% of what they were saying, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

- shooting shit (I use a bow)

Use a flamethrower!

- start a business

A wise, old businessman once confided in me that $1 made for yourself is better than $2 made for somebody else. He would have disputed my characterizing him as either old or wise, but his advice fit well with the advice that I received from a middle-aged attorney (and I'm paraphrasing here because my father would never use such a vulgar expletive): you can make a fuck of a lot more money having people work for you than you can make working for somebody else. Since I got essentially the same message from both an employee and an employer, that was all I needed to hear. That month, my dear old dad and I both quit our jobs and started our own businesses. I started 2: a software consultancy and a real estate investment firm, and he started 1: a small business incubator.

I'm happy to report these have all worked out extremely well for us. Highly recommend!

Great bucket list! I think I need to start mine, now.
1. Asian sex tour.
2. ??

Re:Common Sense

[Cederic]

Nope, can't (legally) fly, but the lessons would be fun.

Great bucket list!

nah, it's a list of possible things. I don't want to do all of them. I wont do some of them.

Re:Common Sense

[Slashdot Parent]

Well, if you want to do more than one, I recommend saving "suicide" for last.

Re:Common Sense

[cusco]

Go mountain climbing in Peru. That's my outlet. No rock climbing experience or paid guides needed, just curiosity, determination and coca leaves (for the altitude). It's a little embarassing the first time a ten year-old passes you running on his way to school, but when you realize that his lungs are already larger than yours and you're still slogging along where no one from your state (and maybe your country) has ever set foot before it's not so bad. Then you arrive at some stunning vista or incredible waterfall or mysterious ruin and the whole trip suddenly takes on a new meaning.

If you're actually interested email me. My brother-in-law has a bed and breakfast in Paruro, near Cusco (look it up on Google Earth).

Re:Common Sense

[cusco]

My wife has repeatedly been offered an assistant manager's job at her store, and she always turns it down saying, "The money would be nice, but I don't like the work my boss has to do."

Re:Common Sense

[hairyfeet]

Dude as a son whose dad went through the whole midlife crisis thing? Please do it FAR AWAY from your kids, at least a couple of states over. You remember what was hip in say...1975? The big ass medalion and your shirt half open? Yeah my dad was doing that...in 1998!

My GF at the time insisted on meeting my family and I tried my damnedest to keep her away from my father, but she wore me down. We were pulling out of the drive after and she just turned with a grin and said "full blown mid life crisis huh? Where is the sportscar?" and I pointed to the sport truck in the garage. When she saw it she busted out laughing, it was so damned obvious it was a mid life mobile.

So if you go for it, please do it AWAY from your kids, they'll thank you for it. In fact, go for the whole Asian thing, that it, nice and FAR AWAY with lots of exotic girls. Certainly better than seeing your dad dating waitresses young enough to be your sister.

Re:Common Sense

[Brad1138]

No, it is called "Car Toys", not sure why I didn't just say that. Worst job I ever had. The Manager and some employees used to go behind the building and get high on breaks...

Re:Common Sense

[Slashdot Parent]

Hmm. I think it's pretty much enshrined in the universal parent code of conduct that we must embarrass our kids as completely and as often as possible. Some sort of payback for all of those tantrums you threw on the ground at Safeway. :)

On that note, think I could pull off one of those big, massive Flavor Flav clock necklaces from the 80s?

Re:Common Sense

[Slashdot Parent]

Heh. I saved you in Evernote. For all I know, you may hear from me someday. But not today. Any adventure trips are a few years out.

Re:Common Sense

[Greyfox]

Mmm, I notice the veteran cashiers at the local grocery have EVERY produce code memorized. I mean, you could go through there with some tamarind pods or tomatillos and they'll just know the code for it. They got nothing to do but sit there, swipe stuff through the laser scanner and memorize every piece of inventory the store has. I bet if they just had numeric codes and not laser scanners, it wouldn't take them all that long to memorize the codes for every piece of inventory. A few months at most. But for some reason, they'd still have to call for a price check on tampons when you're in there buying them for your girlfriend.

Re:Common Sense

[fluffy99]

Moreover, at least in Florida and other states IIRC (from the time I used to work in Home Depot), the law typically mandates that you, the seller, must charge what is in the label.

You are wrong. The label on the product is an invitation for conducting a legal transaction or contract sale. It is not a binding commitment to sell at that price under and the store has no legal obligation to sell it to you at that price. When it gets rung up and the cashier gives you the total and you pay that total - that is the actual 'contract'. Contracts in most states are null and void if there was fraud involved by either party.

Re:Common Sense

[hairyfeet]

Uh huh...I raised my sister's two boys after she fell ill soon after the second was born and right through her passing and I'm damned proud i have NEVER embarrassed their asses, even when I soooooooo wanted to. to be fair the closest they ever got to doing something unruly in public was when the oldest was 12 and someone's cell went off in the game store and it was the Imperial March and he yelled out "Nerd Alert!". Of course I was too damned busy dying with the rest of the place from laughter to get onto the little guy.

But trust me friend, i know how damned old the kids can make you feel. you don't know how badly i want to scream when the oldest is on the college campus and all the girls are gaga over his "cool retro shirts!" and I just want to scream "That's NOT retro, those are my concert shirts the little shit stole!". You know you are too damned old when your concert shirts are considered retro and they are playing AC/DC as muzak in the local Wally World.

Re:Common Sense

[Alex Belits]

Because you can walk into Wal-Mart and name your salary, right?

Social Conservatives are getting more and more annoying as the elections are approaching.

Re:Common Sense

[swamp_ig]

In fact, go for the whole Asian thing, that it, nice and FAR AWAY with lots of exotic girls. Certainly better than seeing your dad dating waitresses young enough to be your sister.

If you do that, please, safe sex.

As a doctor I've seen it all go horribly wrong more than once.

Re:Common Sense

[Inda]

Scales are easy to beat. A lot of items weight the same. Tins of food, with the shop's own branding, is where most are stolen. Dropping one helps. If it leaks, you've scored.

Messing up your scanning also helps. The helpful staff are not so helpful after you've done it for the tenth time.

High priced items in my area are meat and coffee. These are also the items offered in pubs on a Saturday. It's a roaring trade.

I live in a low income area, full of real and exciting people who sometimes struggle to feed their families. We feed a young girl five times a week, sometimes using stolen meat. She wouldn't have a decent meal otherwise. This world makes me sad.

Re:Common Sense

[Hognoxious]

What's a city in Scotland with an awesome castle got to do with it?

Re:Common Sense

[Hognoxious]

If this guy was a known offender then the manager was a twat for not warning you in advance. Or just banning him.

Re:Common Sense

[Hognoxious]

I'm Welsh, you insensitive clod!

Re:Common Sense

[Hognoxious]

We had two cameras in the store that paid a negative commission.

How & why would a system be set up to do that?

Realms of fantasy here, I suspect.

Re:Common Sense

[Hognoxious]

Was that across the road from the pub that had no ice because the bartender quit and took the recipe with him?

Re:Common Sense

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Sounds about right. Assistant manager at the gas station I worked at wasn't bad as it didn't entail much additional work other than on the weekends running the daily reports and interviewing potential new hires. After working that job and then seeing the movie Clerks I laughed my ass off as I realized it is much closer to non fiction than fiction. I think about the only thing that didn't happen at my store was someone dying in the restroom, the rest was all similar with details changed (football on out on the drive instead of street hockey on the roof for example), even the conversations were eerily similar.

Re:Common Sense

[joleonard1]

Is that what we are now, drones?

Re:Common Sense

[Slashdot Parent]

If you do that, please, safe sex.

As a doctor I've seen it all go horribly wrong more than once.

I spoke with my chiropractor, and he advised that if I install universal guard rails on the bed, I should be perfectly safe.

Re:Common Sense

[ccanucs]

I am a Brit... I knew / know the difference... I was taking the pun and making another point. :-)

Re:Common Sense

[ccanucs]

Accident. Wasn't my intention. Apologies.

Re:Common Sense

[lsatenstein]

The cashiers are not allowed to act as security guards. It has nothing to do with unions, but with having a security guard who approaches the customer as he attempts to leave the store, and asks if he is going to pay for what he has under his shirt. If the customer returns to pay, it is judged an oversite, if the customer refuses, and goes outside the store, the inside security agent contacts the exterior store agents to stop and make an arrest.

It is easier if the merchandise had a hidden rfid chip.

Re:Common Sense

[networkBoy]

Sadly, no.
The commissions are automatically generated by a computer, the selling price as well, the problem happens when a human overrides the selling price to liquidate old models.
It actually was one in about three points that factored into a class action lawsuit in California.
-nB

Re:Common Sense

[ToddInSF]

No, not really.

They're just as annoying as they've always been.

Re:Common Sense

[cbiltcliffe]

On that note, think I could pull off one of those big, massive Flavor Flav clock necklaces from the 80s?

If you're going to go outrageous, go outrageous.....

http://i.imgur.com/0rST3.jpg

Re:Common Sense

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Damnit. Why would you go and ruin my inflated sense of indignation by being all civil and shit?

He was too ambitious

[TheRealMindChild]

I see old women do this all of the time. Not making their own barcodes, mind you, but swapping the code from the seeded cucumbers to the unseeded ones, or switch the tag from a generic bible and put it onto the fancy one they have their eye on. I wish I wasn't serious.

Re:He was too ambitious

[Scutter]

I see old women do this all of the time. Not making their own barcodes, mind you, but swapping the code from the seeded cucumbers to the unseeded ones, or switch the tag from a generic bible and put it onto the fancy one they have their eye on. I wish I wasn't serious.

I see this all too frequently myself. Yes, even the bible one. The irony of someone stealing a bible is not lost on me, either.

Re:He was too ambitious

[MightyYar]

I worked in retail and we caught a nun stealing.

I think there are thieves and then there are people who are actually sick.

Re:He was too ambitious

[localman57]

What I find funny is the irony of the copyright notice in the front of the bibles and hymnals. Jesus says "Spread the Good News!" The United Methodist Publishing Company says "No part of this may be reproduced without our permission." It's actually on the very first page with any significant text, before any of the scripture itself.

Re:He was too ambitious

[localman57]

If you don't like fancy bibles, you should try your local Bible Factory Outlet. Their stuff is real basic. You know their motto: "Where Jesus Saves, and You can Too!".

Re:He was too ambitious

[gameboyhippo]

Except that they're not selling the word of God, but a translation that has taken hours and hours of careful work. And just like you expect to be paid to work, these people need to feed their families too. So before telling someone that they shouldn't eat, perhaps you should work for free first.

Re:He was too ambitious

[kidgenius]

So if I make a leather bound bible with gilt edges, I shouldn't be allowed to charge for that? The costs hard quite a bit higher than other bibles. Besides, if you want a free bible, call up the Gideon's. I'm sure they will be more than happy to hook you up.

Re:He was too ambitious

[wjousts]

Except it's not a translation of the word of God, but a translation of a bunch of superstitious middle-eastern tribesmen from 2000 odd years ago (or more).

Re:He was too ambitious

[Rogerborg]

Given that most versions are King James, you'd be looking at a 400 year copyright term. You should probably anonymize your Disney IP address before posting that.

Re:He was too ambitious

[mcgrew]

My pastor got a laugh out of the congregation last year (the guy could make a killing as a stand-up comedian if he wasn't a preacher) when he was encouraging the congregation to read "Wierd: because normal isn't working". He said "somebody stole my copy. Stealing from a preacher? You know that book is good!"

Re:He was too ambitious

[gameboyhippo]

See my reply to fermion above. Same applies here.

Re:He was too ambitious

[localman57]

I didn't say it was bad. I said it was "funny" and "ironic". These words do not mean the same thing. You don't find any irony there?

Re:He was too ambitious

[TapeCutter]

there are people who are actually sick.

Yeah, we recently had a shoplifting MP here in Australia, forbidden fruit and all that...

Re:He was too ambitious

[jluxe]

you work in a place that sells cucumbers AND bibles? Costco?

Re:He was too ambitious

[kiwimate]

Modded insightful and not flamebait? Come on...

Re:He was too ambitious

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There are arguably two categories of biblical pricing:

In the "The laborer is worthy of his hire" camp, you have the pretty-much-cost-of-printing-and-distribution prints of KJV and other out-of-copyright versions, along with moderately expensive editions of newer translations and revisions and slightly more expensive still 'critical editions' that are either a classic translation with a heavy addition of new marginal notes, explanatory sections, essays, etc. or a revised translation with the same.

In the "Yeah, the seller is probably an unscruplous weasel; but WTF is wrong with the buyer?" camp, are the vanity-printed and overpriced versions of cheap or free translations and(most horrible of all) the assorted commercial, political, and celebrity tie-in versions. If, for example, you find yourself purchasing The Holy Bible: Stock Car Racing Edition there are no words...

Re:He was too ambitious

[GrumpySteen]

The irony I find is that someone has the audacity to sell the word of god

I'm sure the publishers would be happy to hand out bibles for free if God would just send a check to cover the production costs.

to prey on someones vanity to profit, that has always bothered me.

Designer clothes, shoes, purses, suits, ties, jewelry, make-up, fancy bibles and tens of thousands of other products are marketed specifically to serve people who want to display their vanity. Quite frequently the cost of the item is an important part of that since it allows them to show off their affluence. The people who buy those things obviously aren't being preyed upon because they seek them out and pay for them of their own free will.

Why does it bother you that other people make those goods available to the people who want them and are willing to pay for them?

Re:He was too ambitious

[gsnedders]

It is still under copyright in the UK (copyright held by the Crown has no fixed expiry date), FWIW.

Re:He was too ambitious

[Calos]

I agree -- and it has nothing to do with my feelings on religion.

It doesn't matter what it's a translation of, it's a translation.

That said, it's been translated and retranslated many many times over the years, and it's probably a progressive work - I doubt very many are translating from whatever oldest sources are available. My impression was that many different versions were just doing things like modernizing the verses to make them more easily understood or to make choices of the somewhat ambiguous translations based on the winds at the time and the establishment they're being sold to.

Re:He was too ambitious

[localman57]

Except that they're not selling the word of God, but a translation that has taken hours and hours of careful work. And just like you expect to be paid to work, these people need to feed their families too. So before telling someone that they shouldn't eat, perhaps you should work for free first.

Who do you think you're talking to around here? Slashdot is crawling with people who create software, documentation, and a variety of other products that take hours and hours of careful work. Then we give it away. We work for free. And we have a day job to pay the bills as well. Eating and giving away as well don't have to mutually exclusive.

Translating the word of God, if that's your thing, seems like it would be best done by the people with the same sort of attitude that the open source community does. Let it take as long as it takes, and let people release it when they're satisfied with it. This seems much more appropriate to me than a profit based enterprise where the quality of the translation is partially constrained by the amount of funds and callendar schedule availible to do it.

Or, alternatively, translating the Bible is really no different than translating stereo instructions. Either way.

Re:He was too ambitious

[mcgrew]

I agree completely. That's one reason I stick to the King James version -- all the other versions are under copyright protection*, and no man should have a monopoly on God's word.

Anyone following Christ's teachings would be giving bibles away, not selling them.

*Yes, I'm aware that the King James version is under copyright in Britain, but I'm not in Britain.

Re:He was too ambitious

[ArsenneLupin]

The irony of someone stealing a bible is not lost on me, either.

It's not (necessarily) stealing, all depends on the mindset you're in when you're taking it

Re:He was too ambitious

[networkBoy]

You can get a free bible, all you have to do is ask at your local house of worship.
If you want a fancy one you have to pay I suppose, but there are always perfectly serviceable units available for free.
-nB

Re:He was too ambitious

[n7ytd]

I see old women do this all of the time. Not making their own barcodes, mind you, but swapping the code from the seeded cucumbers to the unseeded ones, or switch the tag from a generic bible and put it onto the fancy one they have their eye on. I wish I wasn't serious.

I see this all too frequently myself. Yes, even the bible one. The irony of someone stealing a bible is not lost on me, either.

Well, obviously, that's the person who need it most!

Re:He was too ambitious

[BetterSense]

Also, there are plenty of ministries that will give you a free bible. Gideon still puts millions of free bibles in hotel rooms. At my church, we have a giant bookshelf of old bibles free for the taking (mostly years worth of "lost and found" bibles that have become public due to statute of limitations). I grabbed a few old translations with good typography myself.

Re:He was too ambitious

[wjousts]

Considering the amount of blood shed, I'd say, yeah.

Re:He was too ambitious

[wjousts]

Right, because clearly the claim that it's the work of some ancient tribesmen is the more outrageous claim than the one that it's the literal word of some magical invisible sky fairy. Clearly the burden of proof lies with me.

Re:He was too ambitious

[wjousts]

(Sorry, my english skills are limited, so I just hope that the idea in general is understood ) ...

That ain't the only skills you are limited in.

There's too much nonsense to go through, but I'll just take the first one, man isn't descended from monkeys and no scientist claims they are. They share a common ancestor. What you said is equivalent to me saying you're descended from your brother and asking then why your brother still exists?

Re:He was too ambitious

[px2]

No kidding. I work at a bookstore and bibles are one of the most lifted items, along with graffiti books, pot growing books, and books by Bukowski, and Derek Jensen.

Re:He was too ambitious

[hendridm]

Indeed, I've been handed several free bibles over the years and I didn't even want them. :/

Re:He was too ambitious

[fahrbot-bot]

Sadly, both groups may work on Wall Street: Capitalists and Other Psychopaths.

Note that there are numerous objections to this opinion piece (probably by other Wall Street psychopaths - ha!) for using under-representative source data and an incorrect interpretation of that data - even after a correction to the article - and those objections may all be accurate, but the article somehow seems at least plausible anyway, if you ask me.

Re:He was too ambitious

[networkBoy]

Here have a bible sir.

Re:He was too ambitious

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that's not true anymore - they do have expiry dates as of 1988.

The duration of Crown copyright varies depending whether material is published or unpublished. Unpublished material was originally subject to copyright protection in perpetuity. However, the 1988 Act removed this concept from British law. Transitional provisions that apply for 50 years after the entry into force of the 1988 Act provide that no unpublished material will lose its copyright protection until January 1, 2040. New Crown copyright material that is unpublished has copyright protection for 125 years from date of creation. Published Crown copyright material has protection for 50 years from date of publication. Those works protected under Letters Patent have perpetual control of reproduction claimed over them despite being published. Works where copyright is assigned to the Crown by an author are subject to the normal term of protection for that particular type of work, for example life of the author plus 70 years for a literary work.

Also pretty much everything produced by the devolved Governments (Scotland and Wales) and a lot produced by the main Government, is now covered by the Open Government Licence which means you are free to reproduce in full and adapt for other uses, including commercial.

The King James is a tricky one because it was not actually produced by the Crown - so under any definition of Crown Copyright since 1911, it would not be covered. But since it was grandfathered in after being granted to the Crown it is still covered - but only until 2040 (only!) at which point it loses it's protected status under the 1988 act.

Re:He was too ambitious

[Hognoxious]

Except that they're not selling the word of God, but a translation that has taken hours and hours of careful work. And just like you expect to be paid to work, these people need to feed their families too.

I doubt Richard Bancroft or any of his underlings are particularly concerned about that.

Re:He was too ambitious

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Why is this modded insightful and not OT or Flamebait? The degree to which you agree with his snark-filled one-liner doesn't affect its relevance to the actual conversation in this thread.

Re:He was too ambitious

[doston]

Except it's not a translation of the word of God, but a translation of a bunch of superstitious middle-eastern tribesmen from 2000 odd years ago (or more).

I find it extremely sad that Slashdot has declined to the point where any random Christian-bashing is modded +5 Insightful, instead of off-topic. If you want to know why readership has declined significantly, here is an example.

How is stating that the Bible was written by superstitious middle eastern tribesmen from 2000 years ago "Christian-bashing"? And I don't know that slashdot readership has declined at all. Any numbers to back up that claim?

Re:He was too ambitious

[gameboyhippo]

You're incorrect. Most Bible translations are based on the best sources that we have available. We have better sources today than in the seventeenth century. So most Bible translations are more accurate (accurate meaning closer to the original source) than they were in the time of King James.

Re:He was too ambitious

[gameboyhippo]

Such an insightful flame bait^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hobservation. Oh you have shown me the way, wjousts. I may have lived on happily with my wife and kids believing in an imaginary fairy tale my whole life if it wasn't for you.

Just for the record, sarcasm is used often in the Bible. :)

In all seriousness, this kind of intolerance makes it difficult for you to be taken seriously except from other intolerant people.

Re:He was too ambitious

[gameboyhippo]

Touché! :)

While I think that open source free software is great and all, I don't think it's a crime to be paid for your work. I have no problem getting paid to write software. Likewise, I have no problem with experts dedicating their time to translating the Bible. Copyrights have not really prevented people from purchasing Bible translations anyway.

Re:He was too ambitious

[gameboyhippo]

Uh... I'm a Christian and I have no idea what you just said. I'm guessing you're an atheist troll trying to make people who believe in a diety look like idiots.

Re:He was too ambitious

[cusco]

I've only been given one that I recall, and later I was thankful. I was hitchiking in the Florida Keys (early '80s) and one of my rides gave me a bible that I was too polite to turn down. Later that day a Florida state trooper picked me up and tore my whole backpack apart looking for drugs, money, or anything else he could steal. The bible convinced him that I was actually the Jesus freak that I was pretending to be, on my way to a revival, so he gave up and left my with all of my stuff strewn along the side of the highway in frelling Liberty City. Bastard took my last ten dollars though, and I ate nothing but coconuts for the next two days until I got home.

Really my only bad experience in a decade of occasional hitchiking.

Re:He was too ambitious

[CptJeanLuc]

I love how you used "generic bible" as an example here - ROTFL, well played. In the old lady's defense, perhaps the cheap one she used previously didn't include all the commandments.

Re:He was too ambitious

[Hognoxious]

AFAIK, the only perpetual copyright in the UK (kind of) is the right to royalties from Peter Pan owned by Great Ormond Street Hospital.

YKW. P.S. GIYF.

Re:He was too ambitious

[Hognoxious]

If I make changes to it, do I have to release them back to the community?

Re:He was too ambitious

[wjousts]

I wasn't aware I was being intolerant. Apparently stating my opinion is considered intolerant, but yours somehow isn't? Curious? Sorry you feel so victimized all the time. It must be difficult when so much of the western world follows your same fantasy.

Re:He was too ambitious

[gameboyhippo]

I wasn't aware I was being intolerant.

And that is why you have no friends...

Apparently stating my opinion is considered intolerant, but yours somehow isn't?

Yes. My opinion was that people should not feel guilty receiving compensation for work. This is a very inclusive opinion which leaves room for dialog. Your "opinion" is that anyone who does not share your religious belief system is a brainwash idiot.

Curious?

Nobody's buying into it, so quit trying.

Sorry you feel so victimized all the time.

The straw man accepts your apologies.

It must be difficult when so much of the western world follows your same fantasy.

This makes no sense. If you assert your attack on the straw man to be true then the majority of his peers would agree with him and therefore the straw man would not be a victim.

This lack of critical thinking skills is surprising for an engineer. I'm guessing it's because you're so religiously emotional about your belief system, that your brain has shut off. I see it happen a lot with nominal Christians too. Their brains shut off when defending a faith system they know little about; but otherwise they're brilliant. Do keep in mind that I'm not attacking your religious belief in an everlasting universe, multiverse, whatever; but rather attacking your ability to function in society without getting super emotional when people disagree with you. You'll go farther in your career if you learn to practice tolerance.

Now in case you were trying to be funny through sarcasm, it didn't work for me. Here's a knowledge base article that may help: http://www.microsoft.com/education/en-us/Training/Competencies/Pages/humor.aspx

Re:He was too ambitious

[doccus]

Except.. i believe. didn't He say "As freely as you have received, freely give also.." I frankly find the whole "business" side of religion distasteful.. and the Pentecostals (like the TV preachers) are the worst, but also the "Christian" entertainment .. if a Christian wants to make money in the arts, fine, but if you're going to wrap it up as "Testimony" that's where I draw thew line as to whether it should be sold.. I am Christian (Catholic) myself, and I don't begrudge fair wages for efforts earned,, but NOT for testimony of ANY kind, whether it's that 59.95 "package" on the TV preachers channel about "Here's some Good News" or the Christian rocker's "Golly Gee I'm soo Happy I'm Sick" album.. (I was a musician for years and I simply didn't play offensive music.. it was secular, and so was valid to charge for).. And when Bibles are translated, the work is already long ago done and paid for.. the Catholic Bibles were done at The Vatican, and the protestant ones were done by Ol King James.. who had plenty of money, thank you, after robbing all the catholic churches of their gold... Most Bibles are given away.. People that buy fancy Bibles are just buying them for the "Status" IMHO....

Re:He was too ambitious

[gameboyhippo]

I wholeheartedly agree with a lot of what you're saying. I agree that there are a lot of people making money from Christianity in a distasteful way. That being said, I do not feel that it is being compensated for work is wrong. Should a preacher/priest work for free because he is doing the work of God? If not, then why would bands such as Lifehouse and Owl City be disqualified from selling their albums because they have songs on such albums that have Christian themes to them?

I tend to look at this like the parable about the weeds. If we were to say that being compensated for art that glorifies God is prohibited then we would artificially take away a medium that could change the lives of others. I think it would comfort you to read Phillipians 1:15-18. Despite having the wrong motives, the Gospel is being preached. Trust me, the business side of Christianity bothers me too, but it is a comfort that there are those who find salvation despite men's corruptible motives.

I will have to disagree with you on the business of Protestants all using KJV translations or translations that use KJV as a source. Most modern translations such as the NIV, NASB, ESV, etc... use the best available original sources that they can find, not the KJV. The KJV also used the best available sources of its time. With the ease of obtaining a Bible translation, it doesn't bother me that the translators get compensated.

Yes, I agree that there are those who buy fancy Bible translations as a status symbol. Heck, we see this in the book "Tom Sawyer". What does Tom want with a Bible anyway? Status. For me, I just use my iPad since the youversion app gives me many different translations to use for free on and off line. When I first started using it, people would say, "I prefer a 'real' Bible". Can we say, "status"? It's as if a digital Bible app is ineligible to be read outside of church and that somehow owning a real one makes you a better Christian. Now people are more accepting of using a kindle, phone, or tablet.

Re:He was too ambitious

[HArchH]

The lunacy of a, presumably, well paid VP ripping off boxes of Legos is astounding.

Because he needed the cash?

[Nursie]

Surely VP of SAP doesn't need to be doing that?

Some sort of mental illness of thrill-seeking?

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[sl4shd0rk]

Surely VP of SAP doesn't need to be doing that?

Once you start pulling 6 digit incomes and near the 7 digit ones, money isn't just about "saving" is just about "more".

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[sycodon]

Trophy Wife?
Mental disorder?
Poor tax planning?
Mistress!

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[Fast Thick Pants]

He's building a Lego mistress.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[jeffmeden]

Some sort of mental illness of thrill-seeking?

On the part of the submitter. "the vice president of SAP" is not true. He was *A* vice president *AT* SAP. SAP, like most large companies, has many many people holding the VP title, some of which make a lot of money and some of which don't. He was probably well paid but not excessively so, but that doesn't mean anything if he had some sort of addiction or was just plain bored. 30 grand tax free, for a side job, is no small haul.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[egandalf]

My doctor growing up was a kleptomaniac. He would take things out of the local grocery without paying for them all the time. No one ever stopped him because he'd always return the goods a couple of hour later. Of course, he wasn't conspiring to do it for profit, he just couldn't help his impulses any more than someone with OCD.

I suppose this could be something similar, but criminal charges are definitely in order for the nature and amount of the crime.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[allcoolnameswheretak]

Could be his wife / some other entity, is monitoring his official finances and he is procuring unmonitored cash for some less reputable activities such as gambling, whoring, etc.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Surely VP of SAP doesn't need to be doing that?

Some sort of mental illness of thrill-seeking?

All part of an elaborate plot to sell Target some sort of heuristic-theft-detection ERP module that slides 'seamlessly' into a SAP implementation and absolutely nowhere else...

In all seriousness, of course, people who commit crimes despite having no reasonable incentive to do so ($30k isn't peanuts; but in $/hour plus legal exposure, how well could box-at-a-time retail fraud have really stacked up compared to just staying a little later at the office when you are a VP?) are really ones to be watched. People who merely want the good things money can buy are comparatively easy to satisfy. People who want money per se are always more expensive than you can afford...

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[AioKits]

Man that's going to chafe....

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[TooMuchToDo]

A low 6 figure income in Mountain View (and most of California) is middle class. Family of four in the bay area? $75K/year is scrapping by.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[localman57]

If so, she's got blinders on. If I were her:

"So, Thomas, I think it's time we have a little talk about why you have 200 boxes of Lego Millenium Falcon..."

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[TheCarp]

actually, some research on shoplifting has shown that the vast majority of shoplifters can afford the items that they steal. In fact, its not uncommon at all for white middle class adults to engage in shoplifting, often citing the excitement of it as one of their motivators.

The "National Association for Shoplifting Prevention" says that studies have found depression to be very common amongst shoplifters (http://www.shopliftingprevention.org/whatnaspoffers/nrc.htm).

another interesting article is here: http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/137627302/sticky-fingers-hidden-hams-a-shoplifting-history

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[kidgenius]

And he responds "I buy them on sale and sell them on ebay. I then pocket the difference"

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[mwvdlee]

30 grand tax free, for a side job, is no small haul.

Considering the risk, effort and time spent, it IS a small haul compared to the salary of even a "low-level" VP.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[wjousts]

My thoughts exactly. Does SAP really pay that poorly?

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[Anonymous Coward]

My doctor growing up was a kleptomaniac. He would take things out of the local grocery without paying for them all the time. No one ever stopped him because he'd always return the goods a couple of hour later. Of course, he wasn't conspiring to do it for profit, he just couldn't help his impulses any more than someone with OCD.

I suppose this could be something similar, but criminal charges are definitely in order for the nature and amount of the crime.

You may want to check and see if you still have both of your kidneys. Just sayin.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[Wansu]

Surely VP of SAP doesn't need to be doing that?
Some sort of mental illness of thrill-seeking?

He's just a sophisticated kleptomaniac.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[iserlohn]

It wasn't always like this tough.. back when I lived in Vancouver a few years ago, it was around 300-400k for a nice 4 bedroom detached house in Richmond or Burnaby.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[HTMLSpinnr]

30 grand tax free, for a side job, is no small haul.

I'd argue that the income wasn't tax free. eBay will will report significant amounts of income (>200 transactions or > $20,000) on a 1099-K form, which started in 2011. Either way, someone knew about the income at that point.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[Anonymous Coward]

Burma Shave!

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[a90Tj2P7]

On the part of the submitter. "the vice president of SAP" is not true. He was *A* vice president *AT* SAP. SAP, like most large companies, has many many people holding the VP title, some of which make a lot of money and some of which don't.

This. That's an important distinction. Before I'd left my prior job, they had just given each and every person in the sales department the title of "VP of Sales".

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[Waffle Iron]

Man that's going to chafe....

No, you're thinking of old-school Lego bricks. These days, Lego sets come with almost no generic bricks because kids want realism.

The Lego Deluxe Mistress set comes with a variety of custom soft silicone body parts that snap into place at key locations.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[squiggleslash]

Let me guess, VP at SAP is like "Assistant Manager" at a branch of Wendy's?

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[michelcolman]

Maybe he was Vice President of Lavatory Hygiene or something like that?

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[pablo.cl]

The point of avoiding monitoring is so that his wife doesn't know how he spends the money. Therefore, the explanation "I buy them on sale and sell them on ebay. I then pocket the difference" is the same as accepting monitoring.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[msobkow]

It's far from the first time someone has been busted for "thrill seeking" by shoplifting or theft.

Wynona Ryder comes to mind. A very pretty lady and talented actress, yet she felt some inexplicable urge to pilfer things she could have paid for with pocket change.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[Slashdot Parent]

This guy wasn't an executive VP, and it wasn't at SAP Global. His official title was "Vice President, SAP Integration & Certification Center (ICC) at SAP Labs, LLC". So he was a VP of a division of an SAP subsidiary.

Welcome to the world of title inflation.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[Slashdot Parent]

His official title was "Vice President, SAP Integration & Certification Center (ICC) at SAP Labs, LLC". So your characterization of him as an assistant manager at a Wendy's store is probably apt from a corporate structure standpoint, but he probably brought in more than $20/hr!

He was basically a VP at a division of an SAP subsidiary. Upper middle management.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[ekgringo]

To which she would naturally reply, "Great, because I need a new dress, and shoes to go with it, and I've had my eye on that diamond broach, and I really need my hair done to go with my new outfit, and I was thinking about re-doing the living room..."

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[jank1887]

likely it would stack up rather well, as his differential for staying late is likely zero. (salaried mid-upper management, you get paid to get the job done even if it's 60+hrs a week). That, and the fact that a ridiculously large number of Americans have tapped out their income, piled up mounds of debt, and feel pressure to maintain a lucrative lifestyle, and 30k could make a big difference.)

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[jeffmeden]

Given that their web site is still a beta (http://scn.sap.com/community/icc) maybe his salary is in beta too?

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[dcw3]

30 grand tax free, for a side job, is no small haul.

Maybe for you, but it's peanuts for any VP of a large multinational. There has to be more to this than him wanting $30k.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[PeanutButterBreath]

No, you're thinking of old-school Lego bricks. These days, Lego sets come with almost no generic bricks because kids want realism.

The Lego Deluxe Mistress set comes with a variety of custom soft silicone body parts that snap into place at key locations.

No kidding. New legos are like Mr. Potato Head.

Re:Because he needed the cash?

[TheCarp]

I thought a lot about that last bit earlier as I was commenting but wasn't sure where I came down on it.

Yes he was doing it for profit but, I have to imagine he didn't need the money... was he really making that much off of this compared to his salary? Maybe if he got himself into some massive financial situation and this turned up otherwise.... why something so.... it just seems off.

At the same time I can see how a technologist could get into this sort of scam. What technical person hasn't seen a glaring hole in some process and immediately thought of ways to subvert it.... that jump from imagining how to doing it can be small, especially when all it takes is a printer and some labels.

I mean, maybe my conception of his salary and/or how much he was expected to be able to make doing this are off, but.... I find it hard to see how he would justify doing this just for raw profit motive.

Why?

[tekrat]

Really? Doesn't a VP at SAP make enough money to afford his lifestyle? Is he so greedy that he's gotta do this kind of crap? And where does he find the TIME to post 2000 items to eBay?

Clearly, things at SAP must be doing badly because #1) he's not making enough and #2) He's got plenty of time to sit at work posting shit to eBay.

I don't have time to clean out the junk in my house and post crap to eBay. I barely have time to write this post.

Re:Why?

[Jawnn]

Really? Doesn't a VP at SAP make enough money to afford his lifestyle? Is he so greedy that he's gotta do this kind of crap?

Don't be silly. Laws against stealing are for "little people", right?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I told you that a manager of big company is a kleptomaniac, would that be a less surprising way of putting it?

Re:Why?

[sycodon]

$30k is chump change compared to what he presumably makes, especially considering the great amount of time and trouble he went to.

It's time for a visit to the shrink,

Re:Why?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What is surprising is not that he's a kleptomaniac; but that he's such a bad kleptomaniac(or, even more oddly, he brings a degree of technical skill, creating his own barcodes, to a typically downmarket form of shoplifting, normally accomplished just by sticker-swapping, but doesn't actually improve the rate of return notably...)

It's like discovering that some sleazy commodities speculator is breaking into foreclosed houses to steal copper in his nights and weekends. Sure, it isn't a surprise that a commodities trader might have a questionably ethical relationship with metals prices; but it is a surprise to find him getting his hands dirty with a sideline in blue-collar crime.

Re:Why?

[localman57]

Wow, Doc. Your hourly rate is really, really expensive. Would you consider payment in Legos? I have some Star Wars ones...

Re:Why?

[Myopic]

This is the obvious answer. I hardly think he was doing it for the money. He was doing it to get away with it, because he felt a compulsion to do it. Alas, in our civil society, we expect people to overcome their compulsions.

Re:Why?

[bitt3n]

I barely have time to write this post.

I don't have time to wr

Re:Why?

[Gilmoure]

Exactly! I see a nice car I'd like to drive, as a civilized human being, I'm expected to not touch it as it is not mine. I mean, who hasn't gone into a bank and wondered how they'd rob it? It's just a game you play but, being civilized, that's where it ends. Looks like Mr VP may have some boundary issues.

Re:Why?

[mcgrew]

Is he so greedy that he's gotta do this kind of crap?

You don't get to be VP of any company without huge surpluses of greed and huge defecits of morality.

Re:Why?

[DeadCatX2]

Kleptos steal for the act of stealing, they don't care about the monetary value of what they're stealing.

Re:Why?

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

I mean, who hasn't gone into a bank and wondered how they'd rob it?

The bank looks at you and wonders how they can rob you. Then they do just that, legally.

What do VP's make at SAP?

[cryfreedomlove]

He's an executive at SAP and now he's going to prison for stealing $30K from Target? There must be more to this story.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[amoeba1911]

I doubt he's going to prison for four counts of burglary. He'll probably pay a small fine, that's about it.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[fredrated]

Perhaps executives at SAP only make minimum wage now?

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[alen]

he'll probably get fired. under US law i think its illegal to have a company officer with a felony conviction

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[kryliss]

Obviously the same law doesn't apply to past/present/future politicians.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Didn't the executives at 'Premier Election Systems' meet in prison?

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[alen]

elected offices are ruled by the constitution of the US or the state. and those only give age as qualification for office.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[operagost]

He stole $30,000. I know we're all cynical about the "1%", but really: the fine won't be small. And he'll at least get several months of probation.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[Njovich]

I know where you are getting at, but I would say that at least theoretically it is a good thing. You don't want a state to be able to stifle aspiring politicians by slapping some BS felony on them (copyright or patent violation or whatever). Of course, with politicians as they are...

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[Maximum Prophet]

No, it doesn't, and for a good reason.

If someone is convicted of a crime, then it's perfectly reasonable for them to get elected and change the law, so that whatever they were convicted on wasn't a crime. (Not that *that* happens in real life, but it's a great political theory)

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[Sentrion]

I will continue with my cynicism. The fine will not be a percentage of his income or his net worth. For him, the fine will be affordable. He'll probably just write a check the day the judge decides what his fine will be. Now, if a single mother on welfare is stealing diapers from the same store because her kids crap their pants more often than the welfare department allows, that mother will probably spend time in jail. She will have an attorney appointed to "represent" her at trial, but this "representation" will only be to assist her to fill out forms with her guilty plea on them. She could be at home taking care of her kids while waiting for trial, but she won't have the money for bail. She'll be slapped with a felony and ordered to pay fines she might not ever be able to pay off. While the executive probably has strong enough of a professional network to still be VP at another company or to work as a consultant, the single mom will be laid off from whatever job she may have and will be excluded from most other minimum wage work because of her felony conviction. The state will probably even try to take her kids away as she is an unfit mother.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[Sentrion]

He will probably be asked to resign and receive a nice severance package to sweeten the offer. There is no US law that forbids CEOs, VPs, directors, or any other officer in a corporation from having a felony. The only exceptions are when the companies require a special license to operate. For example, in California your company cannot register as a professional photocopier if you, any general partner, corporate officer, or limited liability company officer/manager has a felony conviction.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[robinsonne]

Actually, in California a felony burglary charge carries a sentence of up to 6 years in prison, so with 4 counts of burglary pending he might be seeing some time after all.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[Slashdot Parent]

His official title was "Vice President, SAP Integration & Certification Center (ICC) at SAP Labs, LLC". I'd guess in the $300k/yr range, including benefits.

So $30k would have been more than a rounding error for him, but probably did not afford him a meaningful boost in his lifestyle.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[Hatta]

He got accustomed to being above the law as a VP, and forgot that outside his role as VP, he's not above the law anymore.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[hendridm]

I'm guessing he'll plead guilty, admit he has a problem and agree to get help, pay a fine and be sentenced to probation.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[fermat1313]

he'll probably get fired. under US law i think its illegal to have a company officer with a felony conviction

That may be true, but a Vice President isn't generally an officer of the company, particularly in a large org with hundreds of VPs.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

California is full of stupid laws.

Why does the CA gov't ban them from professional photocopying?

What possible risk to the public is that?

It ain't medicine, finances, security, defense, insurance or anything like that!

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[operagost]

Now, if a single mother on welfare is stealing diapers from the same store because her kids crap their pants more often than the welfare department allows, that mother will probably spend time in jail

Sure... if she steals $30,000 worth of diapers. Equal justice is equal justice. As if that VP isn't about to be fired, BTW. Contracts have morality clauses in them.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[Sentrion]

Maybe the concern over counterfeiting or forgeries, but I really don't know for sure either.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[Amouth]

it's not a law - but a lot of companies have a policy to that tune.

Re:What do VP's make at SAP?

[anyGould]

he'll probably get fired. under US law i think its illegal to have a company officer with a felony conviction

That's assuming there won't be a plea bargain or diversion program or conditional discharge or one of the many other opportunities available to rich people who haven't annoyed anyone in power.

Good idea, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, good idea, but he disregarded the eleventh commandment:
"Thou Shalt Not Get Caught." :D

Re:Good idea, but...

[Gilmoure]

I thought the eleventh was Mind Thy Own Business.

Darn that Herschel!

The article is really hokey

[dmacleod808]

"Police believe he made the bar codes using his own software skills." Well I think that if one scans a barcode with a smartphone, uses a sticker sheet and a printer, 'Ol Country Joe could probably do this same scam with "his own software skills" I presume he was scanning cheaper items and just replacing the bar codes on the more expensive ones, he wasn't "Hacking" the target database and changing prices.

Re:The article is really hokey

[billcopc]

It's the 6 o'clock news; since when do they bother presenting any facts ? Just more thinly-veiled propaganda to distract the docile masses.

This is just the slightly updated version of retagging. A decade ago, petty crooks would keep 4-5 different price guns handy, so they could match the style of price tag used in various shops. Even then, stores were smaller and many cashiers had most of the prices memorized, so they would notice major discrepancies like these Legos. Today, all you need is a Kinko's and free software to generate the barcodes, the cashiers don't even look at the item as it zooms past the scanner, and in some cases they even have self-checkout aisles with only moderate supervision.

It's never been difficult to defraud the system, but only recently has it become so dehumanized that the dumbest of dumb could get away with it.

Re:The article is really hokey

[vlm]

I thought the smartphone tie in was hilarious. 20 years ago I was working retail supermarket management and people used photocopiers and double sticky tape. So you buy a box of (then) 25 cent mac and cheese, photocopy the bar code, cut out, stick to 3x5 card stock so it can't be seen thru, scotch double sticky tape onto the large size free trade organic gourmet $3 chocolate bar.

I "busted" a kid using our own store's 3 cent per page photocopier to copy mac n cheese UPCs. "What are you doing with a mac n cheese box and some index cards and double sticky tape and some scissors?" "Uhhh, ummm, uh its for a rebate" "get out of here kid and don't come back".. "Busted" in quotes because he hadn't done anything illegal ... yet.

This scam has been around since BEFORE UPC scanners and laser bar code readers... remember price stickers put on with those pricing guns? people used to swap those around too.

Trying to turn this into a modern "smartphone" story is laughable.

Re:The article is really hokey

[Gilmoure]

He should try the Bobble-head smuggling scam next.

Re:The article is really hokey

[Ollabelle]

That's the part that has me curious. Presumably, there would be persistent inventory reconciliation errors reflecting more sales of low-priced Lego kits than they had in stock.

But multiple errors across multiple periods? That too should have made a few people suspicious.

Re:The article is really hokey

[peawormsworth]

"Police believe he made the bar codes using his own software skills." Well I think that if one scans a barcode with a smartphone, uses a sticker sheet and a printer, 'Ol Country Joe could probably do this same scam with "his own software skills" I presume he was scanning cheaper items and just replacing the bar codes on the more expensive ones, he wasn't "Hacking" the target database and changing prices.

I agree that making barcodes is an easy and non-technical issue. I made fake barcodes based on real barcode numbers of products I copied down from boxes in a store. I created these barcodes using the bars of varying width based on the specification of width and ordering for each number. I then printed these faked barcodes. I then took these printouts to the store and scanned them under the price-checker scanner provided for customer usage. They all came up with the product and price for the real products using my faked barcodes. I did this decades ago with an inkjet printer. I realized at this time that it would be super easy to either tape these over real barcodes of similar, but more expensive products and the tellers wouldnt know the difference. Also, I identified a store that did not require a receipt for returned products. I just didnt have the heart to follow through with actually stealing products. But I was well aware at that time it would be very simple to do it.

You dont have to use a camera. You just write down the numbers and then use the proper spacing for each number and recreate it in a image editor. The information for spacing can easily be found on wikipedia... I presume. This way the resulting barcode is "perfect" and visual inspection of it will be difficult to detect that anything is fake. And Im sure there are programs to make barcodes directly from the numbers... although I havent checked... Im sure they are free.

My point is... that what this person did is super easy. And most stores are suseptible to this, because the teller often doesnt know anything about the products they are swiping. If the machine beeps when the barcode passes... there is no further security check.

If the article calls it a "software skill"... then they are ignorant or they are trying to underplay the real danger that this is soo easy to do and it has been for decades. Barcodes are not a technical secret... they are simply a set of black bars at the correct spacing. Trusting them is stupid and a security risk for store owners. The risk is that employees will mistake the convience for a fact.

Kleptomania is a mental disease

[hessian]

Many people steal, but kleptomaniacs have a compulsion to steal independent of need. As this article illustrates, the root of kleptomania is a desire for revenge upon a world that the person feels has treated them unfairly. This includes emotional mistreatment, which is independent of a high salary or success in life.

Re:Kleptomania is a mental disease

[SecurityGuy]

Wow. Well, I hope someone treats me so unfairly as to name me VP of a large company. I promise not to crack under the strain.

Re:Kleptomania is a mental disease

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This guy Sells SAP how much more revenge upon the world could you possibly desire?

Re:Kleptomania is a mental disease

[c0lo]

Many people steal, but kleptomaniacs have a compulsion to steal independent of need. As this article illustrates, the root of kleptomania is a desire for revenge upon a world that the person feels has treated them unfairly.

...and, mark my words, being a VP at SAP is truly the most unfair treatment except Inquisition.

Re:Kleptomania is a mental disease

[tunapez]

Calling them kids is being kind. Neurotic, entitled brats would be more apropo....trapped in adult bodies, of course.
Otherwise, bull's-eye.

Re:Kleptomania is a mental disease

[Maximum Prophet]

... I promise not to crack under the strain.

Which disqualifies you for the role...

Re:Kleptomania is a mental disease

[ratnerstar]

As this article illustrates, the root of kleptomania is a desire for revenge upon a world that the person feels has treated them unfairly.

The article you linked to says absolutely nothing of the sort. In fact, citing the DSM, it says the following about diagnosing kleptomania: "The theft is not due to anger, revenge, delusions, hallucinations or impaired judgment (dementia, mental retardation, alcohol intoxication, drug intoxication)."

So I'm not sure what you were reading.

Re:Kleptomania is a mental disease

[Thanshin]

For comments like that, Slashdot's Scores should be logarithmic.

Re:Kleptomania is a mental disease

[Known Nutter]

It's not about him actually being treated unfairly, it's about him feeling as though he has been.

Re:Kleptomania is a mental disease

[Crudely_Indecent]

Unless you don't intend to keep the promise..... Wait... that's politicians - nevermind.

Re:Kleptomania is a mental disease

[mcgrew]

Well, it seems like a lot of our white-collar CEOs are kleptocrats, and obviously feel the world owes them something.

You just pointed out an interesting fact: The right wingers accuse the poor of having an "entitlemant attitude" when I've never met a poor person who felt entitled to anything except a fair chance, and most rich people demonstrate incredible amounts of an entitlement attitude. What cars are taking two parking spaces? Yep, those giant Caddilac SUV and the giant 4 passenger pickup trucks. Who feels entitled to part of your lane? Yep, same people. Who do you see whizzing past you on the interstate going at least 20mph over the limit? Same cars, plus Lexuses and Porches and the like. They think they're so entitled that they don't even have to make a pretense of obeying the law.

The sad thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

He'll get off easier than some kid downloading a couple songs.

Re:The sad thing...

[robinsonne]

+1 Sad, but true

Even easier at self-serve checkouts

[jampola]

You could be even more ambitious at the Self Serve check-outs! (especially here in Australia)

Re:Even easier at self-serve checkouts

[Rob the Bold]

You could be even more ambitious at the Self Serve check-outs! (especially here in Australia)

Don't those have scales on the bagging side in Australia? They do here in the US.

Re:Even easier at self-serve checkouts

[jeffmeden]

You could be even more ambitious at the Self Serve check-outs! (especially here in Australia)

Actually the self serve checkouts (they don't use them at Target, btw, which might have made a difference in this scheme) would have served to CATCH him. The checkouts use highly accurate product weight data, combined with a scale, to tell if you are sneaking things past the scanner. In the case of this scheme, he would have been putting the barcode for a 10 oz. box of Lego onto a 3 lb box of Lego. The self serve checkout would have a fit as soon as it saw that a 3 lb box appeared when a 10oz on was supposed to.

Re:Even easier at self-serve checkouts

[Kijori]

But what would it then do? Around here - the UK - it would show a message stating that there's an "unexpected item in the bagging area" and require a member of staff to authorise it.

Which they would do without checking since the message appears so regularly for no obvious reason.

Re:Even easier at self-serve checkouts

[RobinH]

If he went through a self-checkout I assume he would just have punched it in as "produce - bananas".

Re:Even easier at self-serve checkouts

[Taibhsear]

From my personal experience, the grocery stores are the only places I've encountered the self checkout lanes. When you don't put something on the scale after scanning it, the software pops up a display saying to place it on the scale with a button right beneath it to ignore it and continue ringing products up. The software messes up fairly frequently so the employees don't bat an eye. This would be trivially bypassed here.

Re:Even easier at self-serve checkouts

[Hognoxious]

Don't have them in Belgium. How do they work if you bring your own bag (like a rucksack), is there a tare function?

And what if you don't use a bag at all - if I'm with the hoglet I just shove stuff in his chariot.

Re:Even easier at self-serve checkouts

[Rob the Bold]

Don't have them in Belgium. How do they work if you bring your own bag (like a rucksack), is there a tare function?

And what if you don't use a bag at all - if I'm with the hoglet I just shove stuff in his chariot.

I don't think it has a user-controlled tare function, but I've never used one when I brought my own bags. Mostly because I can't get the 5 cents-per-bag credit without going to a human cashier. But all the ones I've used have a flat bottom in the bagging area to which the rack holding the store bags is mounted -- the whole business: platform, rack, bags and all get weighed together. So it works the same whether you place an item in the sack or just set it there on the platform.

Now it must zero itself at some point after you take your stuff -- with or without bags -- and before the next customer starts loading up.

If I were gonna use my own sack, pack, or whatever to carry out my purchases, I'd just set it down next to the scale and scoop everything in after the transaction completed. It would slow the process down, though, so it's not an ideal solution.

Re:Strange

[jampola]

He could be proving a point? I bet my bollocks to a barn dance that this was not done for any financial gain.

If you work at SAP, this reflects upon you

[cryfreedomlove]

You worked your ass off in school and in your career to land the job you have today at SAP. All of that hard work, just so you can work for this guy. If I worked at SAP, I'd want a full accounting so I could decide if the management team that promoted this guy was rotten to to core. If so, there are plenty of other places that need your skills.

Re:If you work at SAP, this reflects upon you

[kiwimate]

Over-react much there, mate? Heck, why stop at people who work at SAP. If your company uses SAP software, it reflects upon you as well, and you should be demanding a full accounting of your management team for deciding to purchase SAP.

Or...maybe not.

welp,

[P-niiice]

Nowadays, everyone needs a hustle. Even a damn SAP VP.

Re:Giant scam?

[Bill Dimm]

How does this compare to the ongoing financial scams being perpetrated on all of us?

Totally different ... he got arrested.

I wish

[Sparticus789]

At least he was buying the best toy in the world. Imagine if he was buying Justin Bieber lunch boxes or something else equally stupid.

Time for the Lego Bay...

[ravenscar]

We have a grossly overpriced product with strange distribution rules. Sounds kinda like big media...

Yes, I know that digital 'piracy' isn't a zero sum game. I also understand that Lego isn't nearly as evil as big media. Still, it's interesting to watch as illegal forces outside the 'standard' market work in ways that undermine the inflated Lego price structure.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[wvmarle]

There are quite some alternatives to Lego; some are even fully compatible with the original Lego bricks.

Yet I have to see one with the same quality. Strong blocks (not floppy), and that all fit perfectly together: not falling apart or being impossible to take apart. That's what Lego manages to do, and what all competing bricks that I have had in my hands fall short of. Most of them just don't have the rigidity for starters: usually because they use a cheaper plastic. Many have issues with fitting - usually too loose, especially after a while. Yet the Lego bricks from my childhood, some 30 years old, are now being played with by my son. Mixed with a good quantity of even older bricks. And they work just as well as they did back then.

Legos are expensive, sure. But until there is a competitor on the market that can produce a cheaper brick with the same overall quality, you just can't say they're overpriced.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[RobertLTux]

actually there is a minimal amount of "extra" price in lego building blocks (note they should not be refered to as "lego" since the correct name is Lego Building Blocks. One of the reasons that the "real" ones are so expensive is that they are made to crazy tolerences the other one being they are just about indestructible. In fact you can take the LegoBB from my collection from when i was a kid and mix it with a new off the shelf kit and know that all the parts will actually work together.

a LegoBay version would most likely fail.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[Qwertie]

No. Just no. This guy stole from Target, not Lego. Why would Lego lower their prices just because there's a shoplifter at Target? Anyway, Lego's patents have expired, and other companies are free to compete.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[flirno]

The blocks from my youth are about good as new with the exception of those exposed to too much sunlight (they grew very brittle and developed cracks) or exposed to too much water (these disentegreated when dried out and just fell apart into a mush otherwise).

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[Gilmoure]

With 3d printing evolving, Lego sees the writing on the wall and are going for the profits while they can. Soon, it'll be a world of .99 - $9.99 Lego downloads, with Apple taking 30%.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[Fwipp]

You've never heard of muddying the waters?

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[orgelspieler]

My thoughts on why Lego is not like RIAA:

When my 5 year old put his stickers from a set all over a box, I emailed Lego, and they sent me a new sticker sheet. I had offered to pay but they said, no charge. Same thing with a couple of parts that he lost. When my five-year-old scratches his Just Bieber CD... well I sure as hell don't try too hard to replace it. But if I did ever want to replace a big label CD, I doubt they would be accommodating.

Lego allows Peeron to keep scans of all the old instruction manuals online. Even though copyright hasn't technically expired, they realize that they're not likely to print old instructions. They're too busy printing new instructions. Compare that to the RIAA that sends C&D letters to lyrics websites, and tries to shut down guitar teachers from posting lessons online.

BrickLink, LugNet, etc. don't get harassed by Lego. As long as they don't use the name Lego in the website, pretty much anything goes. They have an interest in making sure the AFOL stay active. We go on to raise the next generation of Lego fans that way. :-)

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[SuperMonkeyCube]

Since we're already being pedantic here, I might remind you that the actual trademarked term is 'LEGO' in all capitals.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[orgelspieler]

Have you ever tried to do 3D printing? It will be quite some time before a RepRap will be able to produce the tight tolerances required for the soul-inspiring "snap" of Lego bricks. Even half of the no-name brand bricks can't get it right. Some of them can't even control tolerances enough to keep the bricks from falling apart or not be able to snap together in the first place. It costs a lot more money to make a 1.00 mm part than a 1.0 mm part.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[Gilmoure]

In 5 years or 10' it's coming.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[Ruie]

Take a look at this: Thorlabs - pretty decent, they have optics, mechanics and some exotic stuff as well ;)

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I wouldn't say indestructible but as far as plastic toys go they are about as good as they get. I have my Lego sets from 30 years ago and while some didn't age that well, being pre divorce where both of my parents smoked heavily in the same house (how long does the smell of cigarettes stay in things), the are still completely useable. I even have my dad's Legos from when he was a kid which are getting close to being some of the original Legos. Granted a number of the pieces show wear, scratches, scuffs, rounding of corners, discoloration, but they still work perfectly with new ones. When compared to some of the Mega Blocks that I had gotten or others have bought my kids there is a night and day difference. My wife thought I was a Lego snob as I refused to buy Mega Blocks for my kids until she had to deal with some of the Mega Blocks that my oldest son got. I lump Legos in the same catagory as hard wood blocks, the metal Tonka trucks, and good quality electric trains as being great toys.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Others do compete on price but the quality isn't there. When I have looked at bulk Legos on Ebay or Craig's list I am surprised at how many listings state "No Mega Blocks".

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[wvmarle]

That's not Lego. Can't use it to build a house, then a truck, then an airplane, then just some random pile of bricks.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[Hognoxious]

Do you say Meccano[e]s? Thought not.

So why don't you get over that fact that you're just wrong, and most likely fat too.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[Hognoxious]

how long does the smell of cigarettes stay in things), the are still completely useable.

My cousin peed on some of mine and my gran soaked them in either bleach or some phenolic disinfectant. She was inordinately fond of both.

Anyway, it must have dissolved a tiny layer off them because they didn't fit tight any more. Reserved them for use as cargo & filler ... could spot them because it faded the colours slightly.

In short - test on a small number first.

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[Hognoxious]

In 5 years or 10' it's coming.

You appear to be comparing a unit of time to one of length (or possibly angle).

Re:Time for the Lego Bay...

[Gilmoure]

Naw, just stupid iPad typing.

Re:Mental Disorder?

[ATMAvatar]

If he didn't have the mental disorder, he wouldn't be a VP.

A VP scamming for money?

[wjcofkc]

I smell a gambling addiction and the enormous debt that comes with it.

Motive

[robi5]

He's been doing SAP since 1988, it destroys neurons after several years. He might be a millionaire so he can afford a non-traditional thrill-seeking lifestyle. Or he took even larger bribes from the competitors just to put SAP's name in the papers. Either way the guy showed initiative in Finance just as in Logistics :-)

The third option is...

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe it's just nature that pushes people like him to the top. The result may actually be the cause in this case.

Stores need updated registers

[crow]

This sort of scam is far too common. It's time that stores had updated cash registers that would display a picture of the item when the code is scanned so that it if is obviously different, it has a good chance of getting noticed. It would mean adding a display facing the checkout clerk right above the scanner, and it would require having someone take a photo of each item when it first goes on sale--the latter could be provided by the vendor.

Re:Stores need updated registers

[PPH]

The problem is: this guy covers the original barcode with one from a $49 item. So the register has no idea that the more expensive item just got scanned.

For $270 items, I'd think that stores would be going to RFID by now. With a tag inside the packaging that can't be tampered with unless its opened or damaged.

Re:Stores need updated registers

[u38cg]

Have you ever worked a register? You have a small chance that a cashier would notice that the picture was of a wheelbarrow and the item was in fact a small diamond. However, if the picture is of a small diamond and the item a large diamond, forget it. Add in the logistics of keeping the database up to date (easy in theory, hard in practice), and it's just not worth it. Cashiers do catch stuff, but frankly it's a bonus.

Re:Stores need updated registers

[ravenscar]

It would seem that most of this could be avoided simply by using the bar codes that are printed on the box (i.e. are not on stickers). This wouldn't work for certain items (items not in packaging), but it would work for most.

I'm sure there's a reason many stores started adding and using their own bar codes, I'm just not sure what it is.

Re:Stores need updated registers

[DragonWriter]

This sort of scam is far too common. It's time that stores had updated cash registers that would display a picture of the item when the code is scanned so that it if is obviously different, it has a good chance of getting noticed. It would mean adding a display facing the checkout clerk right above the scanner, and it would require having someone take a photo of each item when it first goes on sale--the latter could be provided by the vendor.

And it would require checkout clerks to actually look at each object as it is scanned and making checkout slower (a competitive disadvantage for whichever firm adopted it first), and it would play holy hell with products that change packaging without changing SKU where a particular store might have examples of both new and old packaging on the shelf.

Re:Stores need updated registers

[Qzukk]

Stores used to work like that. Then everything changed.

Piggly Wiggly, America's first true self-service grocery store, was founded in Memphis, Tenn. in 1916 by Clarence Saunders. In grocery stores of that time, shoppers presented their orders to clerks who gathered the goods from the store shelves.

Re:Stores need updated registers

[crow]

That brings up a good point. The store should be able to do data analysis to determine not only which products are missing, but which products were over-sold. With that information, they can look for the sales history of the over-sold items to look for any interesting patterns, possibly building up suspicion against a given credit card, allowing them to flag that card with a "call manager" alert.

Re:Stores need updated registers

[Spacejock]

I avoid looking at the screens in my local department store because, apart from showing the scanned purchases, they also play ads on a loop. Whoever programmed the things need a re-education, because when I, a 44-year-old-male, am buying 4 litres of motor oil and two bags of fertiliser, I really don't need to watch ads for the latest slimming magazine, hair colours and super-multi-vita-shampoo with vitamin X. Okay, maybe the shampoo.

But, to get back to my point ... I'm 90% certain the screens show pics of each product as it's scanned. Unfortunately an organic cucumber looks pretty much like a regular one grown in Eau du Periodic Table, so I guess even product photos have their limitations.

Re:Typical

[x0]

There's a set of rules for the great unwashed, and another for the 1%.

The marvellous book Freakonomics describes how rich people steal, lie and cheat more often, because their sense of entitlement gets there in the first place.

But I'm not sure I'm allowed to post this. It's election year, therefore we're not allowed to say anything that might offend conservatives, Republicans or rich people.

I swear, this 1% shit is getting old. A story gets posted to /. about on guy stealing from Target, and suddenly this classist bullshit gets posted.

Why can't it just be that this guy is an idiot with mental problems? Or just an idiot with kleptomania?

m

Re:Mental Disorder?

[tunapez]

Sad but true. It's been posited by clients, family and friends I have a disorder because I do not charge enough for services rendered. I make enough, I can afford shelter, nutrition, some new tech toys/tools and maintain a small savings for emergencies. I also afford time to track the local wildlife, visit my family around the country, keep my 11yo truck running(maintaining it myself) and, lately, take a couple months off to help care for an ill family member. They say I'm weird. I say too bad we can't all be weird.

Except...

[AliasMarlowe]

they'll simply weigh your cart and charge you a flat rate per pound

Kind of tricky if you've only bought some helium-filled balloons... Does the store owe you a few pennies?

Re:Except...

[justaguylikeme]

Negative cost for helium-filled balloons? Hey Tippi Turtle! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQfcbXUpIns

Nothing to do with money

[Wuahn]

Kevin Smith has a podcast "SModcast" called Jay & Silent Bob Get Old and in the very first episode he talks about how they were driving around to stores like Walmart and Target trying to find some particularly rare Star Wars toys that they would then resell through a comic book store or something (I don't remember the specifics but it was something they did RECENTLY). There was no theft involved but it was trivial amounts of cash for a guy who's earned million dollar paychecks for his films. It seemed to be all about the thrill of the chase and nothing about the money. This guy obviously has a serious addiction which is independent of his financial status or his career. The story is just quaint because so many of us can identify with Legos (and how expensive they are) and at the same time it's some kind of big shot executive that gotten busted for petty theft.

No longer a joke

[rickb928]

We sometimes kid around here, and one of our favorite bits of dark humor is that SAP is 'Satan's preferred method of interaction with our world".

Little did we know. It's not enough to gouge their customers, or to steal from them, but they have to diversify and thieve from the general public DIRECTLY, not merely via their surrogates, their blighted customers.

All this for $30,000. This bonehead now takes Martha Stewart's place as 'dumbest rich person in the U.S.A'.

Wonder how he will look in orange.

A better story

[joelwhitehouse]

When I lived in Dallas in the early 2000s, there was a free paper -- I don't remember the name of it -- but you'd see available from a newspaper dispenser outside of restaurants like Denny's right next to the Dallas Morning News. One front page story was about a young con artist that seemed to invent these kinds of scams -- anything to make money. As a high school student, he pulled off the lego barcode-style theft, but before his reputation at Target soured, he sold the merchandise out of his car to fellow students. For a while he sold drugs, but was methodical about it -- dealing pot got you money, but dealing crack got you killed. In college, another of his schemes was to sell fake IDs. He started by pasting new photos onto old IDs, but eventually made enough money to upgrade to a full laminate printer and a machine capable of duplicating the copy-protection on a Texas Driver's license. He kept his head down, letting others do the sales work for him, and made a lot of money. The story chronicled several other instances of this guys criminal genius, and they were all fascinating. Eventually, knowing that the authorities were onto him, he fled the country to some Island to enjoy his money and youth. At least that was the story.

Does anyone else know who I'm talking about?

Re:A better story

[PPH]

If the island he fled to was Manhattan, I'd guess he's working for Goldman Sachs by now.

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

It is always "Lego" not "Legos".

Re:Typical

[Calos]

Why is it that you use the same rhetoric that will piss off many of those who would disagree with you (and even some who do), why do you try to insult everyone that you feel would disagree with you? Surely you can't think that's going to help you change their minds. And if not to change their minds, why are you posting?

Rules of Aquisition

[kryliss]

#14. Anything stolen is pure profit.

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

He copied someone else's CV over the real CV and scanned it in.

Probably NOT an illness or thrill-seeking

[KingSkippus]

I'm leaning towards believing that this wasn't just a mental illness or thrill-seeking. The reason why is because he was selling the stuff on Ebay for a significant profit.

Had it just been thrill-seeking or an illness, the money wouldn't matter, and most people for whom this is a motive don't want to be caught selling "hot" merchandise. (I know, a bit ironic that they're willing to risk stealing it to begin with, but such is the nature of these things.) He likely would have just given the stuff away to friends, relatives, or even charity.

The fact that he was selling it for such a profit pretty much says to me that it was purely about money. I don't know (and I don't care) how much the guy makes, apparently he wanted more.

Re:Probably NOT an illness or thrill-seeking

[dcw3]

Anyone at the level of a multinational VP could easily make more money than this in the time that he spent obtaining the merchandise, and reselling it. If my math isn't off, this guy had to purchase 130+ units to make $30k. I guarantee you that had he spent that time (and the time reselling them) at his job, he would have increased his bonus/incentive pay by more than that.

Up his nose?

[durdur]

My first thought was that he had a yen for things that even a VP salary doesn't support (like the gambling habit of a certain former Fry's executive). Or a serious coke habit, maybe. But that doesn't seem to be the case here, at least not according to the reporting so far.

This wasn't kleptomania

[KingSkippus]

The guy was making a lot of money off of his theft. Kleptomaniacs typically don't sell stuff on Ebay at high mark-up, they keep, give away, or even donate the stuff the take. Precisely because profit isn't the motive of kleptomaniacs, I believe this guy was just doing it for the cash. Sad, given his apparently position and likely social stature, but he needs to go to jail, not a mental hospital.

Re:This wasn't kleptomania

[PeanutButterBreath]

Precisely because profit isn't the motive of kleptomaniacs, I believe this guy was just doing it for the cash.

Or just the smug satisfaction in his own cleverness and entrepreneurial spirit.

How Thick can you get?

[djl4570]

He goes from SAP VP to convicted felon. Even if he gets a suspended sentence he is still a convicted felon. I doubt there is an SAP customer or any other IT shop in the country that would hire him with a felony conviction in his background check.

Re:How Thick can you get?

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

He could still run his own business. Doesn't have to worry about being hired then. And people don't usually boycott businesses for that, and even if they do, enough people won't.

Kevin Mitnick owns a computer security company, and he was more than just a hacker, he committed fraud.

Then again, this guy is no Kevin Mitnick.

let the falcons pass

[quipalicious]

he obviously forgot his hand wave.

Re:I don't get it

[u38cg]

Mental illness. Pure and simple. I don't understand why people are quite so keen to ascribe rationality to this.

SAP VP, It figures

[PPH]

The guy is a moron (or the summary is wrong). Making $30,000 by selling 2000 items is $15 each. With a cost of goods of zero, even if he re-sells at a heavily discounted price, only making $15 each on expensive goods (I've seen Lego prices) doesn't demonstrate great business sense.

I know a few people that make a living selling on eBay (legitimately) and they do better than this. I'm beginning to wonder about the caliber of management at SAP.

Re:SAP VP, It figures

[kramerd]

COGS is not 0. It's $49, plus shipping to customer, plus ebay listing fees, plus ebay selling fees, plus insurance, plus phototagging and insuring each item OR returns for wrong product (which ebay says seller is SOL if they send the correct product and get a different product returned and don't take time to prove what the items are), plus regular returns for actual product defects. Keep in mind that as a seller you also have to compete with the store, and in internet times, other sellers, so you aren't selling for a small discount (say...249 instead of 279) but rather a much larger one (probably in the 100-150 range). The item in question, that rings up for 279 at the store, is going for 139 shipped from amazon right now, so if he is selling for 119, I could easily see the maximum margin in the 15-20 dollar range per item.

This isn't rocket science. The guy is a huge moron.

Not always, though

[Kupfernigk]

I'm going to stand up for the "drones" a bit. To a certain extent pay peanuts get monkeys. But in fact there are a lot of people out there who are not hugely bright or who even have "learning difficulties", but who can do boring jobs for extended periods and are pretty accurate and reliable. I worked for a pharmaceutical manufacturer for a bit while at U, and they looked for people like this and gave them jobs in packing and QA. The difference is that instead of treating them like Walmart they worked hard to keep them motivated, told them that their work was valuable and that all the work of the chemists and the engineers was wasted if the wrong product got out of the door, and made sure that students like me understood this, and that we were easily replaceable while they weren't. They are "good finds" who won't move on. They are not stupid, they just have limitations that are different from those of, say, social ineptness. A lot of that is automated nowadays, but there are still a few, mostly smaller places without the Walmart/Bain/you name it view of replaceable monkeys, and they are often successful because they don't get the level of staff theft and they appeal to older people who value helpful and friendly staff.

Re:Mental Disorder?

[FilmedInNoir]

I don't see him as a kleptomaniac. I call bull on that. If he was hoarding the Lego and if there was no rhyme or reason to what he stole then yes. But he didn't do that. He stole a particular thing and then sold it. Those are the actions of a calculating mind. He's more likely a case study of what emerged out of modern psychology a few years ago that the biggest players in business, CEO, etc are sociopaths.

Target Analytics

[Anonymous Coward]

Another piece of this article overlooked is the "caught by Target security". Target has some of the most comprehensive and detailed customer data of any retailer. If you're on their coupon mailing list, the mailer you get from them is customized to you; they have a profile on you that's extremely accurate and their mailers have 2-3 floating pages, where the one printed to go to your address will have coupons based on the things someone in your profile would buy, and it's highly segmented and targeted to a level that's almost creepy; it can apparently predict if a woman is pregnant and when you're due, and can start sending you targeted ads: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

Last month my car got broken into and my girlfriend's purse stolen; we were at an event and didn't get back to my car for about 5 hours after it happened. The perps took all her credit cards and started running them up, howeverher main one was canceled because they bought several items at Target which were outside of her normal profile (lots of junk food apparently, she's a very healthy eater), so they called AMEX and alerted them to fraud within 10 minutes of the fraudulent purchases, and AMEX shut her card down; we know because it got rejected at the next store they went to. They also pulled up the security tapes and were able to give video from their security cameras to the police of the guys checking out at the register. While we recovered and got all charges canceled, that was uncanny what Target was able to do to stop this crime in a matter of minutes.

Re:Target Analytics

[Hognoxious]

Lotion schmotion, supplements schlupplements.

  She'd just stopped buying jam-rags.

self-checkout actually harder

[Chirs]

The self-checkout ones that are any good match the barcode against the expected weight of the item and complain loudly if it's off by any significant amount.

I blame Obama for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly this corporate VP is being taxed too heavily by the Obama regime, and has had to resort to petty crime to make ends meet. Don't Obama and his socialist fellow travelers understand that the wealthy should not be taxed so that they can create the jobs that us common people need? Shame on you, Obama, you should be the one being arrested, not this financially struggling corporate executive!

Errr... you do realise ....

[Viol8]

... that those tribesmen 2000 years ago would have been jewish , right? So where does the christian bashing come into it?

"If you want to know why readership has declined significantly, here is an example."

Yeah right, because most of /. 's readership are churchgoing evangelists.

Not.

Get over yourself.

Re:Errr... you do realise ....

[Brian_Ellenberger]

... that those tribesmen 2000 years ago would have been jewish , right? So where does the christian bashing come into it?

"If you want to know why readership has declined significantly, here is an example."

Yeah right, because most of /. 's readership are churchgoing evangelists.

Not.

Get over yourself.

Well not anymore. Actually, I think the only people left are sanctimoniousness jerks who live in an echo chamber.

Re:Errr... you do realise ....

[St.Creed]

Actually, I think the only people left are sanctimoniousness jerks who live in an echo chamber.

This one's just too easy :)

What irony?

[Cajun Hell]

The irony of someone stealing a bible is not lost on me, either.

The irony is lost on me.

If I were designing a religion, I would consider it successful to have people be willing to steal (which comes with risk of punishment), or otherwise make sacrifices out of desire for my literature. That should be a goal of all good religions. If you look at it that way, how could people stealing it even be slightly ironic? That's part of the end state that a religion should work for: people out of their mind with devotion that they will do anything.

You lose a little on initial sales, but bibles should be thought of as ads. (Yes, I realize their actual uses are more complex.) That isn't to say you wouldn't prefer people pay for them, but geez, don't sweat it if people steal. It's ok for them to be loss-leaders. It's after you get people, that you make real money, either directly (e.g. through tithes or courses) or indirectly (e.g. tell followers which politicians to vote for, start holy wars after you buy into weapon contracts, whatever).

Re:What irony?

[tlhIngan]

The irony of someone stealing a bible is not lost on me, either.

The irony is lost on me.

The irony is because the person doing the stealing is supposedly religious (otherwise why would you bother stealing a Bible?), most likely a religious Christian. And one of the 10 commandments is "thou shalt not steal". Hence the irony - a religious person violating a tenet of their religion to acquire a religous item.

Of course, there is no real need to steal Bibles, for every community with a Church, there will be someone willing to give you one.

Of course, there are businesses disguised as religions (e.g., Scientology) who are in the business of selling belief for money. You can't acquire any Scientology materials "for free" and they will prosecute you for copyright infrtingement and other stuff if you do. But hey, it's a business after all - the worship of profit (for the founders).

Re:What irony?

[Cajun Hell]

The irony is because the person doing the stealing is supposedly religious (otherwise why would you bother stealing a Bible?)

Maybe they want to become religious, by finally learning the great truth. (Wouldn't you steal a Necronomicon? I would.) Imagine learning all of Moses' and Jesus' spells, going around parting seas to lay transoceanic cables cheaper, resurrecting to collect from dead deadbeats, summoning The Beast at just the right moment during a Maiden concert. I am so getting one of those bibles some day, even if I have to steal it.

Re:Typical

[bmo]

why are you posting?

Because he's angry. Justifiably.

Here we have someone who, without a question, makes a decent buck, yet decides that's still not enough and decides to go rip off a store, repeatedly, because rules don't apply to him.

In this thread, the amount of giving this guy in the article excuses ("oh, he probably doesn't make *that* much," and "kleptomania is a mental disorder" (this isn't kleptomania)) is just odious. If it was someone else (poorer), this wouldn't even be a story and nobody would be making excuses for him. Come on, whiskey tango foxtrot, over?

Class warfare is not some guy pointing out the foibles of our "esteemed" ruling class.

Class warfare is the "ruling class" assholes like this guy in the article desiring to do whatever the fuck he wants to anyone and this is just *one* example of the things he's done. You don't go 'round with a scheme such as this without doing similar things in your life, even if metaphorically. He has clearly thought this scheme through, successfully planned it, and got away with it for quite a while. And you *know* Target is not the only store he's done this to. If you can do it at one place, you can do it elsewhere.

It's obvious this guy is clearly one of the "one percenters" - a thug in a thousand-dollar suit - psychopath or sociopath, depending on which version of the word you want (they are interchangeable, and have been substituted for each other in the DSM over the years). And he is just one of many. The people willing to give these sociopaths excuses are even more numerous, especially people who *aren't* part of the 1%, which I don't understand, honestly. It's like the gazelles cheering on the lions when one of their herd gets eaten. The only difference between him and the Wall-Streeters who have been stealing for the past decade is that he is in the wrong business to steal real amounts of money, like John Corzine and MF Global, for example.

He pre-emptively mentioned that people will tell him to sit down and shut up. Like you. If people like you make people like him sit down and shut up, the rage will simply bottle up and be used ... elsewhere. Eventually. And you won't like it.

It honestly feels like I'm in a pub in Paris in the first half of 1789 watching people argue over mouldy bread and bad wine.

--
BMO

What else has he been doing?

[Animats]

This is a fairly common scam. Using it to steal Lego bricks puts you in the "American's Dumbest Criminals" category. How did this clown get to be a VP of SAP?

Re:I don't get it

[DragonWriter]

Doesn't the VP of a company as huge as SAP make enough shitloads of cash without robbing a toy store? $30k, isn't that like two months' salary or something?

Sometimes, people steal who have no rational financial reason to do so. Certainly, this has been seen with celebrities who have been busted for shoplifting, and perhaps more similar to the SAP VP there was Claude Allen, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy under President Bush and head of the President's Domestic Policy Council (and who Bush had previously unsuccessfully attempted to appoint to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals) who resigned from the White House after being caught -- but before beign charged with felony -- in a series of fraudulent returns, also at Target (totalling about $5,000 over several months, less than half a month's pay at his $160,000 White House salary.)

See corporate execs need their bonuses

[JTsyo]

With all the public outcry against corporate pays, nobody considers the little guys. The CEOs are ok without their bonus but how about the VPs? huh what will they do? I think we'll see more of this as execs' pays drop.

Smart != Dishonest

[luis_a_espinal]

Cash register workers are smarter and more observant than you may think.

Probably. But if they actually are smart and observant, they would observe that the smart thing to do when they are offered minimal pay is to provide minimal effort.

That's not smart. That's dishonest. Nobody forces no one to take a minimal pay job. You take a job, and you accept the pay, you do the job (I talked from experience since I've flipped burgers for minimum wage.) What the hell is wrong with you people that you think your duty to do your job is a function of the hourly wage you so willingly accept?

Re:Smart != Dishonest

[luis_a_espinal]

There's absolutely nothing dishonest about it. If you offer a minimal pay job, you might be happy to find a maximal work employee, but you sure as heck shouldn't *expect* it. If you want to attract a better class of employee, offer a better pay check.

Do you know what an employer is telling you when he pays minimum wage? He's saying I think your job is so worthless that I'd pay you *less*, except that *IT'S AGAINST THE LAW*.

Someone working 3 full-time minimum wage jobs is below the poverty line.

You and I certainly operate with different moral compasses then. I've never hired anyone for minimum wage, but I certainly have had worked for minimum wage. It never crossed my mind to do the minimum required work just because I was getting paid the minimum wage, something to do with the way I was raised. That has served me well as I've climbed up the ladder.

It is not about doing what people (a minimum-wage paying employer for instance) expects of you, but what you expect of yourself as an ethical worker. There is a difference, the nuance is missed to most apparently. You either get it or you don't. Only you know.

Re:Smart != Dishonest

[ultranova]

That's not smart. That's dishonest.

In what way is it dishonest? Where is the deception? Or did you perhaps confuse not meeting your unrealistic expectations with lying?

Nobody forces no one to take a minimal pay job.

Nobody forces no one to offer minimum wage. But economic circumstances - offshoring of real jobs and the plague-like spread of McDonald's, Wal-Mart and their ilk - do indeed force plenty of people to take minimum wage jobs.

You take a job, and you accept the pay, you do the job (I talked from experience since I've flipped burgers for minimum wage.)

You offer minimum wage, you get what you pay for. And your job history of burger flipping is irrelevant to the discussion, unless you are suggesting that the world owes you a debt for your presumably heroic job performance there, and unrelated third parties should thus do more than you pay them for.

What the hell is wrong with you people that you think your duty to do your job is a function of the hourly wage you so willingly accept?

What the hell is wrong with you people that you think you can pay minimum price and get top quality? Are you really so full of yourself that you think a peon who doesn't give his everything for a few crumbs off your table is being "dishonest"? Or are you yet another libertarian defending the right of the powerful to abuse the weak in the name of freedom?

Re:"Software Skills"

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Yeah, he knew how to FTP some open source barcode software. LOL.

True but they don't really enforce it.

[aepervius]

By the way by 2040 the perpetual copyright of the crown on the KJV will expire. So not so perpetual.

Re:Why was a VP doing this?

[nullchar]

I too was looking for the discussion as to why a high-earning VP performed this scam.

It seems like a lot of time was spent to buy all these items at retail stores, document everything on ebay, and often travel to a shipping center to fulfill the ebay orders in addition to attempting to keep a high seller rating. Even as a hobby, this seems like a lot of time spent for a major company executive.

Re:Typical

[Calos]

He pre-emptively mentioned that people will tell him to sit down and shut up. Like you. If people like you make people like him sit down and shut up, the rage will simply bottle up and be used ... elsewhere. Eventually. And you won't like it.

The hell?

All I did was to point out that the person's manner in posting will be entirely ineffective and do nothing to help the view they are promoting (and maybe even harm it). I didn't tell them to sit down or shut up or anything of the sort. I didn't pass any judgement on them or their view. Simply pointing out that their time and purpose would be better served if they were to change their tactics.

But you're doing a fabulous job of continuing the same tactics yourself... not to mention polluting the narrative with your personal biases and assumptions which (as yet) have no basis in fact, and cherry-picking and pulling out of context things others have said.

You could have posted civilly and stuck to facts, and separated your speculation and biases from the facts. You didn't. It renders you unpersuasive and makes you look like a loon. And yet somehow, that's justified because you're "angry," and somehow, that's going to make you a victim and it's going to be my fault for telling you to "sit down" and "shut up," despite having said nothing of the sort.

Sorry, but I find your credibility and integrity lacking. Now, by all means, continue using me as a scapegoat and lightening rod for your vitriol. I'll read another reply, but by and large you've lost my audience, and I imagine others' as well.

How is this burglary?

[ChrisMaple]

TFA says "stealing", the summary says "burglary". What he actually engaged in is fraud.

Re:Typical

[bmo]

All I did was to point out that the person's manner in posting will be entirely ineffective and do nothing to help the view they are promoting (and maybe even harm it). I didn't tell them to sit down or shut up or anything of the sort. I didn't pass any judgement on them or their view. Simply pointing out that their time and purpose would be better served if they were to change their tactics.

But what tactics would those be? Being nice? Being nice hasn't been working and people are pissed off. He wasn't out of line. You're "correcting" of him was condescending and belittling. Not literally telling him to "sit down and shut up" but enough so to be taken that way.

>my integrity

Oh fuck off.

--
BMO

E&OE

[Hognoxious]

No. You expect wrong. Cashiers are expected to scan and charge, not to do verification and validation.

I'd expect them to have a modicul of common sense. That's a prerequisite for most jobs, isn't it?

Moreover, at least in Florida and other states IIRC (from the time I used to work in Home Depot), the law typically mandates that you, the seller, must charge what is in the label.

The price label will be on the shelf, and it will have the correct original price on it.

The scammer has replaced the barcode on the product to maker it appear as a different product.

Why you think an intentionally deceptive act by one party does, or should, place any obligation on another is frankly beyond me. I clearly don't have a first-class legal mind like you.

W.A.N.T.

[Hognoxious]

You take a job, and you accept the pay

Do you call and request 'Lay lady lay"? Do you play Stanley Jordan, The Dead & Little Feat? Do you even play the band from the college down the street?

Re:Typical

[Calos]

But what tactics would those be? Being nice? Being nice hasn't been working and people are pissed off.

Being informative? Being insightful? Asking questions, promoting discussion? Just about anything that isn't demonizing the people s/he most needs to listen? When presented with a post like that, do you think someone who disagrees, is on the fence, or is disengaged from the topic will think gee, that person is so passionate that they're angrily posting on message boards, I think I'll support them? Or are they more likely to jump to something on the spectrum between 'not caring because the person is repeating the same boring rhetoric that starts flame wars' to being pissed off at the poster and the post? There's a reason s/he was modded Flamebait.

He wasn't out of line.

Never said s/he was. I said s/he was being ineffective. Was that not clear?

You're "correcting" of him was condescending and belittling.

Well, I didn't intend it that way. Reading over it again, I'm not really sure why you're interpreting it that way. Nor why you want to harp on it so much. What do you find condescending about it?

I posted what I meant, plainly and with no hidden meaning. If, for some reason my phrasing made it seem more than what it is, then my apologies to benjfowler.

Not literally telling him to "sit down and shut up" but enough so to be taken that way.

If you say so. I think you're being hypersensitive. And I find it not just a little ironic that you post in the manner you do while decrying others as being condescending or belittling.

Oh, but I forgot - you're justified by being angry.

What are you arguing for, anyway, bmo? To point out that you think I was out of line? You've made that clear, though lacking in the why. To get me to apologize? I will certainly apologize to the person to whom my comment was addressed, if they feel slighted. But it seems more like you want me to recant my opinion, and any notion that this sort of talk is anything less than appropriate or warranted. Sorry, that I will not grant.

>my integrity

Oh fuck off.

Oh, aren't you just precious.

But, enough. Continuing this "discussion" with you is not proving to be worth my time. You clearly have an ax to grind, and while I'm not sure what that has to do with me, you won't be deterred and you won't allow yourself to be questioned, least of all by yourself.

Re:I don't get it

[mikechant]

Mental illness. Pure and simple.
Doesn't have to be mental illness as such. Could be a personality disorder, which is just basically saying the he's not ill in any treatable way, rather just 'born bad'.

Same way as you don't classify people born deaf as 'physically ill', someone with a psychopathic type personality (no empathy etc.) isn't usually considered 'mentally ill'.

This is not to say that he should be let off because it's 'not his fault'. It's perfectly possible for many people to control their personality disorder intellectually (e.g. I want to do X, I know it won't make me feel guilty, but I don't because intellectually I know X is a bad thing for society or whatever).

Does SAP pay very low wage to it's VP?

[ibic00]

I don't understand why this VP is doing this, just don't understand.