mattlondon 3 days ago

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

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

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

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  • hakfoo 11 hours ago

    This could be a by-product of bad merchandising too.

    The local Home Depot sells some types of screws only in pre-packed bags.

    The Ace Hardware a block over (a franchise of independently owned shops) sells the same screws from cabinets with several hundred types of loose parts, and you can select as many as you need and bag yourself. You can even put multiple types and prices of items in one bag

    So if you need one, HD makes you buy four. If you need sixteen, HD makes you buy a bunch of extra plastic waste. That might create an unexpected nudge towards just ripping the bag and pocketing the rest.

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kube-system 3 days ago

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

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

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codingdave 3 days ago

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

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