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Amazing story from New York Magazine on a strange permutation in our drug culture’s coin of the realm.
The call that came in from a local Safeway one day in March 2011 was unlike any the Organized Retail Crime Unit of the Prince George’s County Police Department had fielded before. The grocery store, located in suburban Bowie, Maryland, had been robbed repeatedly. But in every incident the only products taken were bottles—many, many bottles—of the liquid laundry detergent Tide. “They were losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month, with people just taking it off the shelves,” recalls Sergeant Aubrey Thompson, who heads the team. When Thompson and his officers arrived to investigate, they stumbled onto another apparent Tide theft in progress and busted two men who’d piled 100 or so of the bright-orange jugs into their Honda. The next day, Thompson returned to the store’s parking lot to tape a television interview about the crimes. A different robber took advantage of the distraction to make off with twenty more bottles.
Later, Thompson reviewed weeks’ worth of the Safeway’s security footage. He found that more than two dozen thieves, working in crews, were regularly raiding the store’s household-products aisle, sometimes returning more than once the same day and avoiding detection by timing their heists to follow clerks’ shift changes. Owners and managers of other area stores, having seen Thompson on the news, reached out to him to report their own vanishing Tide bottles. Since then, the oddly brand-loyal crime wave has gone national, striking bodegas, supermarkets, and big-box discounters from Austin to West St. Paul, Minnesota. In New York, employees at the Penn Station Duane Reade nabbed a man trying to abscond with Tide bottles he’d stuffed into a suitcase. In OrangeCounty, an attempted Tide theft led to a high-speed chase that included the thief crashing his SUV into an ambulance. Last year, for the first time, detergent made the National Retail Federation’s list of most-targeted items. Says Joseph LaRocca, founder of the trade group RetailPartners, who helped compile the report: “Tide was specifically called out.”
As the cases piled up after his team’s first Tide-theft bust, Thompson sought an answer to the riddle at the center of the crimes: What did thieves want with so much laundry soap? To find out, he and his unit pored over security recordings to identify prolific perpetrators, whom officers then tracked down and detained for questioning. “We never promised to go easy on them, but they were willing to talk about it,” Thompson says. “I guess they were bragging.” It turned out the detergent wasn’t being used as an ingredient in some new recipe for getting high, but instead to buy drugs themselves. Tide bottles have become ad hoc street currency, with a 150-ounce bottle going for either $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine. On certain corners, the detergent has earned a new nickname: “Liquid gold.” The Tide people would never sanction that tag line, of course. But this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product.
Shoppers have surprisingly strong feelings about laundry detergent. In a 2009 survey, …
… The criminalcost-benefit analysis of a bottle of Tide is more straightforward. Most of the people stealing the detergent, Sergeant Thompson points out, are the same criminals who used to break into houses or mug pedestrians—male addicts whose need to feed their habits can foster a kind of innovative streak. “They are smart. They are creative. They want high reward and low risk,” he says. Theft convictions can come with a maximum fifteen-year prison sentence, but the penalty for shoplifting is often just a small fine, with no jail time. For the most active thieves, says Thompson, stolen Tide has in some ways become more lucrative than the drugs it’s traded for. “It’s the new dope,” he says. “You can get richer and have less chance of doing jail time.”
For stores, stopping Tide shoplifting presents unique challenges. Most frequently stolen goods—GPS devices, smartphones, and other consumer electronics—are pricey, light, and easily concealed. They’re also not routine purchases, which means they can be locked up until buyers ask for them. Bulk goods like detergent are harder to run off with, but they’re also bought by dozens of customers daily—lock those products up, and a store manager adds more time to his customers’ errand runs, potentially sending them to shop elsewhere. “Any time you secure something, it impacts the sale of that item at some level,” says Jerry Biggs, the director of Walgreens’ Organized Retail Crime Division. …
… Despite its popularity, Tide is not a big moneymaker for stores. P&G’s proprietary surfactants and enzymes are relatively expensive to produce, notes Bill Schmitz, a Deutsche Bank analyst, so Tide’s wholesale cost is steep. Only so much of that can be passed on to customers. “It’s so tight,” says Schmitz of the profit margin. In general, a retailer clears just a few percentage points on a Tide purchase. A store that charges $19.99 for a 150-ounce bottle might claim $2 in profit. But if it buys stolen bottles for $5, that jumps to $15. …
The Economist finds a study showing the dual use of the human hand.
THE appendage at the end of a human being’s arm is a strange organ. It is the only one that has different names, depending on what it is being used for. Employ it to hold something, and it is called a hand. Employ it to hit someone, and it is called a fist. That second use, though, is almost unknown in other primates.
Most primate hands are long of palm and finger, short of thumb, and suited for climbing. Human hands have short palms, short fingers and long thumbs, which are not. These proportions do, though, make it possible to grip things in two ways that other apes’ hands cannot manage well. One is by using what is known as a precision grip, in which an object is held between the pads of the finger tips (especially the first and second fingers) and the pad of the thumb. The other is by means of a power grip, in which all the fingers and the thumb are wrapped around what is being grasped. These two grips are crucial to Homo sapiens’s characteristic tool-crafting skills, and it has thus long been thought that the widespread use of tools by humanity’s ancestors was the driving force behind the modern hand’s proportions.
No doubt that was important. But a study just published in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Michael Morgan and David Carrier of the University of Utah has shown that the exact geometry of the hand is probably the result of its destructive rather than its constructive power. …
… it has long been the case that the species is divided between those who prosper by making things with their hands, and those who rely on their fists, or the threat of them, to take what the makers have made. And that is the story of why some people became democrats; so they, using the government’s fist, can steal, from those who work and create. – Pickerhead
Great post from Walter Russell Mead on ethanol pushing the world’s poor back to starvation levels.
Decades of activism haven’t taught greens much about policy. The latest horror out of the sequential failure machine known as the green movement is the biofuels disaster now afflicting the Guatemalan poor. The New York Times reports:
Recent laws in the United States and Europe that mandate the increasing use of biofuel in cars have had far-flung ripple effects, economists say, as land once devoted to growing food for humans is now sometimes more profitably used for churning out vehicle fuel.
In a globalized world, the expansion of the biofuels industry has contributed to spikes in food prices and a shortage of land for food-based agriculture in poor corners of Asia, Africa and Latin America because the raw material is grown wherever it is cheapest.
Now that the United States is using 40 percent of its [corn] crop to make biofuel, it is not surprising that tortilla prices have doubled in Guatemala, which imports nearly half of its corn…Roughly 50 percent of the nation’s children are chronically malnourished, the fourth-highest rate in the world, according to the United Nations.
To make things worse: evidence suggests that the corn ethanol program, for the sake of which callous greens condemned the world’s poor to higher food prices, is a failure even on environmental terms and fails to reduce greenhouse gasses.
We’re betting that this news won’t dent greens’ self-confidence. They will still insist that unless they are put in charge of the entire world economy we face disaster. The sad truth is that the more power they get, the more damage they do.
The world needs a smart green movement. Barring that, a green movement that bothered to think through consequences and make a serious cost benefit analysis on its proposals would be an immense improvement over the shambles we have now.
And congrats to NYT reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal. In the past we’ve criticized some of her work as failing to look at or acknowledge green follies. In reporting this piece, she and the Grey Lady are getting it right.