Shoplifter of the Week: Copper edition

[Harry K]

Thanks for that reminder. I had forgotten about that little glitch :).

And unfortunately, that "ride" can get awfully expensive and rarely can one recover it.

Harry K

[Harry K]

I am asking for a quote of law that specifically says a store may not search a bag leaving the store. Those amendmants do apply but there are many, many court rulings that bear on this subject.

Harry K

[Harry K]

What a wild leap of logic. Think much before you post? The subject is searching a store bag that leaving a store.

Harry K

[Country]

I was paid $2.10 a pound for the copper I sold. There is definitely a profit in it if you can get someone to pay you a couple of dollars or more a pound for pennies.

-C-

[The Daring Dufas]

I've come across a few WWII zinc pennies in my change but not for many years now.

TDD

[The Daring Dufas]

My roommate kept setting of anti-theft alarms whenever he entered a store. When we were on a service call for a clothing store one day were he'd been setting off the alarm every time he went to the van for tools or parts, I finally got him to take his new sneakers off and run them over the store's demagnetizer, it beeped on one shoe. Problem solves, he had bought the shoes at Kmart and they hadn't killed the magnetic tag.

TDD

[clare]

OLD pennies were solid copper.

[Jim Yanik]

Smitty Two wrote in news:prestwhich- [e-mail]:

$17 for $7.30 worth of pennies? well,that's Ebay overbidding for ya....

to get 15.2 oz of copper? today's price is about $3.75/lb.for pure copper,and recyclers will give lower prices on copper alloys.

[Nancy Young]

A few years ago I tried to buy a camera at Circuit City. Waited in vain with a bunch of other people at the camera counter. Forget it, I could have waited an hour and I wouldn't have gotten anyone to help me ... not as if I could just pick up a camera and checked out, everything was under lock and key.

I bought a couple other items, a music cd, maybe a video game, and as I'm leaving, some guy stops me to look in my bag. The one I got

3 steps away when I paid for my stuff. Naively I thought he might say Find everything you were looking for? Duh. Considering the crowd around the cameras, the dummies should have been paying the guy to hand them to people.

nancy

[hallerb]

take note circuit city wwent out of business........ although the name lives on mostly as a on line store

[Harry K]

x.com:

e:

And did not need to be melted down to recover it. We are talking about the alloy/copper plated type.

Harry k

[clare]

innews: [e-mail]:

The alloy/plated type are not worth melting down as separating the elements from an alloy is not a trivial exercise

[Don Klipstein]

That was $17 for 5 pounds, or $3.40 per pound, of 95% copper.

[Country]

Large family? I've got a grand Nephew, or is that great nephew, anyway, he's my niece's son and he is about to turn 20 years old and has never had a real job. Now he's got his 17 year old girlfriend pregnant.

By the time I was his age I had already been working a job that withheld taxes for almost five years. And I was in an area that was worse off economically than Michigan is now. But the best he can do is take a couple of college classes and stop by his grandma's place once in a while and help her for a couple of hours for $20.

He is a nice young man but he is naive and hardly ready for parenthood because his parents have raised him in the culture of food stamps, ill used student loans, public assistance and parental dependence.

Rant over.

-C-

[The Daring Dufas]

When I started college, I was working night shift in a defense plant that produced 20mm practice and tracer rounds for the USAF during The Vietnam War. I've never had any kind of public assistance even when I could have used it. The last time I drew unemployment was more than 30 years ago. I have no problem finding work, I have trouble getting out of bed and walking. For that reason I have a law firm helping me to reluctantly get disability payments. I'd rather work but chronic pain keeps me from doing so every day. I could have gotten on disability years ago but resisted it until now when I'm tired of fighting the pain to work.

TDD

[Robert Green]

One of my life's guiding principles is that if you have to sue someone to get something you legally deserved in the first place, then you've lost. The only people who really "make out" in lawsuits are the lawyers.

The goal in life is to avoid being sued. It's not always possible, but people can do a lot to avoid it. In the hypothetical you describe, the worst case scenario (and it's more common that anyone would ever believe) is that the rent-a-cop that stops you has an illegal gun and injures or kills you.

There have been a number of such cases in this area I recall. A teenager shot in the back riding away on bike and a presumed (but really not) shoplifter shot by Monkey Wards security. These incidents happened a long time ago - over twenty years, but really changed the way guards were hired and trained. Some of the low wage, low IQ guys that some (but not all) outfits still hire think they are supercops and shoplifters are supercriminals and behave like they've just cornered John Dillinger when they see someone trying to steal something.

Mark Chapman, the guy that shot John Lennon, was a former security guard:

That information alone makes me avoid needless confrontation with any kind of guard, even the door guards. Who knows if today's the day his latent schizophrenia "blossoms?" Sometimes it's hard when they're being pricks but thievery is so bad here that HD hires off-duty, in-uniform, fully armed county police officers as their door security and I *definitely* defer to them. There's great wisdom in that the county's spent a lot of money training them and they usually have some decent OTJ experience.

We have several ongoing Fed judicial monitoring agreements in place for our relentless police brutality "problem" which isn't much of a problem for me but sure was for the guy they caught trying to break into my neighbor's house at night while they were home asleep with their kids. Couldn't beat that dude enough for my taste. It was his fault, though: he wouldn't place his hands behind his back and got "slippery." I didn't think you could nightstick the "slippery" out of someone so fast. True masters of the baton.

Only rarely do they screw up and shoot or maim "good people" like a nearby town mayor's two dogs, but those were drug cops, not beat cops. Big difference. I figure they face death with every car they pull over, so they've earned a little deference from me. Kids certainly don't treat cops as respectfully today the way they did when I was a kid.

-- Bobby G.

[Jim Yanik]

[e-mail] wrote in news: [e-mail]:

No,not solid copper,but a copper alloy.

[Kurt Ullman]

And they are probably better shots, having to qualify and all. (The upside is they are less likely to use them unless absolutely needed).

[HeyBub]

It's quite possible he looked in your bag, not to determine whether you were a shoplifter but merely to keep his job.

[Red Green]

"Bob F" wrote in news:id1gru$stg$ [e-mail]:

Ditto but $10 bags. And what amazes me is how fast I went through them...without glasses. Probably need a telescope to spot a VDB today!