Rising Tide

[deguspice]

Apparently the latest hot item to shoplift is Tide laundry detergent. Not only is it easy to sell on the streets (popular and no serial numbers to be traced), drug dealers are taking it in lieu of cash.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2012/03/14/thieves_rolling_tide_detergent_out_of_stores/?page=full

Comments

[c1.livejournal.com]

Snopes had something to say about this. (http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/tide.asp)
My gut sense is that in the context of the bigger picture, there are no more Tide thefts than there are thefts of anything else in a store.

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

Take a look at some of the surveillance videos in this report from CNN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV3wlWn1-Bc

Thieves are loading up shopping carts with Tide and then making a dash for the doors.

[c1.livejournal.com]

I get that Tide is seeing a lot of airtime because of theft recently, but that's not the sum total of things being shoplifted these days. The most conspicuous? Sure. But viewed against everything else being lifted in a given week, I'm pretty sure it's just something else being stolen -- any teenaged thug will tell you that it's pretty easy to stuff a DVD under your shirt, which is something you can't do very well with a large orange jug. On the other hand, those big orange jugs show up pretty well on surveillance video, so that's going to hit the evening news.
Dope dealers will only be able to fence so much laundry detergent in a given neighbourhood before people start saying "hey, I only got so much laundry to do in the next ten years." I don't know about you, but it takes me most of a year to go through a gallon of detergent.
As far as I see it, "nothing to see here, move along."