AIBU to think more people steal than we think?

[Garfy0505]

I run an online business and around 2-3% of my orders I get messages from customers saying thier items have not arrived. Most of them do not realise I can track the item and use the GPS to determine the house it was delivered to. I politely suggest they've contacted me by mistake and 99% of these then either miraculously find it or I never hear from them again. There's whole pages on facebook for people to advise them how to get items for free from online companies, what is wrong with people? I wonder now if for every 100 people I come across 2-3 of them are secret thieves! Please if you ever think of doing this, remember there's often a small business behind the website that you're hurting, rant over!

Yes, a lot of people steal, and a lot of them don't think of what they're doing as stealing. I work in an industry where your income is based on royalties. The internet is rife with Facebook groups and websites helpfully 'sharing' the stuff that people like me produce. Of course, not everyone who steals use of our work through these websites would necessarily have bought the products if they weren't available for free, but some would. The financial impact on my industry is getting bigger every year. One person I know of committed suicide partly due to desperate financial worries over ever-declining income. Piracy of music/films/images/books etc is not a victimless crime.

user - maybe you are right. I am just more aware of it now perhaps.It is sad though as it does not make for a nice way to live.

I passed my neighbour's house and saw a heap of Amazon boxes on their doorstep. It was a few days before Christmas and I knew they were away.
I retrieved them all and put a note through their door.
They were really grateful that I had safely stored their DC's presents, but I could easily have been a thief.

My delivered items recently have been:

Left on my doorstep in the open

Delivered to neighbour and no card left

Thrown in my green bin

Not delivered at all

And the cast majority
Thrown into my porch and the postman signing as delivered.

I volunteer in a charity shop in a very middle class area and we lose a lot to theft.

People do come in and just take stuff but often they're not so blatant. They'll come in wearing ripped or stained clothing which is only fit for the bin, take something off the rails, try it on, and walk out wearing it, leaving the scabby stuff for us on the hangars. Or they'll take a £19.99 sticker off something expensive and swap it with a £1.99 sticker off something else. All of our decent jewellery, antiques and books have to be locked in cabinets because people just help themselves.

We have three or four charity shops in our wee area and they are destinations for thieves. They know we don't have CCTV. They know nothing is tagged. They know that a lot of times there's a 15 year old, an OAP or someone with learning difficulties on the till. We are very easy targets.

And these people aren't the "have to steal to live, down on their luck" types. They're professional scumbags.

We had a non delivery of a stereo years ago. The property had electric gates on busy road, seemingly someone walking past the property said they knew us....? Your GPS would have put it at the correct address. Just because the delivery person was at the right address doesn't mean to say the driver didn't bugger off with it.

I know of loads of examples of theives.
My nephew workef in a bar where they had drinks offers, 2 for £5 type of thing and one guy would wait to see if the customer paid with the exact cash and if they did he would just pocket it.
I worked in a call centre and staff could access accounts (telephone and tv)in our own local area without leaving a foot print. People would regularly enter their families accounts and credit them a few quid, not enough to trigger anything but still.
My friend bought an expensive piece of furniture which she then damaged, she said it was delivered damaged and got her money back.
Another friend will lie about her kids ages to avoid paying on the bus.
Years ago dp worked for a big supermarket and staff were always nicking money out of the tills, if they were caught or suspected they'd move them to the warehouse...where they would then nick stock!

Pineapple despite everything I've just posted I'm still pretty shocked people steal from charity shops.

We have a business that provides services. About 10% of clients try to escape paying their bill.

It's depends I think. People probably will do what they get away with but not everyone who has things 'delivered' to their house gets them.

I had a spate a few years ago where several parcels didn't get to me. I reported it, asked them to resend or refund if I'd had to find replacements from elsewhere. One smallish company made a fuss, said they had gps etc made me feel like a thief even though I genuinely hadn't got the parcels.

Turns out they'd all been left on my doorstep at various times by either Hermes or RM. my Hermes delivery driver has been coming here years I knew he hadn't done anything dodgy. Turns out though I could never prove anything that there had been work going on over the road and as soon as that stopped miraculously nothing else went missing.

GPS doesn't prove that the person has got the parcel. Maybe invest in decent couriers!

I used to work in retail and one afternoon thieves made off with the entire content of the front gondola. Thousands of pounds. Vanished. None of the staff in store saw a thing got about an hour eithwrv

People do make mistakes though or not notice things.
My friend several years ago ordered an iPad for her daughter for Christmas. Complained a week later that it wasn’t delivered and after a bit of emailing had another one sent out.
Years later was moving houses and found a sealed iPad box in the drawer!
She swears she never received it and thinks her mum babysitting must have signed and put it away.
She did contact the company but I’m not sure if she was ever asked to pay back.

Yep, I know someone that every time a parcel gets left outside of their house they say they never got it, the way she sees it is that they shouldn’t leave it outside then.

Nothing new there. Yeah, the nostalgia over Blitz spirit always makes me laugh because if you studied anything of history you'd knew it wasn't at all like that.

One of my nursing colleagues years ago told me she pinches money off rich patients because they have too much of it already.
I was absolutely appalled. It made me think you really can't trust anyone.

@PardonWhat that sounds like the sort of thing dh will do. Several times I've been fussing over why x or y hasn't arrived only to find he's taken the parcel in and stashed it somewhere without thinking to mention it.

I'm not debating the ones where they go to the wrong address etc ... It's the increasing customers who have the item and say they don't

I know what you were saying, Garfy, and you were right - but as a PP mentioned, given the number on MN who sneer at those who'd return a parcel sent in error, or at folk who'd report someone being flagrantly dishonest, the 10% YABU vote perhaps isn't a surprise

I think it was C S Lewis who said integrity's doing the right thing when no-one's watching ... which could be why those of us who've got more than enough faults as it is would rather not add to them by thieving

I work in a high end law firm where the average salary is 3 figures. We had to snip the lids off our washing up liquid in the kitchen areas as people kept stealing them.

I was in an O2 shop the other day. Very affluent area if that's relevant (not sure it is?) But.... whilst i was sat down running through a contract with one of the staff (two others were free), a bloke who had been browsing phones, suddenly grabbed the new iphone, yanked it off the cord and ran out with it.

Nobody gave chase - in fact the staff barely flinched. When I asked if someone was going to chase/call the police (they have CCTV obviously), they said 'No. Head office have asked that we just let the single thefts go'.

I was and even more so when they said they lose about five phones a week. But their actual policy is to do nothing.

My brother once ordered an Iphone and the delivery guy left it in the outside mailbox. When my brother came home it was obviously stolen by someone and he had to proof he really hadn’t received it though delivery guy said it was.
I wouldn’t blame it all on stealing customers. There are far too many stories like these.

I rang my insurance company to stop a claim on the contents insurance because DH and I had found the item. The woman I spoke to told me told me what U had done was as rare as hen’s teeth.
I find this widespread casual dishonesty depressing. Even more depressing and nasty are all the people I come across who are like this despite being well off but are always ready to castigate the poor and benefit claimants for being thieves and villains.

Yup! I wonder how many 'honest' people steal from their organizations' stationery? Honesty is rarer than you might think.

A couple of years ago I was on a late evening train. It was quite crowded. A guy got off the train and left his very nice phone on the table a couple of seats away. Almost before the doors had closed there were people pouncing on it! It was like a feeding frenzy. I doubt any of them were 'rescuing' his phone to give it back!

Yup! I wonder how many 'honest' people steal from their organizations' stationery? Honesty is rarer than you might think.

In a couple of firms I worked at, they both had lots of trainees studying for professional exams. We used very expensive pads of analysis paper (£1 per pad as it was quality paper, headed with firms' name etc). Rather than the trainees "stealing" those pads for their studies/courses, the firm actually bought standard A4 pads in bulk. They were never used for the business at all - but strangely disappeared from the stock room at an alarming rate. The firms knew that it was cheaper to bulk buy cheap pads which they knew would be "stolen" to stop staff taking the expensive pads.

It works both ways. I bought from a small independent Children’s wear company on Instagram. There was a delay on the product and a note at the checkout saying it would be dispatched when back in stock. A few weeks passed and I’d had no dispatch email so contacted them to just check. They were so rude, saying it had been sent and the implication being I had received it and was trying to pull a fast one. I’ve noticed they now send a dispatch email, but it left a nasty taste for me, I will never use them again.

I’d be interested in what courier/mail company you use. I wouldn’t say GPS is infallible. It just says a delivery person has been there, not that the package has been safely delivered.