EDIT: To be sure, I wonder because my city is both HQ and a significant hub for one of those F500 major Class I freight rail operators, but I haven't heard of such brazen exploits happening locally...yet?
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/s2sjxj/los_angeles_th...
I wonder if this is an evolution of the security cat & mouse game with shipping switching to have more random items people ordered directly to their home? Similar to porch-pirates being more of an issue today than 30 years ago.
Before, if you broke into a container, you'd often find weird homogenous B2B stuff. Like a bunch of dog food.
but presumably the volume of b2c stuff being shipped over rail hasn't changed? after all, the b2c stuff has to get to customers somehow. Maybe a random assortment makes it a more attractive target due to the skinner box effect (ie. lootboxes).
If you open up a container of UPS shipments, and you grab one random bag out of there-- there will be valuable consumer goods in it.
Why would that be hard? eBay, craigslist, Facebook groups, and other platforms exist which can be used to facilitate the quick and easy offloading of stolen goods.
And then if anyone is poking around at secondary markets, you have a massive number of item X showing up new-in-box grey market in a zip code where a bunch of that item was stolen.
Compare to having 20 random consumer items, all stolen from different end-recipients. It's hard for any authority to know these items were stolen. It's hard to establish you stole them or were knowingly receiving stolen property. Even if they surmise that they're probably stolen, as far as they know you could have committed petty theft several times at unknown places.
OTOH, I think your argument assumes criminals are lacking creativity... and that the police care and/or have the resources to track $8K worth of headphones. If $8K of headphones are stolen, how many % of total headphones sold on eBay/CL/FB/etc. per month is that? Also, who says they have to offload all the headphones immediately? What's to prevent a "criminal network" or a single person from creating 20 different eBay accounts, each selling one pair - location: obviously not near where they were stolen from. Repeat process once per x months or just wait a few months until the heat is lower. Or perhaps pass the headphones on to a larger "criminal network" who can resell them all over the US. Also on eBay one could just say "shipping from northern California" when in fact they are located in Southern California - who will verify that? Also you could take a few pair to pawn shops... some might even take multiple pairs at once. Also someone could gift a bunch to friends/family. I'm sure there are tons of tricks criminals use to offload stolen goods.