Crazy Eddie: The popular electronics chain that scammed America | Hacker News Reader

Crazy Eddie: The popular electronics chain that scammed America

thehustle.co

285 pointsyarapavan170 comments

> “We arrogantly committed our crimes simply because we could and we had no empathy whatsoever for our victims,” Sam E. Antar later wrote

Surprising moment of honesty there.

The fraud is a distinctly pre-21st century one, relying as it does on handling large amounts of cash while operating parallel books. Then pivoting to stock fraud to take in a bigger pie from investors.

Is it that surprising, given that he was testifying against his estranged son in exchange for leniency?

I was struck by the same line. No real reason to add the part about "no empathy." And it seems like something very close to empathy to understand that one had no empathy....

They probably had no empathy at the time, but after years of reflection and a criminal plea, finding empathy (or something very close to it) is possible.

More likely, regret.

At the time of that statement being written, he had taken a plea deal in exchange for testifying against his son.

It was likely written for him and he agreed to sign or say it

> The fraud is a distinctly pre-21st century one, relying as it does on handling large amounts of cash while operating parallel books. Then pivoting to stock fraud to take in a bigger pie from investors.

I mean, I'm not sure that either of these have exactly gone out of fashion.

It is much harder with electronic payment systems forcing accurate accounting.

Today's equivalent might be to wire money back and forth between companies in different jurisdictions.

I once spoke with tax auditors of Pornhub (while they casually audited our company), many years ago, it seemed like a pretty intense headache.

I am not sure what wiring to different jurisdictions allows you to do, but I was referring to the parallel books for the purposes of underreporting revenue for tax purposes or stealing from other business partners. The card processor always has your sales amounts available so come tax time or audit time, you will not be able to hide revenue, as seen on 1099-Ks.

https://www.irs.gov/payments/general-faqs-on-new-payment-car...

This is always a funny video clip about electronic payments making low level shenanigans more difficult. The game nowadays is to do it legally, and getting involved in the political machinery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gsz7Gu6agA

These days you have a lot more EPOS systems and a vast majority of cashless transactions, especially for high value goods.

>handling large amounts of cash while operating parallel books. Then pivoting to stock fraud to take in a bigger pie from investors.

They were pretty advanced at this in the 19th century already.

Moments of honesty are always rare when predatory activity is the prevailing attitude.

Sooner or later you end up with an Enron, Madoff, or even a Theranos.

"If it seems odd that a purveyor of VCRs and stereos could make investors swoon, remember that this was the 1980s, and people were getting pumped about cellular phones that were roughly the size of microwaves."

That is not how I remember it. To insinuate VCRs and stereos should not have been sought after in the 1980's is silly. Most people had no interest in a cellular phone. They wanted TVs. The author's comment begs the question, "Was Mark Dent in NYC buying electronics in the 1980s."

Crazy Eddie defrauded investors but generally, as I remember it, they were honest toward their customers. To be trutthful, I was not much of a Crazy Eddie customer. I only bought from them a few times. I chose to buy from their competitors, other electronics dealers in NYC with "low, low" prices and price guarantees. Like Crazy Eddie, these shops focused on volume.

Anyone remember places like 6th Ave electronics. Prices were published, in their newspaper ads. In theory one could take one of these ads to Crazy Eddie if that was one's preference for where to shop. Apparently 6th Ave imploded even faster than Crazy Eddie. There is a Wikipedia page devoted to the subject.^1

To some perhaps these places felt like they were being run by "hustlers". As a customer, I never found them to be dishonest, they were just barebones operations. No salesmanship, no BS. The price is low, the stock is here, take it or leave it. The educated consumer was their best customer.

However I see marked differences with how people today use the word "hustle", e.g., this website. Today, customers are the target of "tech" company deception and investors are the enablers. It is unlikely these 1980s era electronics shops had wealthy investors backing them like "tech" companies have today. They had to make money in the present to stay in business. Their employee salaries were paid from revenues or loans, not investment rounds. If they failed to make money, eventually they went bankrupt. They had skin in the game.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Avenue_Electronics

> Strangely, Crazy Eddie’s fraudulent history gave it an advantage. To provide the illusion of quickly increasing profits ahead of the IPO, the Antars simply reduced the amount of cash they were skimming.

There was someone like this as well... a man who had a bookstore and invested all of their profit into expansion so when expansion was scaled back, they could easily report massive profits.

Are you suggesting it is the Prime customers or the investors who are being scammed ?

I don’t think it’s fair to compare a growth company to this:

> There was just one major problem... Crazy Eddie had been lying about its numbers since its inception

Amazon is notorious for aggressively re-investing their profits which is why they're as massive as they are. They are constantly trying 30 different things at once.

"You must spend money to make it", this adage is true since the very inception of monetary value.

Not sure this is a great comparison.

I heard about this, apparently the owner also devised a scheme that paid his employees so poorly he was able to get the federal government to subsidize his workers food using programs originally designed for the unemployed and disabled persons. To perfect his fraud he expanded his book store to include groceries so that he could profit on the government subsidies directly by having his employees buy their food from him.

Genius! Innovation to be lauded and copied! Whoever thought of this should be rewarded with more property and increased control over their employees and regulators.

This same owner encouraged customers to avoid paying state sales tax on their purchases -- and then, when the state of California wanted to collect the tax, threatened to divest his company of all California workers. And then dragged his feet for years with threats and obfuscation to delay implementation.

Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck were enabling the interstate sales tax bypass 100 years earlier. Nobody cared because the constitution was respected then.

The overlap between people on government food assistance and buying a significant fraction of their groceries at Whole Foods is probably not very high...

Fresh/Go, not WF

Unfortunately because of lobbying efforts the public doesn’t have access to that data, that’s right tax payers aren’t entitled to know where taxpayer funds are being spent. There are FOIA requests and subsequent lawsuits to get the information and you can see the industry argument for yourself, but these businesses feel they would be stigmatized if the public knew how much they made from taxpayer funded programs and they feel they would be at a disadvantage with landlords in negotiating rent if they knew how much they received from these programs.

They also double dip and both Amazon and Whole Foods accept SNAP benefits/EBT, after a 20% discount, I’m sure it’s a significant amount, after they are the largest employer of SNAP beneficiaries in many states.

I don’t think SNAP/WIC recipients should have any less right to privacy around their grocery purchases than you or I do. I trust that the SNAP/WIC administration can/do monitor purchases for fraud, but beyond that internal use, I do not believe that data should be released in any form that could possibly be linked to an individual purchaser (which would include links to their employer).

If you and I have that privacy, benefits recipients should as well.

> I don’t think SNAP/WIC recipients should have any less right to privacy around their grocery purchases than you or I do.

That is great if you want to protect the privacy of the businesses, but businesses disclosing the total they make from these programs has nothing to do with privacy of individuals.

If Amazon and Whole Foods had to disclose they made $1B each from SNAP last year, there is clearly no privacy concerns linked to individuals involved. There is absolutely no information of the individuals involved.

Not even the industry has attempted to make privacy arguments, which again are publicly available if you wanted to learn about it and are limited to concerns of being “stigmatized” if the public learns how much the businesses make from these programs and fear that disclosures would hurt negotiations with landlords.

What possible difference could it make to landlords if they knew Whole Foods made 3%, 8%, or 11% of their revenue from WIC/SNAP? To a grocer, it's just another payment method.

I wonder if his exit strategy involves escaping not only prosecution, but gravity itself.

With the slight difference that “investment activities” is a line on a cash flow statement, and “embezzlement activities” usually is not.

That's not really at all like the scam Crazy Eddie was doing. Reinvesting is perfectly legal, and so common any investor knows to look at revenue (and many other things), not just profits. In fact, I'd bet most investors would prefer profits be reinvested rather than paid out to investors, as the increase in the share price usually dwarfs the payout.

Except expanding the business itself is a perfectly valid way to use the business' profits. Amazon used 100% legal accounting measures.

The Crazy Eddie story is most interesting to me as a window into the highly insular and particularly successful Syrian Jewish diaspora.

Guess who was of Syrian descent as well?

Who?

He's talking about Steve Jobs.

But in Steve's case, only by nature (on his father's side), not by nurture.

And only Syrian, not Jewish.

He was Jewish on his biological mother's side.

No, he wasn’t: http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=745

It's fun to see this story get rediscovered every 3-5 years. Electronics stores, like car dealerships, appeared to need showboating to stand out, and that appears to be the starter-drug for fraud in a surprising number of cases.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Who could possibly have guessed that a guy named "Crazy Eddie" might not be entirely honest??

surprised he didn't claim insanity; seems like a slam dunk.

I can appreciate self-disclosure. With him identifying as such, you're either going to get an insane deal or shanked, and should not be surprised by either outcome.

"Honest Eddie," on the other hand-- stay away from that guy.

It's weird how this pattern repeats itself. Madman Muntz[1], who Crazy Eddie emulated, is an endlessly fascinating character as well. Less of a criminal, but still...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz

Although I'd argue Muntz, becoming a verb, probably achieved what Crazy Eddie claimed to have done.

Oh yeah, the impact of Muntz is huge. Both engineering-wise and culturally.

Also see this documentary on Muntz:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deFlB2G0mH8

Talk about showboating... there's one Polish electronics outlet that always aims for the most annoying advertisements and so is widely hated for that.

https://bezprawnik.pl/czy-media-expert-celowo-denerowal-ewel...

> Electronics stores, like car dealerships, appeared to need showboating to stand out

Reminds me of the themed Fry's Electronics stores.

The space-station themed Fry’s store near Houston, TX recently closed. I only ever visited it in the twilight years where there was so little inventory in such a large footprint that it seemed like a front for something. The architecture and decor was definitely imaginative.

And Fry’s was brought down due to fraud as well [1].

[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/frys-electronics-execu...

I don’t think it’s fair to say they were ‘brought down’ due to fraud - that article is from 2008, and the chain only shut down last year.

The enduring legacy of Crazy Eddie is people writing articles about it on a recurring basis

It's Christmas in August!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmF2lCXV8lQ

I remember the bait and switch was big with these stores. The stuff they advertised was not in stock, but they tried to sell you what they did have.

I'm surprised they didn't discover what Sir Alan Sugar had: that you could make more money on house branded stuff made in Hong Kong.

The NYC camera stores were famous for this: "That Nikon lens is out of stock but we've got a Zeus lens for the same price and it's actually a better lens".

This was also lampooned in Adam Sandler's movie Zohan, with electronic store employees proclaiming everything had "Sony guts!".

I remember Crazy Eddie's very well. I was a teenager in the 1980s, and I still have the portable Sony Discman I got there for $100. I mowed a lot of lawns in order to save up for that Sony Discman from Crazy Eddie's.

The decision to do an IPO for a company that was literally not paying payroll taxes and keeping profits in suitcases just has to go down as one of the worst criminal decisions in recorded history.

Like without the IPO I would suspect they could have gone on for many many years basically skimming and scamming the government, maybe with some eventual consequences and fines but most likely being able to pay their way out of it.

New York by 1987 seemed to have a jam-packed little hole in the wall electronics store in every block. Suddenly now I wonder if they were jumping on the Crazy Eddie bandwagon.

This is a good story to compare and contrast with the 2008 subprime fraud cases, for example 'Crazy Lloyd Blankfein' of Goldman Sachs.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-open-criminal-probe-of-gol...

"Goldman Sachs to Pay Record $550 Million to Settle SEC Charges Related to Subprime Mortgage CDO, CBS 2010"

The amount of fraud committed was far greater than that, and there were no criminal charges involving jail time for any of the culprits. Kind of like doing armed robbery at a bank, getting away with $100K, then being fined $50k for the crime with no jail time. A profitable business model in other words.

Banksters really got away with a lot in the States.

Iceland at least held theirs accountable.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iceland-has-jailed-26-b...

Never hear anyone suggesting we start charging people who lied on their loan applications even though it was rampant.

People frequently would say they were going to make $X/yr where that number came from the amount of money they expected the home to go up, not actual income on a W2. Banks were selling the loans so they often didn't care to get real documentation of income either.

> were going to make

That's a documented risk the lender knew about and encouraged.

I've often seen this take, but what it misses is that at the height of the liar loan boom, those loan applications with the lies were often filled in by the loan originator, knowing it was a lie, and they would then sell that loan off as soon as it was issued. The borrower often didn't even know what was on the form.

They thought they could get away with it because they believed real estate could only go up, so if the borrower defaulted the lender could get the house and still make money.

Yep. Happened with my mortgage; I only know about it because the bank actually asked for evidence to support a level of liquid assets that I never claimed to have. In my case, it wasn't really a problem as the mortgage was in line with what I knew I could afford. What was surprising, however, is that the bank offered to loan me considerably more than I could afford. I found it all very odd, but I didn't understand the meaning of it at the time. A few years later when it all blew up, I realised what had been going on. Again, I was fine as I did my own math, but I can imagine many people were sold on mortgages that they were never going to be able to afford.

Yep, happened with me too.

I remember my wife being adamant about a fixed rate mortgage while the banker was being super pushy about doing a 5 year arm. About a month after we got our house, we started getting the letters, "Your loan was sold to Bank XYZ, your new loan holder is ABC company." Literally every month our loan was getting sold multiple times.

Then Wells Fargo started calling about re-financing our mortgage around late 2006. We were like, "Huh? We're on a fixed rate." and the guy was like, "Says here your 5-year ARM you signed is expiring in 2008 and your rate is going to go way up."

Alarm bells started going off. We made an appointment to sit down with the guy at Wells Fargo. Sure as shit, the guy who was pushing us to do a 5 year ARM falsified our loan papers. Inflated a bunch of our assets to get us qualified for a bigger loan that we didn't need. He put us into a 5 year adjustable rate that was set to increase wildly in 2008. We refinanced and got our mortgage into a fixed rate again. We talked to an attorney about suing them, but by then the crisis was starting to gain some real steam and the company who did our original loan had already been out of business for six months.

I really feel like we need more stories like this catalogued. Glad it seems like it all worked out.

It didn't all work out for many: when real estate crashed in 2008 a lot of people lost everything: they had huge negative equity in a house that was suddenly worth 20% or more less than what they paid with 5% or less down payment, lost the house and their savings and wound up bankrupt, at a time when the economy was tanking so many lost their jobs as well. Many people had invested their retirement savings in bonds based on all these crappy loans, thinking that this was a conservative investment (real estate! Only ever goes up!).

In the late 90s I decided on an ARM with a teaser low rate for the first year, then it would jump up. So I refi'd after one year for another. Refi'd a year later. I think I did this 3 years in a row, then sold the house.

I read the mortgage agreements carefully. I didn't write them, and the contracts allowed this.

A side effect was each refi came with a home appraisal, paid for by the mortgage company. Every year, my property tax valuation went way up, every year I appealed, attached the bank appraisal, and got it back down.

That worked when interest rates were declining; now they are going up, so refi'ing at a better rate might not be an option.

OK charge the originator then too.

You're not wrong, but I always wonder why this is a reply when suggesting we charge and prosecute the bankers. To create an equivalency? To change the subject? Why?

Because the investment banks took loans and repackaged them, then didn't do anything illegal. The most sketchy thing they were accused of was repackaging loans when they should know the documentation was fraudulent, ie borrowers were lying on their forms. Its a long chain of paper pushers who are blaming each other, I'm not convinced anyone is worse than the others, just GS is most famous.

Actually, the transfer and repackaging of loans was not done legally, and courts had to rubber stamp massive amounts of backdated paperwork when cleaning up the mess so the houses could actually be foreclosed upon.

> Because the investment banks took loans and repackaged them, then didn't do anything illegal.

They did very illegal things. They lied, flat out lied, to their customers about what was in the financially engineered structures. Lied.

That is a crime (in civilised jurisdictions, and in the USA)

Please tell me which customers you are talking about? Is it the hedge funds who bought billions of CDOs but says they didn't understand what they were? Are they the people you're concerned about.

The banks they sold them to. And yes, the hedge funds.

They misrepresented these products. The learnt that the ratings agencies had made a mess of the rating too late, they were on the books. So they sold them as fast as they could, lying to the customers.

It does not matter if the customer was a hedge fund, a bank, or you. Lying about financial products is a crime.

They didn't lie they passed on the documents that were signed by the borrowers.

They lied. They also passed on the documents that were signed by borrowers, who were also lying.

The bankers were doing what we wanted them to do by giving us loans, even when we didn't qualify. Now they're continuing to do what we want them to do by being the villains. As long as they get paid...

Bankers where ultimately using other peoples money to issue loans so they didn’t care if the information was accurate and therefore not only didn’t check but actively falsified the information themselves.

That’s how you get this kind of crap: “How much do you make? It varies, I made 50k last year. That’s going to be a little tough, hmm let’s say next year went well, how much could you make? I don’t know 60-70k. Great 70k is going to make this all very smooth.”

The applicant assumes he’s being clear when getting a loan from the company he’s talking to. Meanwhile the company is only interested in selling Fake AAA bonds and just needs warm bodies to sign some paperwork.

There's a certain group of people who self-identify with the super rich, even with the ones that are orders of magnitude more wealthy than them. An attack on the rich is perceived as an attack on "their group". So they retaliate, usually against the poor, which they otherize.

> Never hear anyone suggesting we start charging people who lied on their loan applications even though it was rampant.

Loan industry operates on “victim blaming” philosophy. If you give money to someone who could not afford the loan you are on the hook. That’s reasonable.

It's because these loans usually don't make it through underwriting. Most of the time they don't even make it past the originators desk. Banks have no incentive to prosecute people who "forget" to mention there's a lien on their house. Also, who is to prosecute in cases where documentation of income isn't required? For instance, if I say I make $200k/yr because my boss told me I'd make that much in this new sales job am I lying if it turns out I won't make that much and documentation wasn't required?

People have such a school-house view of how the world works.

This is the context of that story, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs_controversies#20...

I think one important difference is that the story in the OP is fraud directly against individual retail investors (and the government, to be fair), whereas the Goldman story is a conflict between two hedge funds and an investment bank.

That seems important for the subtext of what you're saying.

>>But Zinn immediately discovered $45m of listed inventory was missing.

Living in Manhattan in 1983, when the cable installers came to hookup service, they offered us brand new TVs at about half the price of Crazy Eddie's stores - from what little I could find out, it seems they'd been recruited by Eddie's warehouse workers to push fell-off-the-truck / out-the-backdoor sales of Eddie's inventory.

I'd bet that there were a lot of the appointments that bit on that offer. I was not surprised to see Eddie's rapidly declining in the following year. You just can't survive with truckloads of your inventory going missing every day...

And reading about how he paid employees 'off the books', no surprise they were also freelancing off the poorly controlled inventory flow.

The full saga: https://whitecollarfraud.com/crazy-eddie/crazy-eddie-saga-ta...

My dad bought me my first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, from Crazy Eddie's when I was 5. When people ask me how I got started programming, I tell them the story of the VIC-20 from Crazy Eddie's, often having to explain what Crazy Eddie's was if the questioner is a millennial or younger. The chain and especially the commercials were part of the cultural landscape especially in the northeast, and were even parodied in television and movies.

> Crazy Eddie stores stayed open on holidays and Sundays, at a time when many retailers still followed a Chick-Fil-A schedule.

Wait. Retailers weren’t always open on Sunday?

Costco Business Center isn’t open on Sunday! I nearly found out the hard way yesterday.

From my memory opening on Sundays slowly became the norm through the late 80s and early 90s in Texas.

Yeah it's tied to the rise of rent and the fall of wages.

In The Netherlands, opening times were strictly regulated by law up to 1984 : no openings on Sunday, weekdays not later than 18:00 and Saturday no later than 17:00.

This scheme was common up till the mid nineties. Since then it has been relaxed, but it is still regulated.

One of the reasons listed for the regulation is the protection of 'Mom & Pop' stores.

> One of the reasons listed for the regulation is the protection of 'Mom & Pop' stores.

A silly motivation. Smaller-scale businesses on the "convenience store" model are more likely to provide extended opening hours than any large store operation. That's as close to "Mom & Pop" as it gets.

I don't get your POV.

I talked about the 80s and 90s and a healthy work/life balance was still a political talking point at the time.

Also single worker households, which meant there was someone to patronise those stores while the breadwinner was themselves working.

(To be clear, I'm not saying everything was great in the days of "all women are house wives" but it would have been nice if the stigma of a house husband went away instead, rather than the actual turn out of "both adults must work").

> rather than the actual turn out of "both adults must work").

It was almost an inevitably. Especially for the middle class, I would imagine that both sides of the couple working provided a substantial boost in economic mobility. Or at least a perceived one. At that point its just keeping up with the joneses.

The motivation was religious.

The Winkeltijdenwet was instated in 1976 when we had the Den Uyl government, which consisted of Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA), Katholieke Volkspartij (KVP), Anti-Revolutionaire Partij (ARP), Politieke Partij Radikalen (PPR) en de Democraten 66 (D'66)

That is a lot of left radicals and only 1 religious party.

As you are no doubt aware concessions are often made to smaller parties in order to secure their votes on other subjects is well established in Dutch politics.

There is no reason to assume the left wanted to work on Sunday.

https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/kst-24226-3.html

And many others besides.

Really, why would you even try to argue something that is pretty much settled history at this point in time? The Netherlands historically had a very strong religious streak running through it and one of the last vestiges of their direct influence on Dutch society is the 'Winkelsluitingstijden' law.

That link is a wall of text. Could you please quote what is supposedly proving your point? Because I can't find it.

Probably in Gelderland, I guess? Not too sure about the rest of NL.

Limburg and Brabant are in the present day a lot more religious than Gelderland, as is Zeeland and a large chunk of the area North-East and East of Amersfoort.

NL is percentage wise (or rather, was) one of the countries were religion was 'on the way out', unfortunately that trend seems to have first stabilized and is now reversing. It's a pity because personally I think religion should have absolutely no place in politics or organized society, though I do believe that people should be free to practice whatever religion they want as long as it does not negatively affect others.

I last visited NL about two decades ago, and spent most of my time in a Gelderland village. I must say that I was reasonably well-tolerated as a visiting heathen ;)

As you mention, it's the religious intolerance that one finds disturbing, not religion (of any kind) itself. It is fairly rare to have one without the other these days, it would seem. The phenomenon is not limited to NL alone, I think.

That's fair but the strong Islam presence has lots of people upset to the point where I would say the Dutch (as a group, of people without religion or subscribing to some religion) are now less tolerant of (other) religion(s) than they were 20 years ago. This is a factor in the right wing extremist presence who use this to drive a wedge between people who otherwise probably would not care that much, it is clearly positioned as 'Islam against the rest'. Most notable for this is Geert Wilders, who is a complete asshole but there are others as well.

Gelderland (where my family is from) is definitely more religious than say Amsterdam, but far less than the South of Limburg or the 'Bible Belt'. At the same time, those are all various offshoots of Christianity, whereas if you were to look at Islam you will find the opposite, it is strongly represented in the big cities, where there is hardly any Christian offshoots left (and if they are they are dying).

Churches are disappearing, Mosques are rising up everywhere, and I'm not sure if the longer term will find NL with a more tolerant version of itself or if it will regress at some point.

It's not really the Islam presence that bothers people, it's specifically intolerant, militant religion that happens to be of the Muslim type. Let's be clear, nobody there is complaining about an overabundance of wise Sufi mystics.

No, but there are many more people complaining about morning calls to prayer than there ever were to complain about church bells (with the exception of Tilburg).

Same thing in Germany. All shops are closed on Sundays and bank holidays, and while opening times on weekdays have been deregulated in most states, some - like Bavaria - still enforce opening times of no more than 6:00 to 20:00 or 6:00 to 22:00.

I'm generally a fan of longer opening times, but having a day where everyone but entertainment and hospitality has free time simultaneously seems very healthy for both families and society at large.

> All shops are closed on Sundays and bank holidays

Unless, of course, they are in a train station. This loophole seems to be _heavily_ exploited.

When I was young, the only places open on Sundays were grocery stores and gas stations.

We had one KMart open on Sundays. If we needed something on Sunday, that was the only place to go.

In the US a lot of places used to have so-called "Blue Laws" that restricted what you were allowed to do on a Sunday. Some places still have reduced versions that apply specifically to vices; e.g. where I live in FL, alcohol sales are restricted on Sundays to certain times.

It used to be heavily regulated in Canada (or at least Manitoba) until very recently as well, like some time in the last 20 years or so. I remember when Wal-Mart first entered Canada, they had a really hard time in some places because labor laws and blue laws prevented them from being open 24/7.

Formerly very catholic Quebec still has one of those crazy laws.

During certain hours (such as, past 8PM on weekends), groceries are only allowed 4 employees. Which is almost impossible in those very large groceries. For many groceries, they just assume this is part of doing business, they would rather pay the fine than angering customers with long lines.

https://www.economie.gouv.qc.ca/bibliotheques/conformite/ouv...

I know a lot of places in MB still open later and close earlier on Sunday but I don't visit as much as I used to or keep my pulse on the civics anymore so I don't know if that's convention or blue laws.

These laws were repealed just a few months ago, actually.

>In the US a lot of places used to have so-called "Blue Laws"

Used to? Hell, in Texas, you cannot buy alcohol until after noon on Sundays. Still. Today, er, yesterday, but you get the point.

Fun fact this is also true about Chicago except it's 11am.

Not just that, but you can only buy beer and wine on Sundays, and only at places like grocery stores.

Liquor stores (which also sell beer/wine) are not allowed to be open on Sunday, period.

Note this pertains to off-premise (i.e., stores, not bars) only. Bars, you're free to get sloshed to your hearts desire on any type of alcohol and as early as 10AM on Sundays.

This used to be the case in New York too, but those laws were repealed in 2008. It seems there's been a trend since around then for municipalities to slowly repeal alcohol blue laws as a few other places followed suit over the next few years.

Unless you're in a state determined to make a real-life Gilead where the laws are getting more restrictive than less. I present to you as an example the same Texas from earlier.

In New York, until 2006, liquor stores were closed on Sundays. Was quite common across the US

It's by county in New York. Where I lived liquor stores were open but not until 11 or 12 I can't remember exactly it's been a while since I lived there. Similarly, you couldn't buy beer between 2am and 8am. I am probably misremembering the times a bit because it was a long time ago but that's roughly what it was where I lived in NY.

> In the US a lot of places used to have so-called "Blue Laws" that restricted what you were allowed to do on a Sunday. Some places still have reduced versions that apply specifically to vices; e.g. where I live in FL, alcohol sales are restricted on Sundays to certain times.

Blue laws around vices (specifically around the sale of alcohol) are still commonplace in the US.

However, Bergen County, NJ, still has the rare Sunday blue law that applies to everyday consumer goods -- you can purchase food and medicine on Sunday (and even alcohol after noon, per a state-wide vice blue law), but everything else is prohibited. If you visit a big-box store like a Costco or Walmart that sells both food and goods, large swaths of the store will be closed down on Sunday.

https://www.wnyc.org/story/assessing-bergen-countys-blue-law...

No. In the distant past of the 1990s and earlier, lots of stuff was closed on Sundays. Get this: many gas stations used to close at night. Lots of grocery stores used to be closed by 9 or so on a week night, if they were even open that late, and earlier on the weekend. Even Wal Mart closed fairly early most days (IIRC they started rolling out the 24/7 thing to many stores—though I think still not all, even today—a while after they introduced the "super center")

Quel surprise... how could Walmart have known about Canadian laws beforehand. :-D

Not all stores are 24 hours, moved to North Carolina and the Wal-Mart by us closes at 11pm I believe. That's weird to me since it seemed like all of them in California were 24 hours.

That’s a “since the pandemic” thing. Most all were 24 hours for many years.

Plenty of Wally Worlds are still not 24/7.

Grocery stores often weren't, as recently as the 90s, at least in New England.

shops in the UK are STILL restricted to six hours of trading on sundays, the law was last changed in 1994[1] and the number of hours that a shop may open on a sunday is determined by the shop's size.

there are some exemptions such as airport shops, petrol or motorway service stations, etc.

the main reason there are still legal restrictions on sunday trading are advocacy groups such as "Lord's Day Observance Society" and the "Keep Sunday Special" campaign.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Trading_Act_1994

Some of the New York camera stores are closed on Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath) to this day. I think there's even one or two that actually disable ordering from their web site on that day.

A state I lived in as a child allowed grocery stores, restaurants, and pharmacies to be open on Sunday, but not much else. Restaurants were also allowed to sell alcohol on Sunday, while liquor stores weren't. A local restaurant took advantage of this double loophole and put in a drive-through booze window that they only opened on Sunday.

People are acting like this is a relic of the past, and I'm surprised you're surprised. I live in a small-medium-sized Canadian town at the edge of the GTHA (not the hub of economic activity, but not exactly the boonies) and many shops are still closed on Sundays. To the extreme even—many only open for short hours (4-8) during the weekdays and a half-day Saturday. It's a relatively quiet place. We've wondered how some can stay in business. Given the area, our guess is wealthy families backing them. I don't think massive profit is their primary motivator, just involvement in the community. And social influence, I'm sure.

Consider that for a lot of shops and restaurants demand might be inelastic over the course of the week. If everyone in town is closed on Sunday and consumers don't have convenient access to other options it's likely that demand will simply shift to other days, thus being closed on Sunday would reduce operating costs without significantly affecting revenues.

This is arguably a big factor for both Chick-fil-a and liquor stores that are prevented state-wide from opening on Sundays (in the US)

The problem for me (at least with Chic-fil-a) is that I am really only eating fast food ever on Saturday or Sundays. Those are the days I have off and the days I am most likely to be traveling (by car or other) and when I would be mostly likely to indulge in fast food. Probably about 2/3 of the times I would have gone to Chic-fil-A I could not due to the Sunday closure.

In some cases for sure. Our speculating was about some oddball cases—like clothing stores that are never busy and only open a few hours a week. And dealing in odds or purely consignment goods. They must be hobby projects (expensive ones, considering the rents around here).

But for others, definitely that's the case. And it's been this way for so long I'm sure it's just a known and we're essentially tethered to Hamilton via transit and highways so there are a ton of options just a few minutes further down the road.

Yup. Can't buy electronics and clothes on Sundays in NJ b/c of Blue Laws. Garden State Plaza, one of the largest malls in NJ, is still closed on Sundays because of this.

When I last lived in the area (pre-pandemic), Garden State Plaza itself would be open on Sundays (the mall has a bunch of restaurants and a movie theater), but most shops would be closed. And it extended beyond electronics and clothing -- most consumer goods would be unavailable on Sunday, and there was always a puzzling list of exceptions (for example, cosmetics could be sold, but paper notebooks could not).

Can you get Amazon same-day delivery there, or is that also restricted?

In the 90s in Manhattan, almost everything was closed on Sunday until the evening. When I asked our hotel receptionist about it, she said, "It's so everyone has enough time to read the New York Times Sunday Edition". I'd like think that's apocryphal but as a teen at the time I believed it.

It stood out to me because in California most everything was open on Sundays. So it seemed to be more of an East Coast thing.

For many, many years they were prohibited from being open on Sundays due to so-called "blue laws" which were ubiquitous, at least where I live on the East Coast. They started to be repealed in the 1970s for general retail and the 2000s for alcohol. In some locations (a couple towns in New Jersey IIRC) blue laws are still on the books and stores are closed on Sundays.

When stores first started opening on Sundays it was usually for only limited hours. I remember everything shutting down around 4-5pm on Sundays when I was a kid. That's not really the case anymore. When I was a teenager in the late 90s I was paid $1 more an hour on Sundays.

This was published in the NY Times in 1986

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/19/nyregion/sunday-shopping-...

>Similar changes are being felt throughout the region and indeed in most parts of the nation. Like New York, many other states in recent years have struck down legal restrictions that prohibited the sale of most goods on Sundays. The curbs, called blue laws, date from colonial New England, with the observance of the Sabbath being their main purpose.

Surprised to see Systemax/TigerDirect and the Fiorentino brothers, who were convicted of embezzlement, security fraud and tax evasion, wasn't mentioned. Perhaps because they didn't outright scam customers. (although I do think they with run-by-night 0-support AV crapware we bundled with everything we could as a value-added service, or pointless "optimization" services that did absolutely nothing).

Don't have much to add here beyond the fact that I worked there in the 2012-2013 strech and a little beyond. Run about as spartan as could be, no LP but millions of dollars worth of equipment that were there ripe for theft and fraud with nearly zero oversight. (fraud was rampant in the store - can honestly say I never engaged, but I was offered the opportunity multiple times).

TigerDirect! That really takes me back. I used to love skimming their catalogs.

It's kind of interesting how every single time that some kind of fraud damages the system, not only is there no effort to fix or revert back to an undamaged version, but the damage is simply allowed to grow and fester as copy-cat fraudster corporate types latch onto the barrier that was breached.

It's literally every single time. Internet "bubble", housing "bubble", "Affordable Care Act" fraud, and the mountain of other frauds committed before and since; including all the various "recovery act" type of Government fraud where the same class of people who commit the fraud and cause the damage, are then the primary beneficiaries being rewarded with billions, approaching trillions now. And that's without even touching on the murderous fraud of the type like the deliberate fraud of the Iraq war.

Just look at the common complaints today regarding work-life, wages, and even supposed staff shortages (the claims of which themselves are fraudulent); they all are directly linked to things like this guy knocking yet another section of the wall out through Sunday workdays that was then never reverted/rolled-back even after the fraud was revealed. Is Chick-fil-A really just a fluke in how efficient and happy it's employees are in spite of the fact that they shut down on Sundays? I sure don't ever think so.

>> It's kind of interesting how every single time that some kind of fraud damages the system, not only is there no effort to fix or revert back to an undamaged version

Enron

The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002

The bill was enacted as a reaction to a number of major corporate and accounting scandals, including those affecting Enron, Tyco International, Adelphia, Peregrine Systems, and WorldCom. These scandals cost investors billions of dollars when the share prices of affected companies collapsed, and shook public confidence in the US securities markets.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal#Sarbanes-Oxley_A...

Sorry to break it to you. SOX has effectively been neutered, defanged, and amputated into little more than a male work type of grift to enrich people itself.

Hrm. So is Crazy Eddie in "The Mote in God's Eye" a reference to this, or are they both a reference to some prior thing?

I was wondering about this too.

Actually, I think there almost must be an earlier common origin. The chain started in 1971 in New York. The book was published in 1974, so probably written in 1973 if not earlier. Neither Niven nor Pournelle lived in New York or anywhere near New York, so it's unlikely to be inspired by the store (unless it became so instantly culturally relevant that everyone knew about it within a year or so, which seems unlikely)...

I mean, maybe it's coincidence and they both just came up with the same name, but that also doesn't seem likely.

If you just want to know, it's Crazy Eddie.

Reminds me of Dell Schanze and Totally Awesome Computers [1] in Utah.

[1] https://www.ksl.com/article/260958/a-look-at-super-dell-scha...

I never knew that the role of “Crazy Eddie” in the series The First Wave [1] was in fact based on a electronics chainstore…

[1]. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160277/

Oh man, I loved that show. Late 1990s Canadian sci-fi is just the perfect blend of cheesy and interesting.

So was Crazy Earnie's Emporium [0] from Brave Little Toaster!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glJgOtyM8k

What's interesting to me is that he started with a successful business model that really did change the industry for the better in a few ways (better hours, better customer service, etc.). The greed and sociopathy turned that into fraud.

As a kid who grew up in New York, I'll never forget those commercials.

The prices are insane!

They actually had decent prices and merchandise. There definitely wasn't any apparent fraud or malfeasance on the consumer level.

Scammed America? Looks like, scammed investors. As far as I understand, clients of this electronic chain were not scammed at all, they get all goods they payed for.

Not gonna lie... thought this was going to be about Radio Shack's rebranding as a crypto scheme.

Guess that will be an article for next year.

Their former CFO has an active twitter account and is fun to follow.

The 80s have not left us, to this day.

My parents bought my first computer (Commodore 128 with printer) from a store in Queens. That singular act got me started down the road of programming and to some degree engineering.

I also believe they purchased an Apple IIe from them far earlier but I can't be certain.

I do remember when the PSU for the C128 failed, they gave us a new one no charge.

Oh the memories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml6S2yiuSWE

Posted on slashdot 13 hours before this…

Is there a point to that comment? Many of us don’t follow slashdot.

Good thing it was posted here then, otherwise I never would have seen it.

I've never, ever understood people pointing out "reposts" like it's some kind of shameful dirty act.

Shameful? No, informative. I haven't checked out slashdot for awhile it is good to know I'm not missing anything.

Slashdot still exists?

lol sure does, though they're usually a few days behind

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