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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

The question is, where is the food and beverage going to? Containers don't have $214k of a balanced variety of foods, they have thousands of boxes of cereal. No thief is eating their way through a shipping container's worth of cereal.

Prior articles (e.g. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/the-fight-against-stolen-pro... ) have written about how Amazon is turning into a semi-legitimate fence for stolen goods; the seller-thief can list the stolen goods, ship to an Amazon warehouse, where Amazon provides the marketplace for a cut of the proceeds. The FTC may not care enough about Amazon turning into a front for counterfeit goods; will the FTC finally wake up and target Amazon for dealing in stolen goods?

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The thieves sell to local independent stores that don't care that their wholesale price is too good to be true. That allows you to move low margin and short self life consumables without having to deal with Amazon.

There's an entire world of stores that sell "expired," discontinued, and massively discounted stuff. It's the stage after things have made their way through the Walmarts and Dollar Generals of the world.

edit: DavidPeiffer correctly notes the air quotes. Packaging uses all kinds of phrasing to indicate when the manufacturer moves all responsibility to the store and the consumer.

Wow, it's legal to sell expired food in the US?

Most food items have "sell by" dates that has very little to do with expiration. In fact a lot of food doesn't really expire at all if properly stored.

>In fact a lot of food doesn't really expire at all if properly stored.

I would have to argue with the use of the word food here. We have been convinced items available in grocery stores is food, when it is really highly processed ingredients with loads of preservatives presented as food. I consider food the items sold along the exterior walls of the stores (at least in typical US store layouts).

It depends on the state and how the date is worded. You may have noticed some products list a 'best by' date, which really isn't the same as 'this will have gone bad by this date'. I think 'use by' is the magical phrase which implies something has expired.

There's one of those stores near me, and as far as I've seen, they typically sell stuff near the expired date, not past it. Most consumers are turned off by buying truly expired foods.

Note the parent said "expired". We don't have the best labeling standards. Rather than saying "Expires 3/25/2023", food could say any of:

* "Consume or freeze by 3/25/2023"

* "Do not use after 3/25/2023"

* "Packed on 3/25/2023"

* "Best by 3/25/2023"

* "Sell by 3/25/2023"

* "Use by 3/25/2023"

My understanding is anything consumed inside a restaurant or factory preparing food must use food that is not expired, and that's something inspectors check for.

PDF with more detail on Page 3: https://foodbankiowa.org/app/uploads/2022/03/Shelf-Life-of-F...

It's not technically `expired`, it's `best before date`.

Yes, absolutely legal. For example, you can get an MSRP $1.89 can of Progresso Chicken Noodle at a store in Chattanooga Called "Discovery Outlet" for $0.25.

And it’s perfectly fine to eat well after that date.

It’s in the interest of the manufacturer to keep that “expiration” date as short as possible. Unlike with medication, there is no actual rule for when food expires.

It depends a lot on the food.

Typically, canned food is practically immortal. If there's no bulge, it's good and modern canning has done a lot to avoid the bulge.

Dried foods are somewhat similar, though they go rancid more readily. If you are in a super dry climate they last longer.

Foods that need refrigeration, in my experience, tend to be super close to the use by/best by dates when it comes to going bad. Exceptions are things with a lot of vinegar in them (ketchup or pickles for example). Milk, though, seems to curdle right on the the date.

An example of an exception to your last point is eggs. In the US* the eggs could have been in a refrigerator for a week or up to a year before being sent to the supermarket.

* I don’t know if this is still the case with the current 2023 high price of eggs. There has been a lot of monopoly/consolidation in eggs and it’s unclear what’s really going on.

FYI, ketchup does not require refrigeration. (How do you think restaurants keep bottles of ketchup on the tables all day otherwise?)

Seems reasonable to assume it'll last longer in the fridge though.

Also ketchup at restaurants probably has to be refilled daily, at worst weekly, merely from customers using it.

I've seen this similarly when I accidentally put a can of something in my pantry rather than the fridge, but it still keeps for a long time.

The point of canning is that refrigeration it not required. In fact it preceded refrigeration by about a century.

I meant an open can.

If you have an open can then all bets are off - if out for more than a few hours (or definitely if overnight) safest to toss it. Canning only preserves as long as the can is sealed!

You can keep butter for a long time in room temperature if it is submerged in water (e.g. in a pot). It also spreads really well, but your bread may get wet if you are not careful.

Something that I learnt in post-1989 Czechoslovakia when we cut down on our electricity bill by turning the fridge off for weeks :) Ancient knowledge of my grandma who grew up in eastern Slovakia without any electricity served us well.

From memory, does butter not float in water?

Also, according to my circuit monitor: using three fridges full-time accounts for about 4% of my total monthly usage [FYI, Gramms].

You can "glue" it to the bottom, it is sticky enough to catch and stay.

Fridges made behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s were a lot more power-hungry than today and our specimen had some non-tight seals on top of it. Buying a new one was out of question, our budget back then wouldn't support it.

Or just put something heavier on top

On the other hand, who doesn't have an Amazon account these days? Selling to a local independent store (especially these days when Safeway/Albertsons/Ralphs /Whole Foods dominates the landscape) means actually finding unscrupulous market owners and convincing them to take your product. And it's not like they have a warehouse to hold $200k worth of cereal either. Meanwhile, all you need to participate in FBA is an identity that hasn't been banned yet.

The other thing is though, this isn't jewelry and cocaine, it's cereal and baby formula. They could just, y'know, give it away. It isn't always about the money, especially if you're poor, and if you're poor, you know other poor people, and everyone can use a little bit of help. With food prices up, giving away a lot of free cereal makes you a lot of friends. Not as much as free cocaine does, maybe, but people still appreciate what you can give them.

Thieves aren't some cartoon villains, they exist among us other humans.

They are selling it online

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/the-fight-against-stolen-pro...

>Amazon , eBay and Facebook are the places where these stolen goods are being sold, and critics say they’re not doing enough to put an end to the racket. The companies disagree.

It doesn’t work much if you’re selling individual stolen items but if you steal a truckload of something the FTC or whoever would be reasonable in requesting that lot codes/serial numbers/whatever identifying information be checked against a list of stolen items.

Some countries (eg. Thailand) have a centralised government system for managing this.

On every receipt, by law, is a unique barcode encoding the shop and purchase value. That barcode, when scanned, leads to a government webpage (and doing your taxes involves scanning each barcode for anything deductible, so many of the receipts get scanned).

On that webpage, occasionally they ask for a photo of the best before label of the goods. The best before date usually includes the lot number.

Now, the government has a list of lots of serial numbers and associated retailers. They can now easily punish those who regularly sell stolen goods.

Is cash still the dominant means of exchange in Thailand? If the discounted price of the good covered the potential deductible amount then no receipt would be needed.

Lots of people still want the receipt.

I suspect there are both undercover sellers and buyers to find buyers willing to buy without a receipt, or sellers willing to sell without a receipt.

> doing your taxes involves scanning each barcode for anything

So a dystopian police surveillance-state?

Thanks but no thanks. The socially optimal amount of theft is not zero.

I think you already live in that... Credit card networks already know everything you buy, and will happily hand that info over to government.

At least this way you get the benefits of it.

Not quite, card networks only know transaction level information if the merchant processing the card transaction passes back level 3 data. Merchants only pass level 3 data to secure a processing % discount on network fees. This data can be used to mine user behavior by the card companies, and unless you opt-out of Visa/Mastercard's data mining program at the card level, they do this.

I was under the impression that the vast majority of merchants do this though...

And any that don't still need to keep records for tax purposes, and the authorities could still request that anytime and without your knowledge.

It is frequent that news reports say "attacked with a hammer purchased by the defendants credit card earlier the same day". So it appears the facility to search card payments is fairly widely used.

Most merchants do _not_ send level 3 data. For the most part it’s only sent on travel related transactions or for government vendors.

>It is frequent that news reports say "attacked with a hammer purchased by the defendants credit card earlier the same day". So it appears the facility to search card payments is fairly widely used.

Not really, because the search could have happened in the opposite direction (eg. they ask the store for a list of transactions that were made with the suspect's card). I doubt they're asking visa/mastercard to give them a list of all hammers sold in the past month.

> Credit card networks already know everything you buy

I didn’t know this.

Let’s say I buy advil, condoms, and dish soap with my capital one Visa card at Walgreens. What information does Walgreens share with visa and/or capital one? I just assumed the name of merchant and the total amount charged was all they needed?

I remember back when I was younger, I’d often see adults requesting the cashier to charge this much on one card, this much on another, bringing out four or five cards. Do all these banks/ card processors get a full list of items sold?

Somehow I doubt it - I would honestly consider it a feature if I could look on my credit card statement and have an explanation around why I spent $22 at 7/11 on the 12th.

There are 3 levels of data shared from the merchant to the card networks. Level 3 is the highest which does contain item level detail.

That tends to only be sent on hotel or airline transactions or when working with government accounts.

Generally speaking the merchants and card networks have very antagonistic relationships. The big merchants know that their sales data is valuable and won’t share it without incentives. The credit card networks do offer lower interchange rates for sending level 3 data but it still hasn’t seen a lot of uptake.

If the retailer keeps a record of the receipts, the government can ask for them since they have the payment reference from the credit card company.

Until its your store that goes under because of theft. And you can't pay for your kids' education or medical bills or food or rent. And then you turn around and you beg for a dystopian UBI government where everybody gets free everything and we all eventually become government-subsidized vegetables on life-support, useful only as fertile incubation vessels to pop out the next round of vegetables.

> “And then you turn around and you beg for a dystopian UBI government”

You seem to have mixed dystopian and utopian.

It is only utopian if everything you happen to be into is what the current power is into.

We don't really have receipts anymore here in the USA. I mean, we're supposed to, but it's on thermal paper, but everyone's printer is broken, and they'll try to send it in email, but oh the images are broken too, and the link expired after 29.25 days anyway. Proof of purchase is necessary for refunds. No refunds.

We don’t have national business registration either.

This already happens and its called LeadsOnline. When someone reports something stolen the serial number gets added to it. Pawn shops in most states are required to use it or something similar before they buy an item. eCommerce marketplaces do not have that requirement in most places. LeadsOnline does partner with eBay however.

This obviously doesn't answer your question at scale, but lots of stolen "common" goods like cereal and deodorant are sold at places like this: http://www.northpointfleamarket.com/

Could stores that are fronts for money laundering buy at inflated prices?

Seems like valuable food cargo is gonna be stuff like liquor.

Booze probably has better grey market value than most perishable items.

Which analysts or industries consider liquor to be a foodstuff?

If it makes you happy find and replace everything ”food” in the comments with “Food and beverage.”

> . No thief is eating their way through a shipping container's worth of cereal.

Resell online or even on street.

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