[scrollaway]

(Replying to the dead comment)

People are bloodthirsty because stealing packages is so much more personal than, say, shoplifting. The mail is personal. The shit you get shipped is personal. Especially around christmas. "Who the fuck steals the gift for my nana?"

And it's like, people don't usually even know what they're stealing. There's a damage&reward imbalance between the person who loses something of great potential sentimental value (it's not always amazon packages, sometimes it's stuff people send each other), just so that some petty thief has a shot at having something they care about / can make a profit on.

I'm with everyone else on this, fuck people who steal packages. Those and bike thieves.

[soneil]

It seems sensible enough to me. If you steal $item from a shop, you're a shoplifter. You stole it from an abstract corporation. If you take the same $item from /my/ doorstep, you stole it from /me/.

I don't eat the losses, Amazon do. So technically you stole it from them. But just as my insurance company eat the losses if you steal my car, I'm still going to internalize it as "you stole my $item." And I can't help but judge that much more harshly than shoplifting from some faceless name.

[mikeash]

It’s also just plain inconvenient. Shoplifting doesn’t affect me as a customer at all, aside from the ambient rate eventually being reflected in prices. But when my package gets stolen, I have to report it and get a replacement sent out, wait for it, hope that one doesn’t get stolen....

It’s small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but it’s definitely more than retail theft.

[masonic]

  stealing packages is so much more personal than, say, shoplifting

When it occurs at my house, and my name and address the thief clearly knows, it magnifies personal risk in a way that shoplifting doesn't.

[0db532a0]

Who knows. He doesn’t have to know the specific value. Maybe the thief has analysed the data in some way and has calculated the expected value of a package.