There have been a couple of stories on the local news in the past week or so that have given me pause because of the values attributed to stolen goods.
The first story about recovering nearly 3000 pills claimed that each tablet of Oxycodone has a street value of $60-80. Seriously? Who could afford that? Well, I have no idea how much it would really cost, or if you could get high off of a pill, but it sounds wrong. There are a number of cites that give the value as $40. Are the locals being really ripped off, then?
The other story was about a bulldog puppy being stolen from a pet store. They claimed the puppy was worth $3,500. No way. It’s a pet store I go to fairly often, and there’s never been a bull dog puppy there that’s cost more than $1,800. Most of their puppies, regardless of breed are between $1,000 and $1,800. In a decade of stopping into the puppy room every visit, I’ve never seen a puppy there for even as much as $2,500, nevermind $1000 more than that.
Do you think they inflate the value of goods in news stories? And if so, why?? Just to sound more impressive, or for some other reason?
They probably do depending on the context, and when given a range of prices they probably pick the highest one if it suits their purpose. Though in their defense most news outlet reporters are based in New York City, Los Angeles or London. A purebred puppy in any of those markets could easily double the maximum you’d pay anywhere else.
Are you sure it’s the media doing the inflation? Stolen puppy = insurance claim. If the puppy was insured for $3500, despite a retail value of 1800 then the higher value is reported to the media. If a police department does a drug bust, then they will give the media a value that makes them look good.
In their defense, and having been a reporter, I think the news media do the best they can in the time alloted them. Try doing it yourself on a constant deadline and you’ll see what I mean.
There’s no “big table o’ stuff” in the newsroom that lists the going price for everything. Though very cool, that would be nearly impossible to keep track of. And as long as things seem to make sense, there’s not really much point in questioning. If the cops say a heist got away with $10,000 in electronics from Best Buy, that’s a reasonable amount if the culprits had a truck (a few large LCD TVs in the back of a pickup could exceed that easily). If the guys ran off on foot and the store reports a $75,000 loss, you wonder exactly how many diamond-encrusted iPhones they shoved down their pants.
There was a Fark thread a while back (the article is in a paid archive now) that quotes the police as giving a price for marijuana as $800 to $1000 per pound. A few posters commented that $50/oz. seemed very cheap to them, which they noted was odd, since police numbers are generally inflated.
And of course, there’s no set-in-stone price of anything – only what someone’s willing to pay. Insurance value, retail value, street value – you can report what was on the policy or the pricetag, but until someone forks over some cash, worth is only an estimate.
Huh. Around here a pound of pot goes for about $2900-3500 depending on the strain.
As far as inflated claims, I usually see grossly inflated dollar amounts when a bust is reported in the papers. They’ll also report they collected ten times the amount they did, since they’ll count the weight of the whole plant and root ball and not just the salable bud.