There is/was a band called You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead. 
A friend of mine had his car dashboard completely destroyed by someone who did not succeed in getting the airbags out. Over $1800 worth of damage and the thief walked away with nothing but a few CDs.
This (the convenience store antiperspirant thief, I mean) reminds me of a story a news stand owner told me. Some years ago, Women’s Day & Family Circle magazines had a promotion where each issue had a card insert that allowed one to send away for a free pair of those little corncob holders, the kind that you stick into either end of the ear of corn so you don’t get butter all over your hands, approximate retail value…oh, 25 cents, maybe. Sure enough, he discovered a woman, hidden by the magazine and candy racks, sitting on the floor of the news stand tearing out every corncob insert card from every copy of Women’s Day & Family Circle.
She was very annoyed at being caught, too, he said.
Perhaps it was all a publicity stunt that garnered no publicity because nobody got it!
When I was a kid, my older brother got caught trying to steal a can of string beans from the neighborhood store. My mother was astounded, not so much that he tried to steal something, but he didn’t even like string beans. Turns out his plan was to rid the supply of string beans so that my mother wouldn’t be able to serve any.
Back in the late 80’s, someone broke into my pickup truck. Leaned over the boom box on the passenger seat to steal my “radar detector” - which was actually a cheap (under $5) toy that made various weapon (phaser, ray gun, machine gun) sound effects. I would think they’d have noticed it was a toy the moment they grabbed it and found it weighed almost nothing.
Ah yes, the law of demand and supply.
My copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel got stolen from the waiting room of a doctor’s office once. I forgot it out there when I went in for my appointment, and when I came back it was gone.
A woman at the local drugstore told me that they had to put the Sunday edition of the local newspaper behind the counter because people (plural) would come in and take the coupons out of the papers without buying the paper.
When I was a young guy I cooked in a restaurant. On my way in to work I was in a very minor fender-bender that resulted in no damage to the guy that backed into me, but both the headlights on my MG Midget shattered. It would be late at the end of my shift and I couldn’t drive the car with no lights.
So, a dishwasher whose shift was ending offered to help me out. I gave him all the cash I had and told him the year of my car and the location of the closest auto-parts store. Later that evening he gave me my change and told me he put the lights in!!
My change was what I had given him minus $3.50 that he spent on beer. He had driven around the parking lot until he found another MG Midget.
On the old air-cooled VW bugs and vans, engine theft was actually fairly common. There’s only four bolts that hold the motor on and if you’re cutting the wires and fuel lines instead of removing them it’s practically a smash-n-grab!
The same thing almost happened to Abraham Lincoln’s corpse. Body snatching for medical dissection was fairly common for a long time (see John Scott Harrison), but the Lincoln and Chaplin cases were about extortion.
That happened to me one day at work, except it was the license plate off my motorcycle. It seemed like an odd thing to steal, considering that the tag was about to expire in a month.
I’ve posted this before:
My (well-to-do) aunt was one of the first to get a garbage compactor, decades ago. It crushed all the trash into a nice cube wrapped in a tight plastic sheet, stamped with the manufacturer’s logo.
GE was a well-known maker of consumer electronics…garbage compactor output was less well-known at the time.
This probably accounts for the behavior of the well-dressed man one morning who stopped his car next to the curb where the trash had been put out for pickup, opened his car door, looked around theatrically to see if he was being watched, and then scooped up the nice plastic-wrapped cube with the GE logo and sped off.
Over the years, family gatherings have occasionally been enlivened by speculations about what might have ensued. My favorite theory is that he offered the cube of compressed garbage to his lovely wife as a present.
Nope, not VWs, were American standard box sedans. I would have simply boosted the whole car instead of yanked out engines, removed tires and whatever else they stripped off the cars. Amazing. Van would roll up, bunch of guys jumped out, air tools, jacks and whoops - no engine, tires, anything else they could unbolt or whatnot in 5 minutes then off - there were at least 2 vans working - one would strip and zip off, then the other would show up about 10-15 minutes later after dropping off the last trips stuff. Kept it up for about 4 hours. Stripped pretty much every car on the street. Made me glad we went down on the train and were using taxis!
As Greasy Jack pointed out air cooled VW are the easiest to pull. Best time I have ever seen on a bug in the shop was 15 mins give it take.
If you didn’t give a shit and cut stuff maybe 10.
Any other car parked on the street in 5 minutes?
I don’t see how.
Sorry I gotta call bullshit.
We once had our American flag stolen off of our front porch.
There must not have been a “one per household” limit?
That’s happening a lot more since the “Extreme Coupon” program debuted. :rolleyes:
Didn’t you call the police? And if not, why not?