Let me say as an Accountant (and a Retail Accountant at that), Accounting costs often deviate from economic costs.
Are you saying the mistake is in putting a cost on the item, or in assuming that the store will make a profit on the sale of the item? If it’s the former, then it was only for the purpose of the example. If it’s the latter, then I think it’s a fair assumption. Most things a store sells are for a profit. Likewise, most stores keep enough of an item in stock to support their order cycle and not sell out. It’s a bigger assumption to assume that a sale was inevitable, than to assume it wasn’t.
I am wondering whether the $70 was on sale from $150, and if a billionaire was about to walk into the store and, seeing the item on sale, buy out the entire stock of the store in an unprecedented windfall, prevented from doing so only by the thief’s earlier purchase of the item.
I mean, as long as we’re introducing unknown variables into the problem, and not just answering the freaking question with the information we’re given.
Yes. They lost $100 from their till. Then a sale happened; since we don’t know anything about the Platonic value of the item, or about the accounting spreadsheet, or about the thief’s intention to purchase the item, or about anyone else’s intention to purchase the item, or about a freak lightning storm that’s about to set the store ablaze destroying all their inventory, or about the owner’s plan to take that item home and give it to her sickly child to comfort the child in his misery, or anything else, we may justly ignore the sale as a red herring in the riddle.
The riddle may reasonably be answered as $100. There’s no other reasonable answer except “Unknowable.” So let’s answer it with the reasonable answer.
You contend that there are two reasonable answers, but you suggest that we answer it with “the” reasonable answer?
It could be $100. It could be any amount less than that down to $30. Therefore the answer cannot be expressed in a dollar amount because of the ambiguous definition of “loss/lost” and the facts surrounding the owner’s cost, expected profit, demand for the product, current stock, and his ability to reorder it.
However it can be answered as I have repeatedly done. The loss is $30 plus the value, however one wants to definite value, of the item that was priced at $70. That is a more precise and correct answer, and is far from “unknowable.”
Two completely separate and unrelated events have occurred.
$100 dollars was stolen from the till, stop.
Later a legitimate purchase was made using $100 dollars. The amount of the purchase is irrelevant, the amount of change back is irrelevant. Where the money for the purchase came from is irrelevant. The thief might just as well have pulled a different $100 from another pocket. The purchase has nothing to do with the original crime, which was:
$100 dollars was stolen from the till.
True. And yet, that’s not what the question asked.
Why do we stop there? The thief engaged in further wrongful acts which form the basis of the owner’s loss.
Ok, reviewing the question still leads to the same conclusion. The store is out $100 that was stolen. The purchase is irrelevant to the crime. In a separate action a legitimate purchase was made using legal tender.
Doesn’t matter where the money came from, the cost of the item, the markup of the item, the store’s real inventory cost of the item, the change returned, all have no bearing on what the store is out monetarily. It is misdirection to even consider the two, separate actions as being related, they are not. The store is out $100.
How was the purchase legitimate? It was done by duping the owner. It was a larceny by trick. The owner did not know it was his own money being used for the purchase. There is nothing legitimate about that purchase.
It is a legitimate purchase using the price posted by the store and using legal tender. How was the store duped? They got the real money that they asked for the item. There is nothing wrong at all about the purchase, nothing fraudulent occurred.
It was a completely separate transaction from the crime of stealing the $100 in the first place. Linking the two, separate actions makes no sense at all.
Please explain what was fraudulent about the purchase.
He did not say there were two reasonable answers.
Do you often change people’s words when you’re in court too?
This is ridiculous. I haven’t read and won’t read the whole thread. The answer is simpleand was given in the first couple of posts. If the thief steals $100, the store is short $100. It doesn’t matter if the thief uses the hundred to buy a lamp. Hopefully the store sells many lamps and whatever else it sells. They are still short a hundred. At closing time, when the clerks count the money they have and compare it to the money they should have, they will be short one hundred dollars. That’s it. That’s the answer. The whole business of the thief buying a lamp is just smoke being blown to distract from the obvious correct answer.
They asked for “real money” that was not previously stolen from them. That is implicit. The store was very obviously duped.
Let’s pretend the item vs. money distinction makes a real difference. Say a car. Say that this item was a gun. Say there are increased penalties for stealing a car/gun vs. stealing money. Do you really think that a crook can structure his theft in this meaningless way to escape the larger penalties? If not, then why do you view the theft of this item as a “legitimate purchase”?
Does anyone think that result would hold up in court? I didn’t steal a gun, I merely stole money out of the gun shop’s register and then legally and legitimately bought the gun? Any takers on how that case comes out?
And before anyone says that I am making up details because this is not a car or a gun, I am merely illustrating that the object of the theft, however creatively done, is the item itself and not the money. The money was merely a means to wrongfully acquire the item and therefore when analyzing loss or the object of the theft, it is directed where common sense says it should be: the item, not the initial machination of the thief who attempts to conceal the object of his crime by using many steps.
Of course it does because the question asks about the loss resulting from the thief’s actions. So you look at the totality of the thief’s actions. It doesn’t matter if the thief did it in one step or 100 steps; the loss is the same.
Your solution allows for a different outcome based on the different iterations of the overall con, even though the result remains the same. That’s silly.
You really should read the rest of the thread, because it’s been illustrated many times why this is not the only valid way of looking at it. It is certainly a valid answer, or the answer from a certain perspective. But it is definitely not the only answer.
The answer to the riddle, based on the two transactions listed in the riddle, the theft and the purchase, is $30 + $x where $x is the inventory value of the item that was purchased. Any answer besides that requires making an assumption not provided by the riddle. Just because the value of x is unknown doesn’t make the $30 + $x answer unreasonable.
For everyone stating that the loss is $100, my question to you is what would have happened if the thief had never walked into the store? Are you saying that the store would be $100 ahead? You can only conclude that if you make the assumption that the sale was inevitable. That assumption isn’t supported by the riddle, nor is it supported by normal retail practices.
What the what? The opposite of a $100 loss isn’t a $100 profit. It’s $0 loss. If the thief hadn’t walked into the store, the store wouldn’t gain or lose anything.
If there are two reasonable answers–“$100 loss” and “unknowable,” depending on assumptions–clearly the assumption that allows you to know the answer is a superior one. That’s how riddles work, the Occam’s Razor of puzzles.
Otherwise, we get this:
Q. Brothers and sisters have I none, but that man’s father is my father’s son. Who is that man in relation to me?
A1: My son.
A2: Maybe I “have” no brothers or sisters, but I “had” one, making that man my nephew; or maybe I’m a member of a cultural group that considers “brothers and sisters” not to be strictly genetic relationships, unlike fathers and sons, and so the answer to this riddle is unknowable.
$0 is ahead of -$100 by $100. I’m explicitly comparing two situations, one where there is neither theft nor purchase, and one where there’s both. I find it mind-boggling that, after all the discussion in this thread, you concluded that I was talking about $100 profit if the thief had never walked in the store. Likewise, even if after you mistakenly jumped to that conclusion, why didn’t you take a few seconds to consider what I probably meant by “$100 ahead” before replying as you did?
I find it rather hilarious that this has gone for 200 posts. For me, $100 ($30 in cash and $70 in a shoplifted item) is a fine first approximation. A more correct answer along those lines is $30+X, where X is the total cost of the item to the store. That general accounting principles answer that the books show a $100 loss in the register while the inventory is correct (further elaborated with corrections to shrinkage and the like as needed) is fine as well, but starts getting more complicated to the point that there are too many unknowns to write a meaningful answer with the information available other than to throw a number of variables representing various categories at it. In any case, $100 has to be the upper bound in any of those answers.