Unless the store was taking a loss on the $70 item.
My answer is that it’s 30 dollars plus an item with a selling price of 70 dollars.
Answer: The thief is a little person. He can only reach the smaller bills in the register’s cash drawer. On rainy days he can reach the 100s with his umbrella, but then he splurges $70 on a raincoat.
In a group Teams chat at work this went on for YEARS. Now we are an Accounting & Finance group in retail. About the only thing almost all of us agree on is that Accounting rules and procedures will not give you the correct answer.
To me, it’s like trying to get a useful answer in science (especially physics) by neglecting terms that aren’t really meaningful. I’m sure it matters more to an accountant because the books should accurately reflect reality. But I’m of the opinion, especially for dumb clickbait on Facebook, that a basic approximation is close enough to reality for an answer.
What if the $100 was not a theft, but collusion?
Delboy gives Rodney $100 on the understanding that he’ll buy a near-worthless but flashy item for $70 dollars: Rodney can keep the $30 dollar change as his ‘wages’. Delboy goes into his spiel, and at the right psychological moment Rodney pipes up, clamouring to buy the item. Seeing his enthusiasm, several other suckers customers buy the rest of the stock. Delboy bought these items for a dollar each, so he is up a few hundred dollars; Rodney is up $30, and he’s got a near-worthless trinket which he could potentially sell himself.
So, if someone poses a physics question about dropping a cannonball off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and you’re estimating the time it should take to hit the ground, should you ignore air resistance? You don’t know the air temperature, or the humidity, and there may be some weird kind of downdraft that makes the cannonball fall faster than otherwise. Is your best physics answer based on the acceleration rate of Earth’s gravity, or should you say that air resistance will have an effect, even if the effect is unknown based on the information provided in the physics question?
For a first approximation, sure. You can throw in air density, the drag coefficient of a sphere, the Reynolds number, and other things, but it’s only a 185 foot drop.
The best answer is what gets you a useful number in the fastest time. It should take about 3.4 seconds for that cannonball to fall based on a simple calculation of dividing by 16 and then taking the square root of the answer. How much more precision will you get by making it more complicated and, more importantly, will it matter?
No, I don’t think I’ll be doing that. I’ve been on this board a long time and I remember the “Plane on a treadmill” and the “does .9999…=1” threads. I’m aware of dopers propensity to overthink things until they come up with absurd conclusions, and I read enough of this thread to see it happening again.
If the thief steals a hundred dollars, the store is short a hundred dollars. If the thief then makes a purchase, the store is still short a hundred dollars. The only way the store is short less than a hundred dollars is if the thief, perhaps suffering a pang of conscience, slides some of the money back into the register.
No other acts were “wrongful.”
Money is fungible. It doesn’t matter what $100 bill was used for the purchase.
Seems so. He starts the day with $130 and an item. Ends the day with $100 and no stock. What’s required to restore the status quo? $30 and a new thing (price indeterminate)
Plus, I think the point of the riddle was to trick people into overlooking the thief gives back the $100 he just nicked, and so come up with $200. Rather than wallowing about in the minutiae of accounting practices.
This question was deliberately designed to cause dissent. There is correct answer because there is no correct question.
It depends. Someone might know enough about the effect of air resistance to decide it’s effect will be negligible and not worth calculating. Or they may know it’s non-negligible, and that even if the question doesn’t provide the atmospheric data needed to calculate the coefficient of drag, they can get a better answer by looking up Pisa’s mean temperature and humidity and using that in the calculation. Or they could simple say that air resistance will slow the cannonballs fall so the best answer is the gravity only answer plus x seconds due to air resistance, but that x is unknown. What they shouldn’t do is say that air resistance is non-negligible, but it’s going to be ignored because it doesn’t fit in with the answer they want to provide.
This is like the riddle of the $25 hotel room and people insisting that the $1 is missing.
You either have to recognise that the thief made the purchase, or ignore it. You can’t do both. If you recognise that the thief made the purchase, then the store is out $30 plus the cost of the item. If the store made a profit on the sale of the item, that profit reduces the amount that the store has lost, and the answer is less than $100. It’s incorrect to recognise the till loss, but not the profit.
Yup.
If there is an actual crime consisting of “using the money you stole to make a purchase,” I’d love to see that crime and its particulars. I’ve never heard of it, but I could be wrong.
I can recognize it but also recognize that conversations about how much a store loses to a thief do not generally include legitimate purchases, and I can recognize that this was a legitimate purchase. The purchase is a red herring.
To folks that think otherwise, can I ask a couple of questions to explore your thinking?
- Does order matter? Switch the story around: Bob goes to the store and buys the $70 item with a $100 bill. Later, he realizes that the specific bill he used was the one with a heart on it that his beloved wife gave him before she died. The store refuses to let him return the item, and in a fit of pique, he steals the $100 out of the till. Does the fact that he made the purchase have any relevance if it happens first?
- Does elapsed time matter? Casper steals $100 from the store. He’s caught and arrested and made to pay restitution to the store, which he does using some different cash. Some years later, he goes back and spends the original $100 bill at the store. Does that expenditure modify what the store lost? Would it matter if he were never caught?
It just seems so weird to me that folks are counting the expenditure as a relevant aspect of the store. I’ve never heard a store talk about loss to a thief in terms of legitimate purchases.
The actual question from the OP says:
I’d say 100 dollars is a perfectly reasonable answer.
But the question does not actually say “How much did the store lose in the theft?” It asks simply for how much the store lost, and more than that, it happens to explicitly list exactly two interactions of the thief with the store before asking that question. The second interaction, which is to say the purchase, resulted in a marginal profit for the store. Stores are in business in order to sell things, and the margins they make on those sales are what keep them in business. The actual mechanics of this purchase work like any other in that respect.
If we net those two interactions of the thief with the store, we’re going to have a net loss of \$100 - \$x, where x is the margin from the sale. (It’s sensible to make this the actual accounting margin, or we could try to include some more theoretical estimate based on probabilities.)
Trying to include that marginal profit is also a reasonable answer. The thief’s interaction with the store to make this purchase is, after all, explicitly listed. To answer your two questions then.
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No, the order does not matter. If both interactions were written in the question, then I would be tempted to net both interactions.
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Elapsed time also would be irrelevant to me, if the question explicitly listed both interactions despite the time lag between them. I would still be tempted to net both interactions.
A person’s answer to the question is going to depend on how they interpret its meaning. In this case both interpretations seem clearly reasonable to me. And really, a net loss of \$100 - \$x + \$y, where y is the subsequent investigation costs of trying to figure out what happened to the missing money also strikes me as fully reasonable.
In general, I think it’s a salutary exercise to try and figure out what the real costs of something are, when everything is added together.
This is obviously wrong, but I recognize the futility of trying to convince you of that, so I’ll leave this thread.
People are saying that the stock count is correct, because the thief purchased the item instead of stealing it. That’s fine and I agree with that. But the store probably made a profit from the thief’s purchase. If someone is saying that the purchase doesn’t matter, then the stock count doesn’t matter. It’s not giving you any information about the theft. If someone is saying that the stock count matters as it proves the thief didn’t steal the item, then they should also acknowledge the profit the store most likely made on the purchase, even if that number isn’t stated.
If the thief was a horse and the item that was purchased was a trough of water, would that mean that make any difference to the answer of the riddle?
No difference. If you tell this story, then say “how much did the store lose?” I would say $30 and an item priced at $70.
I would say that the store gained from Casper in this scenario. It recouped the original loss, and then he also made another purchase. If he is not caught, but returns and spends the entire original amount then they lost the value of the merchandise. But it depends on how you phrase the question.
In any of these questions if you asked “how much did the store lose in the theft?” or “what would the accounting show was the loss?” then I would say $100.
It’s not wrong to say the answer is $100. But it is wrong to insist it’s the only answer given the statement of the question.
How often does a thief spend the stolen money during the time of the theft?
Since I answered your hypotheticals, perhaps you could answer one of mine.
Scott goes into a store and steals $100 from the register. Then he buys $20,000 worth of merchandise before leaving. How much did the store lose?