You said in your post prior to this that it made all the difference and was why I was wrong.
I said you were wrong that the shopkeeper would find an item missing.
It was there before the thief’s actions. It is not there now. Call it “not missing” or a “purchase” or any other descriptive term. It is a loss to the store due to the thief’s actions which is what the question asked.
Here is an equivalent scenario:
The thief walks into the store during business hours and purchases the $70 item with a $100 (getting $30 change). Later that night be breaks in steals the $100 back.
Do you still think the shopkeeper finds an item missing in the morning?
Most stores these days make a record of every single purchase.
There will be an item no longer on the shelf, and a record showing the sale. Hardly ‘missing’.
No, there will be $100 cash missing from the till. The sold item isn’t ‘missing’, and it does not matter how you value it.
Look, the shop had 10 shirts in stock. The thief buys a shirt with stolen money. The store now has 9 shirts in stock, a record of the sale, and some money in the till from the purchase. They haven’t lost the shirt in any way.
No, but you are changing the scenario and it isn’t equivalent. In your scenario, the thief is bring outside money into the store. The net loss there is $100 because the owner was now able to fully collect the value of the item making that a known, unambiguous quantity. What he lost was then $100.
When the item is simply stolen, we still don’t know the true loss of value in the item.
Another scenario: Forget the $30 because it makes it too confusing. The thief breaks in and steals the $70 item. Is it different if he first goes to the register, takes $70, then “purchases” the item and replaces the $70? The loss is the item and we don’t know the value of the loss.
You have a widget. You are selling it for $70. We don’t know without more information how much money you will actually “lose” if it is stolen. Agreed? It could be that you lose $70. It could be that you lose less than that because we are talking about only your cost and it is a lost volume item that you can easily reorder. Agreed? We just don’t know.
But however we value the loss, you would agree that it doesn’t change if I take $70 out of your wallet and then put it back. And I think you would agree that it doesn’t change the amount of loss even if I stomp my feet and demand that you call the removal and replacement of the $70 a purchase.
Completely different situation to the puzzle. The widget wasn’t stolen. It was bought with stolen money.
Why is this distinction important to the store?
Let’s try this: I sell widgets for $70. My cost is $50. I sell about 25 per day. I have 40 in the store room.
A thief comes in and steals one widget. I notice it and reorder one extra the next time. My customers are able to purchase all they want and I make the same amount of profits on sales. You would agree that I am short $50 on the theft of the widget.
Is it your contention that this changes if the thief takes the intermediate step of removing $70 from the register, “purchasing” the widget, and replacing the $70? How does that change anything?
You seriously don’t understand he difference to the store if the item is purchased, Vs the item is stolen?
If the item is “purchased” with the store’s own stolen money, then there is no difference between that and stealing the item. Explain how it is different.
If the thief takes $500 out of the register, then “purchases” my widget, and puts the $500 back in the register should I go shake his hand because he gave me well above asking price? Should I think of expanding or inviting more thieves in for “purchases”?
I’ll repeat a question I ked earlier.
Suppose a thief steals $100 from Baxter’s Bookstore, then spends $70 in Sam’s Shoe Shop. Has Sam ‘lost’ $70 from the sale?
Or has Sam ‘lost’ a $70 pair of shoes?
You are adding a third party. To Sam, this is no different than any other purchase. Money came from outside the store and into Sam’s pocket. Not from Sam’s pocket and back into it.
Let’s look at different scenarios.
A: a thief takes a $100 bill from the till. At the end of the day, the till is shown as being short $100 and the store records it as a “missing” and their accounting will need to handle it however they do, but it will be considered a cash loss, correct?
Actually, let’s see if we agree with that.
Yes. If I understand correctly, a thief steals a $100 bill from a store. The store has lost $100. I agree.
Right, specifically the store shows a loss of $100 cash from the till.
Next, if someone else purchases an item for $70 with their own $100 bill and receives $30 in change and takes the item out of the store, the store does not show a loss, correct?
I meant to ask you to verify the following;
It depends on how you define loss. In a normal sale, the store receives $100, records that they have one less item in stock, and also records that they’ve made a profit on the sale. For a theft, when someone becomes aware of the missing item such as during a periodic stock check, the store records that they have one less item in stock, and also records the cost of that item as a shrinkage expense. In either case, the store has reduced it’s stock by one item.
In the riddle, the shrinkage expense isn’t recorded because the item wasn’t stolen. However, the store did reduce it’s stock by one item. If you look at the net result of both the theft and the purchase, the store is reduced by $30 and one item. It’s just semantics whether or not you call that reduction a loss.
The money used to purchase the item is real money. From the point of view of the purchase how the buyer got the money doesn’t matter, the item was paid for with real money.
Now, when dragging someone into court that might be a different matter - I’m not a lawyer (you are). But from the standpoint of the store’s finances real money is real money and can be used to make purchases. On the bookkeeping side of the store the loss to the store is $100, not a hundred dollars+the cost of the stolen item+$30 change.
How would you define “loss” in the case where an unrelated customer comes in and purchases a product for $70, assuming that the retail price is greater than the cost to the store. Leave aside any theft of money. Leave aside any complications of the thief being the person who purchased the item in the OP.
For the purpose of my question to @UltraVires if an ordinary customer purchases a product at it’s listed retail price, assuming that there is a gross profit built into the retail price, does the store suffer a “loss”?