Under the Wire: The fabric of society

OPINION: If you will allow me to be a bit serious for a moment, I’d like to use this column to draw your attention to a rapidly spreading blight on our national landscape.
 
A blight that, if left unchecked, threatens to undermine the very rules and structures by which our society is governed.
 
The blight I’m referring to is cheap DVD players.
 
I’ll just take a step back before I continue, to fill you in on some background info. A couple of years ago my home was robbed. A DVD player, a camcorder and a bag of mobile phones were taken (yes, a bag of them -- I was reviewing them for a magazine). The person who committed the crime was caught, but not before my goods (and the phones, which weren’t mine) had been sold to help support my burglar’s drug habit.
 
Now, I know that this fellow wasn’t very experienced in the retail game, because despite stealing my DVD player he didn’t take a single DVD. As any of you know, there’s nothing like a little value-add to seal the deal, and I’m sure many of the titles in my collection would have made a nice bundle. Maybe he threw in a free mobile phone.
 
Which brings me back to cheap DVD players. A few days ago I was glancing at a catalogue from one of the large electrical discounters, and the front page special was a DVD player for $65. You read that right, there are no digits missing: sixty-five dollars. I paid more than that in GST on my current player.
 
I don’t recall the brand (things get recycled pretty efficiently around here since we got a baby), but I do know I’d never heard of it. Some apparently random string of letters that may or may not be pronounceable. Where it was built, I don’t know. What sort of quality I might expect of it, I don’t know. What sort of warranty it carries, I don’t know.
 
You see what I’m getting at? This DVD player for $65 is appealing to exactly the same sort of customer that my burglar was relying on: people who buy entirely on price and care not a whit for provenance.
 
Given the kind of deals you can get on a mobile phone these days (providers practically pay you to take handsets from them) I can’t imagine the back-of-a-truck market for mobile phones is particularly profitable either.
 
The only selling advantage remaining for the habit-supporting seller is convenience -- you can buy stolen goods without leaving the pub.
 
Here’s the problem. There is an unspoken understanding going on between the thieves, the police, the insurance companies and the victims of break-ins. The thieves steal stuff, the police fill in reports and the insurance companies reimburse the victims. The thieves sell the stuff down the pub for less than the insurance companies paid for it, and (hopefully) no-one gets hurt. Every once in a while one of the dumber thieves gets caught (my guy left fingerprints on either side of a window he broke, in such a way that no-one other than the person who broke the window could have got them there) and the police get some good PR. It’s a circle of life thing.
 
If Bing Lee or Retravision or whoever it was is going to start offering $65 DVD players, the system breaks down. The customers take less risk by buying things legally and the thieves have no ready market.
 
What then? Think about this if ever you’re held up at knifepoint just after using an ATM. If only DVD players were expensive, such crimes might not be necessary.
 
Thankfully, computers remain pricey. Even on razor-thin margins, the unit price of a computer is greater than the overheads involved in being a burglar, so the burglars will always be able to offer a better deal than you.
 
Just be sure to tell your customers to leave their purchases near open windows.

commentary opinion security under the wire