https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniScribe
> In July 1987, Jesse Parker, director of far east operations, told Wiles that something was amiss. In August, Wiles travelled to Hong Kong and Singapore where he found a complete loss of control. The inventory count from that fall showed that the numbers had grown to $15 million, mostly in Colorado. A report was prepared to consider various solutions, but Wiles suggested that they continue hiding the problem, ordering all copies of the report be destroyed. This led to the company's most infamous cover-up; the managers rented a second warehouse in Colorado, where they personally packed 26,000 bricks into hard drive boxes and shipped them to Singapore in order to shore up the inventory count. After the count was complete, they recalled those serial numbers as defective units, but instead of writing them off, they checked them into inventory, along with other failed drives that had been returned.[6]
Maybe one of the bricks made its way to a store :P
People ran all sorts of scams, most commonly putting a $500 video card in a $20 box. I’d catch them all of the time, but if you reported it you had a chance of losing commissions when loss prevention people interviewed you.
Solution: avoid the aisle.
The other crazy one was what we called the crime bus. A charter bus of Asian people, usually Chinese, would pull up and flood the store with like 30 people on a weekday, pinning down every employee with stupid questions. Another group would loot the aisles of hard disks, various video/other cards and certain inks. I was there for one — it was absolutely insane.
They put that stuff back behind the counter a few months later.
Too bad they went broke! In the 90's, CompUSA was one of the only local places that had a large selection of computer parts.
Also, I wonder how many customers even failed to notice they wound up with an older card. Probably not all of them!
Wait, what? The loss prevention people wanted you to not prevent loss?
Sitting in some windowless office at $5.75 an hour for two hours basically cost me $100-300 in commissions from lost sales.
Those jobs were great in the 90s. One year I paid for my College tuition in the week before Christmas.
Sears didn’t do any checks if anything. You just took your boxed up computer to the back of the store and you got your money back. It was common to pull the RAM and HD from a computer, return it for another, and then you had double the memory and drive space for free.
You couldn’t do that at Best Buy, the Tech bench (before they had the Geek Squad) would inspect your returns. If you wanted to fool us, you’d have to make it look like you never opened the boxes, and put the correct amount of patio bricks in it.
You couldn’t swap video cards or RAM, we checked the model numbers. So you’d have to take the video card over to the appliance department, slice the side of the box with a knife, remove the video card and throw the empty box in a washer or microwave. When the Voodoo 5 came out we found every single one was stolen and the boxes in a freezer that was on display.
We even had a RAM tester that would tell you the speed and size of the chips. We never got one that would do DIMMs, just SIMMs, so as the Pentium II became popular it was less useful.
Now, if you knew someone who worked at the tech bench, you could bring your home PC in for a bullshit service like a $29.99 disk defrag, and you could get it loaded up with memory, disk drives, or hell, you could just stick as many audio CD’s as you could in your tower. Just make sure the case screws are on tight when you leave, or the panel falls off along with whatever you were smuggling out, right in front of the whole store.
Lastly, there was a DEVO area towards the back of the store, basically a dumpster full of returns. I heard they got sold to the lowest bidder, stuff we couldn’t return to the manufacturer for some reason. Memory, hard drives, all kinds of random stuff would end up back there because the computer said so. Anything that could fit in a pocket, people helped themselves to.
I'm surprised Amazon doesn't X-ray incoming merchandise and then use Computer Vision (i.e. face tagging but for objects) to say whether what's inside the box matches what "should" be in there according to a database of SKU X-ray "fingerprints."
That percentage matters less the smaller it gets.
Maybe some rudimentary thermal imagery, and that is the method?
Folks were running scams like this in the 90's. I remember a friend of mine bought a hard drive from CompUSA. Turned out it was actually a brick sealed in a box.