by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Stolen goods get sold to law-abiding Americans by third-party vendors on big ecommerce sites that profit from it. Legislation to control it struggles.
It’s a big profitable business across the US because the cost of the merchandise is zero: Organize a bunch of people via the social media, raid a store and and run out, arms-full of merchandise, and then sell this stuff into specialized distribution channels from where it gets sold by third-party vendors on some of the best-known ecommerce platforms in the US, such as eBay and Amazon and many others.
Shares of Best Buy [BBY] plunged 12.4% today after the company’s earnings call, during which it discussed a laundry list of headwinds and pressures on its gross profit margins, which, for US sales, fell 60 basis points to 23.4%, “primarily driven,” as CFO Matt Bilunas put it, by product damages and returns compared to last year, lower margins of services, and the infamous “inventory shrink.”