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Is there a black market in price scanners?
By adamg on Wed, 10/26/2011 - 9:40am
Dedham and Foxboro police are both looking for a guy who walked into stores and walked out with expensive price scanners.
On Oct. 15, he walked out of the Star Market in Dedham with five scanners, each worth $1,000 apiece, police say. The same day he walked out of the Bed Bath & Beyond in Foxboro with four MC 3000 price scanners, worth a combined total of $6,000, police say.
He didn't even change his clothes between heists, based on the photos supplied by the two departments.
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Comments
What a racket!
He was doing them a favor! $1000-1500 per scanner? For $400 each, they could just buy 64GB iPod Touches and it could do all of their scanning, bluetoothing, etc...AND play their entire music library while it did it! Hell, most of these things are running Motorola hardware. You could probably get the latest Motorola Droid for the same or less and it'd still probably install whatever enterprise software these things are supposedly providing out-of-the-box for their huge upcharge.
Talk about overspecialized crap.
Chill Kaz
It's not overpriced crap - it's cops (or the store owners) pushing bullshit numbers - maybe in order to push the crime into felony territory.
In actuality, price scanners like these cost just a couple hundred bucks a piece. And they are far better suited for these purposes than iPods/Droids/et al general purpose handheld computing devices. They are ruggedized to a significant degree and have firmware and software which is highly optimized and secured.
The thefts are notable for their specificity, not their size.
Artificial ruby is used on
Artificial ruby is used on the scanning surfaces to make them wear much better than other materials. That stuff isn't cheap.
He is actually stealing very
He is actually stealing very sophisticated Mobile POS/inventory devices. http://www.motorola.com/Business/US-EN/Business+Pr...
We can only dream of having these at AE instead of the dinosaur Fujitsus we have, barely running Windows CE.
Sophisticated yes, expensive...not so much
MC 3000s retail for about $250. In large quantities (like Star/BB&B would be buying them) they are probably closer to @$175.
I didn't say they were
I didn't say they were expensive, but thanks for posting the actual numbers for others who might not be familiar with the industry.
To be more specific
They normally cost exactly $189.99, but your frequent-shopper discount brings that to $175.99.
...
Forget I said that.
They aren't cheap
I used to work for a company that wrote software for these things. There is a reason they're expensive. We tried doing a project with consumer hardware and it wasn't a pretty sight. There really is a difference.
1) Everything on the device is ruggedized, usually needing the ability to be dropped from a certain height a number of times, being somewhat waterproof, etc.
2) The market for these devices is small, so each device is pricey. Tech changes happen so fast they have to constantly redesign them to keep up with the consumer industry. So yeah the iPhone sells in the millions, these probably sell in 10x-100x fewer.
3) They have to integrate with specific peripherals, like printers, RFID scanners, etc.
4) Adding bluetooth, GPS, to the base platform etc. drives the price up.
That said the police are probably quoting the retail price for the things, when you negotiate with Motorola you get a much better deal.
No, the police weren't quoting retail prices
I currently work in the handheld/ubiquitous computing industry, and have for a couple decades. The numbers mentioned in earlier posts are correct. These devices retail for a fraction of what the police/store owners are claiming. It's a case of someone trying to make this into a bigger deal than it actually is.