Possible setting:

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DuncanClinch

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The setting is a thrift store that is ostensibly run for the benefit of military veterans, but the prices are far from what you’d expect for a used-goods store.

The people who run the store are all Asian in one form or another.

Each piece of merchandise in the store has an individual price tag. The price tags are color-coded red, blue, yellow, green and white. Every day 3 of the colors are discounted either 50% or 75%. But, regardless of what day you go to the store there is very little merchandise with that day’s color discount. Colors that are absent one day will be present in abundance on other days, but then merchandise for the other colors will be missing. The store has a large warehouse so it would be very easy to take merchandise off the sales floor and replace it with other merchandise.

The store does not take checks or credit cards or even debit cards. Everything is cash-only, and the store has an ATM machine onsite for the convenience of the customers.

So what kind of scam could this store be that would make it a good setting for a mystery/espionage story? If somebody went undercover as a shopper or store employee, what should they be looking for? Could the color price tags be used to send coded messages in some way?
 

KTC

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Because I am using a real-world example. This thrift store actually exists where I live.

And the Asians who run the store IRL are in fact scammers?

This is smelling a bit acrid to me.
 

Twick

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The only sort of scam I can see is that if the store is cash-only, one or more of the people involved could be pocketing some of the proceeds. That would be a scam primarily on whoever the store's owner was.

While it might be slightly manipulative to remove stock with the discount from the floor, the main reason stores give discounts in the first place is to encourage sale of product. If they don't want to give a discount, they don't have to. Promising good deals on, say, green-tagged items but removing them from stock would likely just result in annoyed patrons who would next time go to shop where prices are lower.

I suppose you could have some sort of code in the colours of the tag, but I really can't see a thrift store having any intelligence of value. If it did, there are lots of easier ways information could be communicated than by moving around a whole store's-worth of inventory on a daily basis.
 
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