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- Aug 20, 2017
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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?
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?