Home Insulation
It is probably confusing to you because you are trying to find a logical answer. While it is true that sometimes people steal because they are so poor that they have nothing to exchange for what they need to survive. But real criminals don't steal for survival reasons. They do not want to exchange something of value for what they need. They prefer to steal. The world is full of such people. I have known quite a few.
Here is one example out of many :
I once had a job selling home insulation. I got so many cancellation of my sales that it didn't make sense. So I went back to some of the people who had cancelled and asked them what had cause them to do it. The first one I talked to told me that my boss had come to his house and told him that the papers had been made out incorrectly and he needed to correct them to comply with the law, so he told the customer to sign the 3-day recision form on the back of the contract and sign a new contract, which he did.
This cancelled my sale, and the owner of the company then wrote out a completely new contract under his own name, and kept the commission for himself.
Naturally, I spent the rest of the day visiting other recent sales that had cancelled. All of them told me the same story.
So I walked into the boss's office and told him what I had found out. He started yelling at me, threw his walnut and brass name block at me and actually stood on the top of his desk shouting at me, called me a liar and told me he was going to call the police if I didn't get out. I should have told him to do so and filed charges against him, but I was too timid. He later called up the contractors' licensing board and filed a mendacious criminal complaint against me. Unfortunately, I didn't find out until several years later after this criminal creep had disappeared.
That was not the only time I had an eye-opening unpleasant experience with a criminal, just the most violent and dramatic one. When I was in Basic Training out in the desert, back in 1952, I got called back to base to do some photography for an officer, and one of my fellow Basic Trainees gave me ten dollars and asked me to go to the PX while I was there and buy him several cases of candy bars. Butterfingers, Babe Ruths, etc. Naive me did it. Such candy bars sold for 5 cents each in the PX, and less than that by the carton. So brought him a huge bag of candy, and he sold them to the soldiers out there in the cactus who were living on nothing but the boring fare of C-Rations, for $1.00 each. I think he made a couple hundred dollars or more on it. I know that a lot of people think that is just the way a good business man thinks, but in my opinion, that is how a criminal thinks.
Con artists are a special case of criminal who work on the criminal streak in weaker characters. There were some of them who used to work around the main passenger railway station in Stuttgart. Buying PX cartons of cigarettes from newly arrived soldiers with Ostmarks. Ostmarks were the currency of the DDR ... Russian occupied East Germany . The soldiers thought they were making money, but they were being had by their own little larcenous hearts, because the value of an Ostmark was a small fraction of a Bundesmark ... the West German Mark.
And so on. I could go on. I have no use and no sympathy for criminals.
Doug