Let’s say you’re a multi-national corporation worth billions upon billions of dollars. Your business is built on an empire of discount retail establishments, most of which are so large one could get lost inside. Your stores, in fact, contain more items than actually exist in reality, all of which (both the real and the theoretical) are priced at low, low prices and ready to move.

Now, sure, you have to deal with the problem of shrinkage. Not of the George Costanza variety, but the kind that entails product leaving your stores without an exchange of money taking place. Theft is a real problem, especially if the thefted item happens to cost a couple thousand dollars like, say, a laptop computer might. The solution, it turns out, is simple. Put out for sale empty boxes.

Most would think such a strategy couldn’t possibly exist, let alone have unintended positive consequences, but you’d be wrong. It seems three men in Chandler, Arizona, purchased a laptop from a local Wal-Mart. Apparently not realizing they had bought the lightest laptop this side of an Apple thinbook, the men left the store with what they would later claim was an empty box. Low and behold, Chandler police were called when the three men returned with an empty box, claiming a laptop was never in it. Long story short, when police arrived, one of the men made a run for it tossing away what turned out to be forged credit cards in the process. Wal-Mart’s shrinkage-protection scheme strikes again, only this time thwarting a Phoenix-wide credit card forgery ring instead of a simple shoplifter.

And the best part:

Store employees later discovered they had indeed sold an empty box to the three men.

Walmart Sells You An Empty Box Instead Of A Laptop—But You Bought It With Stolen Credit Cards [The Consumerist]

It’d be nice of the Wal-Mart Managers to take a break on the PR team and maybe wait a few weeks before distributing fake back-to-school lists. But by then school would have already started, and the opportunity’s out the window…

Kelby Carr, via Consumerist and Boing Boing:

My daughter is about to start kindergarten, so naturally we did some back to school shopping. Our state sales tax break weekend happened recently. When we noticed the local Wal-Mart had shopping lists not only specific to school and grade level, but to teacher, we were thrilled. We started tossing items in the cart to spend, spend, spend.

Weren’t we a little surprised to learn afterwards that Wal-Mart invented those lists. Not only were we a bit surprised to learn they did not, in fact, base the lists on anything remotely suggested by the school. Wal-Mart, in fact, put items on the list that are BANNED from being brought to school.

Our daughter’s school said Wal-Mart makes up those lists on their own, and a number of items (such as crayons) are on a list from the school. A list of items parents are specifically told not to have their child bring to school. Seriously?

(No scanned copies of the actual lists have yet been posted, but we’ll keep an eye out for them. )