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All those mattress stores that are on every corner are a front for illegal gambling.
Wtf tell me more
lol I made it up, but there's been conspiracies around these stores since there's so many of them around metropolitan areas
It's because they're big money items
Cloth, springs and foam are cheap as all hell while a mattress sells for hundreds, if not thousands of dollars
Even selling one is a big profit and in cities, where people move more frequently, mattresses get fucked up easier and thus, sell even more
which would make them a perfect front for money laundering
They're kind of heavy for that.
I guess you could sell mattress deliveries with high cancellation fees, though.
Mentioned it in my last comment but they are literally the exact opposite of what you want for money laundering.
You want to be doing hundreds of small cash transactions a day with the possibility of cash tips, not have a store where your entire inventory is on a spreadsheet and you sell two of them a month through well documented credit card transactions for prices you advertised in a full page newspaper add that went to everybody in the city.
You can't just "misplace" an $1800 item very often without getting flagged.
Yeah, but that's also nearly any kind of business that deals with cash in any capacity
Makes more sense than some of the theories I saw about them being fronts for human trafficking.
Everything is a front for human trafficking if you *really* think about it
You could be human trafficking right now and not even know it
This gets said a lot but it doesn't actually make any sense.
If you wanted to launder money you'd set up a business that does lots of small transactions, many of them in cash. Restaurant, corner store, laundromat, car wash (fuck this is the second time I've referenced breaking bad in a real world context today). Or items with undefinable value (who's to say if that original painting is worth $20 or $1.3 mil)
What you dont want is a business that might sell one or two big ticket items a week, each one individually tracked and inventories, with a clearly labeled price tag and usually paid for with a credit card because it's too expensive to pay cash.
The markups on mattresses are just fucking ludicrous to the point where selling 10 of them at 70% off three times a year is actually a viable business strategy.
It's the same reason the world's most successful counterfeits make 1s and 5s not 20s and 100s.
they're actually drug smuggling operations
they hide the drugs in the mattresses and ship them all over the place
its the only explanation
It's way easier to just do that without the mattresses.
Once its in the country there's no reason to not split it up into a million small amounts, concentrating it into a large enough package to need a specially licensed and monitored vehicle and driver is just an unnecessary risk.
10 year old beige sedans don't have to stop for mandatory inspections every 50 miles and there's millions of people who have to travel for business that would love to make an extra $200 next time they have to drive to a job 4 hours away.
do they ship these mattresses on huge trucks? i can't say as i've ever seen a truck loading or unloading at a mattress store to be honest.. i just assumed they were little uhaul sized trucks
Box trucks to get them to the actual stores yea but those are a bat signal for cops.
The mattress is already 90% profit by weight why risk fucking that up by getting non legal racketeering involved.
Sorry I just know somebody who actually sold mattresses between jobs in their field and there summary was they wouldn't risk fucking up their somehow already legal racket by taking on unnecessary risks.
They're already charging thousands of dollars for foam wrapped in the cheapest thread money can buy they're not going to risk killing their golden goose.
