[x-egghead]

Interesting.

So the Egghead store in San Jose on Blossom Hill Road had 2 interesting employee perks:

0. Vendor reps, including those from Microsoft, were happy to see you cheap NFR copies ($10-25 USD mostly, with some expensive packages going for $50-150) of almost their entire catalog of retail and semi-retail channel software.

1. Here's the shady one: since 99.9% of software was only "sealed" by shrink wrap and having a shrink wrap machine in the store to fix damaged or packages missing sealing altogether, it was essentially impossible to tell, as an end purchaser, if a particular item had been used and resealed. This was by design to avoid throwing away returned product or sending it back to the manufacturer as a loss. An unofficial benefit was created to deter shrinkage (employee theft) at this store in particular, had an unwritten policy established by the manager that permitted employees to temporarily "borrow" software that wasn't sealed or was already unsealed such as being returned.

I helped closed the store in 1997 after the CompUSA tech hypermart format ate tiny stores like ES that would eventually also meet its own demise.

[galeos]

We were also allowed to borrow and re-shrinkwrap games at the Game store I worked in, in the UK, in 2000. Seemed like official company policy to give us better product knowledge!

[flomo]

For that type of employee, it would all fly under the standard deduction anyway, so the IRS would not care. (Unless you had a side-business making $$ on this.) This is the first Raymond Chen post I've read which seems kinda dumb and pointless. Oh yeah I need to deduct my copy of random DOS app DBPieGraphicsPro-VII, which was left on a table at work.

[dezgeg]

It sounded to me that he's just responding to a frequently asked readers question. And I'd guess it's more likely for people to ask such question if they're not familiar with US taxation.