Legoland über alles

As if bricks and mortar retailers didn’t have enough of a problem with showrooming (the practice of customers checking out merchandise in a store and then using a smartphone to track the item down at a lower price somewhere else), it turns out there’s worse. A Silicon Valley high tech exec has been charged with theft for using his smartphone to spoof price barcodes to buy stuff at “a much reduced price.”

Thomas Langenbach, a vice president with German software giant SAP, has allegedly been using his smartphone to scan barcodes on boxes of Lego bricks. Then he generated his own barcodes—lower prices—which he stuck on the merchandise. And, of course, paid the fake price.

I don’t know how it worked—he must have generated codes that would ring up as Legos, but at the different price, because even Target checkout clerks would notice if they ran a box of bricks across the scanner but the display showed Pampers or Diet Dr. Pepper.

But evidently it’s been going on for some time—when the cops searched Langenbach’s $2M San Carlos home (which is not really all that upmarket in this area; but, still), they found “hundreds of boxes of unopened Lego sets”. And evidence that he sold more than 2000 items on eBay over the past year for a total of $30,000.

No telling why a guy who’s been with a global software giant for more than 20 years would want to nick little plastic bricks in mass quantities. Maybe it’s the very fact that he’s been with a global software giant for more than 20 years. And it’s a German company. Maybe he needed lebensraum, so to speak. Legos are, after all, a product of Denmark.

Here’s his LinkedIn profile. Perhaps this gives a clue.

Or, well, maybe not.