They’re so hot they’re flying off the shelves, nobody can get them and more than one fistfight has occurred!
We all thought this year’s hottest Christmas item would be Hatchimals — whatever the heck those are — but we were wrong; it is newspaper racks.
We know what you’re thinking: Maybe this is a ruse to trick me into picking up more papers. We wish our crack Chicken-Fried News team had thought of it, but really, it’s much more than that.
A camera outside Choctaw restaurant Tasty Burger at SE 29th Street and Indian Meridian Road recorded two thieves stealing Choctaw Times and Oklahoman racks.
What we really want to know is why these people wanted to steal things that just hold papers. What else could they do with them? You can’t cook with them. They look awkward full of your ’80s cover band bootleg cassette collection. They aren’t extraordinarily visually compelling, so putting one in your bedroom, filling it with dirty laundry and setting your bubbly, glitter-filled lava lamp on top of it doesn’t sound awesome, either.
“Who does that? Who steals a newspaper rack?” Steve Coulter, copublisher of Choctaw Times, Mustang Times, Tuttle Times and Minco-Union City Times, told OKCFox.com. “I mean it’s a lot of work so they had to go at 3:30 in the middle of the night and it’s cold outside. They had to have help; they’re heavy.”
What makes this case even more interesting is the thieves used a blowtorch to break into the racks, which Coulter said only hold around $10 worth of papers at a time. The racks were recovered Dec. 15.
A couple of stolen newspaper racks don’t add up to a Christmas spree. But then it happened again.
Dec. 15, another Choctaw Times rack was stolen from Nicoma Park.
Coulter said the racks can cost anywhere from $500-$1,000, and the bandits are, unfortunately, still at large.
Print headline: Paper pinchers
This article appears in Dec 28, 2016 – Jan 3, 2017.