Open Door Theft Opportunity

Over the past couple of weeks a number of crimes have occurred at the Specialized Bicycle distribution center, located on the west side of Salt Lake City, Utah.  These crimes include theft, breaking and entering, vandalism, and other various property crimes.  Unlike most of the crimes that occurred in this area, the property crimes in question were not committed outside the Specialized warehouse, but actually inside the facility itself.  An analysis done by a Utah based security firm has come to a conclusion as to what these crimes can be tied to.

The vast majority of the people who committed inside the warehouse entered the warehouse by way of an open door.  This door has been left open on purpose all day and all night by the warehouse's facility manager, Micah Wright.  When asked why this door was left open, Mr. Wright gave this statement:

Recently, the intention behind our Open Door Initiative — to provide additional openness and transparency to our company and our processes, and enable our employees to feel more free in our work environment — seems to have been lost.  This response surprised us — we thought this was going to be great — how could it not be?  We wanted to make magic happen and help foster an environment of caring and understanding. We wanted to include our customers in the process of discovering our great products.  In pursuing that dream, we have unfortunately encountered crime.

The truth is, openness is hard. Being open means everything is fair game, and it means sometimes things don’t work out exactly as you hope.  In our case, openness resulted in people taking advantage of this opportunity in negative ways.

We’re OK with all that, though, because being open is worth it. It’s a value we stick to because we believe in our values 100%.

In launching this campaign, we've been called everything from naive and foolish to crazy and idealistic. This is not the first time we've been called any of that. Maybe we’re naive … and YES we’re definitely idealistic, but we've not let our detractors distract us from our dream before, and we're not going to let them distract us now.  It’s gotten us this far.  If we can put aside the doubt and embrace the spirit of this fund as it is meant, and of Specialized Bicycles as it is meant, we might just be surprised by what a little positivity can produce.

Specialized Bicycles is not the first firm to run into problems with an initiative that, while good in nature, has been used for blatant theft.  Another example of this can be found at this link.