1K Christmas Trees Lifted From Fla. Costco

The holiday season kicked off with a bah-humbug bang this week with reports of an ambitious theft from a Florida Costco. Miami-Dade police are trying to find two 53-foot semi-truck trailers crammed with 500 Christmas trees each, taken sometime between 8pm and midnight Tuesday from outside the Kendall warehouse, the Miami Herald reports. The trailers themselves were worth $78,000 in total. "They were brand new—2015," Frank Ducassi, a rep for the refrigerated-truck company that delivered the trees, tells the paper. Conflicting media reports make it unclear whether the trees were worth $18,000 in total, as the Herald reports, or if each trailer's haul was worth that much, putting the cost closer to $36,000 altogether.

The Fraser firs are sold right off the truck to customers for $30 each, and it's the only time all year that non-Costco equipment stays on site overnight, a store GM tells the Herald. A special pin lock is typically used to secure Costco trailers so they can't be hauled off, which Ducassi says he thinks was in the Costco contract, but the store GM says he thought he only had to lock up the trailer doors. "It's going to be a black eye for Costco if they were supposed to secure the trailers and didn't," he tells the paper. (Hopefully the trees aren't being devoured by goats.)