Here in New York, one of these will cost you 115 bucks,...
...which is why it might seem crazy that UPS and Fedex shrug off thousands of them every year...
...and millions in fines.
That's the thing about fines in corporations.
The numbers sound really big.
One billion, three billion, 13 billion?
But for a lot of companies, that's just the cost of doing business.
It makes you wonder, do fines really matter?
I'll give you three examples.
Remember the Gulf oil spill?
BP agreed to pay 7.8 billion dollars to settle all sorts of claims over that.
But for BP, that's about eight days of revenue.
Shape-ups are revolutionary.
Skechers claimed that shoes would tone your butt.
Did anyone believe that?
It doesn't matter, they don't.
Skechers was slapped with a 40 million dollar penalty,...
...but they sold nearly 1.6 billion dollars worth of shoes in 2012.
Google paid up the biggest fine in Federal Trade Commission history.
They had to pay 22.5 million dollars for violating online privacy.
But this is Google, it takes all five hours to rake in that much money.
But for executives, for the people in charge, all those billions could be worth it.
That's because the cost is nothing next to the profits that their companies stand to make...
...by doing stuff that gets them in trouble.
