The Man Who Brings the Bread

Cedar Valley News
June 3, 2026
The Wire Is Worth Stealing
By Lars Olson

A man I have known for twenty years set a spool of wire on my counter Monday and asked me whether the price was a mistake.

It was not. He is an electrician. He has wired houses in this town for two decades, and he has bought copper wire from me the whole time, and he stood there holding the tag the way you hold a letter with bad news in it. I told him the number was right. Copper crossed six dollars a pound this spring. It has never cost so much in the history of the metal. He has wired a thousand houses without once thinking about the price of the wire itself. Now it is the first thing he thinks about.

He told me something else while he paid. Two weeks ago, someone cut a spool of wire off the back of his truck at a jobsite overnight. He found the plastic jacket in the gravel the next morning, stripped clean, the copper gone. He bought it once, ran it nowhere, and now he was buying it again. He was paying the record price twice for the same copper, and only the second roll would ever end up in a wall.

I have sold wire for forty years. For most of those years, copper was a thing you left on the truck without a second thought. It was worth something, but not enough to bother a man with bolt cutters. A roll of wire was safer in an open bed overnight than a ladder or a good drill. Nobody wanted the wire then.

They want it now.

At my counter, between customers, I read what copper is doing elsewhere. A phone company reported more than ten thousand copper thefts across the country last year. Whole neighborhoods lost their phones. In some towns, the cut wire was the line carrying 911 calls, and a person who needed help picked up a dead receiver. The thieves work in the dark and cannot always tell copper from fiber, so they cut both, and the internet goes down with the phones.

This is the part worth sitting with. The wire only became worth stealing because it became worth everything to the rest of us. The data centers need it. The car batteries need it. The new power lines need it. The same demand pushing the number on my customer’s tag to six dollars is the demand pulling the wire out of streetlights and switch boxes at two in the morning.

It is one number, seen from two ends. From my counter, it is an honest electrician paying twice for the wire he needs. From a dark utility yard, it is a man with a saw and a truck, turning the town’s nervous system into scrap weight.

I am not telling you anything the police do not know. States are passing laws now about who can sell scrap metal and how. The wire services are covering it as a crime story, and it is one. But a crime story counts the arrests. It does not count the electrician.

He is the one I keep thinking about. He did everything right for twenty years. He learned the trade, paid his men, kept his trucks clean, and left his wire on the bed overnight because in the country he grew up in, you could. He is being charged for the country we have become — once at the register, and once again in the dark.

The wire in your walls is worth more today than it was on the day it was installed. So is the wire in the streetlight on your corner and the line carrying your call for help. We did not make those things more valuable on purpose. We built everything to run on copper, and the copper followed.

I sold my electrician his second spool. He loaded it himself and said little. At the door, he stopped and told me he brings the wire inside every night now, off the truck, into the garage, like a man bringing in the dog.

If you have copper a stranger can reach, bring yours in too. We have made it worth taking.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. If copper has gone missing where you live — a spool off a truck, a streetlight gone dark — tell us about it. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the record 2026 copper prices, the rise in copper theft reported by major telecommunications carriers, and the new state laws restricting scrap-metal sales are real.

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