Dips aren't just reaching into your pocket to retrieve tiny items, they're stealing your stuff from wherever your stuff is. Inventory is abstract. If you have a lot of bulky items on you that you aren't wearing it's perfectly feasable to imagine someone lifting an unattended item from a backpack or a loot pile or whatever.
You also may have been much less careful (stat-wise) IC than you realized OOC. Not so much carrying your hoodie in your backpack as having one sleeve just barely tucked into your back pocket as it dragged behind you on the street.
Some people will say e-con is ICly, but its *not* necessarily when it goes against elements of the theme.
I feel some items should be in a category where they are some common place its impossible to run out of stock for them, regardless of couriers.
Like pieces of paper, disposable lighters, cheap disguises, etc.
This right here, 100%
The ONLY reason my character still runs crates after a year is on the off chance that a disguise item shows up.
And despite running crates weekly, in 52+ weeks of delivering crates, I can count the number of disguise items on one hand, with fingers left over.
There are so many other and more efficient ways to make chyen in any given week. But crates is like playing the lottery. A disguise item is a winning ticket that is a guaranteed doubling (or more) of what you pay for it.
It's a pvp video game. Certain characters engage in PvP by stealing items, they are correct and right to do so. Other players should consider means to protect these items and create challenges for thieves rather than acting as though they are entitled to own whatever they want.
RPwise, if you need to get pedantic, Mixers are poor and useful life-saving items are treasured, and the Mix is not a functioning society. Capitalism has broken down and random things are difficult to find because the supply chain gets broken six times by middlemen and criminals before it even reaches the topsiders, let alone the subhuman scum who live under their feet. Go read about Cuba or the Soviet Union and learn about the completely random stuff that was just impossible to find sometimes because political conditions badly disrupted commerce. Red Sector in Withmore is not a functional US City circa 2020, it's the worst slum history has ever seen.