This is a Steal!

The limelight. The show. Valor. A heart. A kiss. Your thunder. People will steal anything. We’ve all done it. When I was a kid, we used to steal blank cassette tapes from a local store until they put them behind the counter. When my son was little, I made him march back to a neighborhood party supply store to apologize to the owner and pay off the dime he owed after pinching a balloon. Shoplifting is an illicit right (or wrong) of passage. Retailers know this and they factor some theft into their projections. In the business, it’s called shrink. But, as you can probably tell by the glass barriers between you and the product you want at the pharmacy, shrink is getting huge. And no, those glass barriers don’t do a lot to deter shoplifting (although they do tend to dissuade paying customers). It turns out, most big stores aren’t sure how to stop the problem, and because executives have made use of the issue to explain away other more intrinsic business challenges, we’re not quite sure how big a problem it is. If I can steal a moment of your time, here’s a gift article (which I’ve basically stolen on your behalf) in The Atlantic from Marc Fisher: Shoplifters Gone Wild. “An estimated one in 11 Americans have shoplifted at least once. In one study, criminologists spent the spring of 2000 to the spring of 2001 monitoring surveillance video in a major national chain drugstore in Atlanta. They determined that about 20,000 incidents of shoplifting took place in that one store, compared with only about 25,000 larceny-theft cases reported to police in the entire city in 2001. The study used shoppers’ clothing, jewelry, and other markers to draw conclusions about their economic class, providing a rough profile of who steals. The result: The shoplifters were not disproportionately minority, male, and lower-class, as many experts had assumed. In fact, about a third were middle-class and nearly 40 percent were women, and white people were just as likely to steal as were Black or Hispanic people.” There’s an old saying that stolen fruit is the sweetest. If that were true, your local grocery store’s produce section would be behind glass.