The Steal (2 page)

I wrote this book because, unlike gambling, which has a history, a medicine, and a literature, shoplifting remains unwritten. I met shoplifters by placing ads on Craigslist and by joining listservs for those suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Some shoplifters I literally met at dinner parties or while interviewing people at Starbucks. Psychiatrists and mental health counselors asked their patients if they would talk to me. A handful of probation and police officers, security personnel, and not-for-profit groups serving shoplifters helped, as did a few scholars.

Of the shoplifters in this book, a surprising number of them agreed to talk freely, although many did not want to use their names. But not everyone. “This ends here,” a lawyer screamed several times before she hung up on me, even though the story of how she resold the household appliances she shoplifted from a big-box store had gone viral and she had been disbarred. At first when this sort of thing happened—and it happened a lot—I felt ashamed, as though I had stumbled onto an episode of
Candid Camera
. A challenge of this book was to explain, in an era of diminishing privacy, the superheated responses to the crime. Another was to write about shoplifting without collapsing the subject into a “he did it” tabloid headline.

I also looked to the history of the crime, beginning in sixteenth-century London, as urbanization and consumerism made the city into Europe’s busiest mercantile capital. In this era, anyone who shoplifted an item worth more than five shillings could be hanged. Shoplifting reappeared in a new guise after the Industrial Revolution in Paris—a cynosure of the alluring retail palace. Treating the style-crazed lifters who frequented the city’s new department stores, psychiatrists made the first diagnoses of kleptomania. Although shoplifting emerged in America as early as colonial times, the crime became a symbol here in the 1970s, when the yippies politicized shoplifting into “liberating” and Abbie Hoffman wrote
Steal This Book
, turning the crime into an antiestablishment act. In response, modern antishoplifting technologies were developed, as were modern methods of studying shoplifters. The number of shoplifters skyrocketed. Instances of racial profiling of shoplifters began to be recorded.

Today we see all three interpretations of shoplifting—crime, disease, protest. Increased prison sentences, shame punishments, and over-thetop surveillance techniques have all been employed to curb the crime. Alcoholics Anonymous–inspired shoplifting rehabilitation programs have cropped up all over the country. A new, more ironic international generation of political shoplifters has come into view. More savvy professional shoplifters steal greater quantities and use violence more frequently.

One of this book’s projects is to bust myths and preconceived ideas about who is shoplifting now and why it is done. Another is to overturn common wisdom about what is being shoplifted, surveying so-called hot products—the everyday household items and luxury goods most frequently stolen. Besides tracing the various narratives the crime has produced, this book also examines the complex and often contradictory things shoplifting stands for.

Shoplifting today is understudied, but the best analyses show that the crime is everywhere. According to the 2008 Department of Justice annual survey, the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), over a million shoplifting offenses were committed. As one expert noted, the dollar amount lost to shoplifting is almost more than “the losses suffered by all individual victims of property crimes combined.” (In 2008, around 800,000 people were arrested for charges involving marijuana.)

But even the UCR cannot present a full picture of the extent of shoplifting. Critics say that the survey undercounts shoplifting more than other crimes because it is so easy to miss: Video cameras do not always catch the shoplifter. Stores do not always keep good records. Because contributing data to the UCR is voluntary, because many police departments lump all theft crimes together or focus on thefts of large amounts of money or violent robberies, the UCR documents only a partial account of shoplifting. Many states don’t have a specific crime called shoplifting on the books. Some stores use euphemisms, calling shoplifting “external theft,” to contrast it with “internal theft” (employees stealing), or “customer theft”; others just lump all stealing together.

Despite its shortcomings, the UCR offers one of the more complete pictures of shoplifting. It tells us not only which periods in history have seen shoplifting spikes—more than 150 percent between 1960 and 1970—but that shoplifting sometimes ebbs and flows independent of trends in crime overall. Between 2000 and 2004, even as other property crime including pickpocketing and bicycle theft dropped, shoplifting grew 11.7 percent. The number of people shoplifting also climbed slightly between 2004 and 2008. Year after year, the shoplifting rates of many American cities show substantial upticks: In 2008, shoplifting rose 13.2 percent in Cape Coral, Florida; 18.7 percent in Long Beach, California; 40.6 percent in L.A.; 9.9 percent in San Francisco; and 27.3 percent in Las Vegas. In 2009, shoplifting rose almost 8 percent.

According to the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention (NASP), the number of American shoplifters is 27 million, or 9 percent of the total population. But a massive study of 40,093 Americans—the 2001 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC)—found that 10 percent had a “lifetime prevalence” for it and 11 percent had shoplifted. Ten percent is higher than the percentage of American teenagers who have tried cocaine or used methamphetamines. Ten percent is often cited as the number of Americans estimated to be suffering from depression.

And shoplifting may be even more common. A NASP report estimated that store security catches a person shoplifting one in forty-eight times and informs the police of the incident one in fifty times.

If one obstacle to seeing shoplifting as an epidemic is the dearth of good numbers about the subject, another is the media, which trivialize the crime. News stories about shoplifting usually blame its rise on simple economic downturns and its fall on increased security measures. A 2008
USA Today
story, “More Consumers, Workers Shoplift as the Economy Slows,” like many such stories, relied heavily on the retail industry’s assertions: “Retail experts agree that they’ve seen an increase in shoplifting.” The story quotes a National Retail Council study saying that 74 percent of retailers “believed” shoplifting was rising. Retailers “felt” that the economy was forcing people to steal.

What’s new about shoplifting today is that it has become a cultural phenomenon—a silent epidemic, driven by pretty much everything, in our era. Some scholars connect it to traditional families’ disintegration, the American love of shopping, the downshifting of the middle class, global capitalism, immigration, the replacement of independent stores with big chains, and the lessening of faith’s hold on conduct. Shoplifting gets tangled up in American cycles of spending and saving, and boom and bust, and enacts the tension between the rage to consume conspicuously and the intention to live thriftily. The most recent suspects include the Great Recession, the increasing economic divide between rich and poor, and an ineffectual response to the shamelessness of white-collar fraudsters: the shoplifter as the poor man’s Bernard Madoff.

Yet many shoplifters see themselves as escape artists, stealing out of inscrutable cravings and unexamined desires. Having lost their old solaces, people shoplift as an anodyne against grief or to avenge themselves against uncontrollable forces or as an act of social aggression, to hurl themselves away from their identities as almost-have-nots. Whatever form shoplifting takes, it is as difficult to stamp out as oil spills or alcoholism.

Shoplifting is further misunderstood because the line between crime and disease has blurred. Although most estimates put the number of kleptomaniacs among shoplifters at between 0 and 8 percent, some experts believe that the disease is far more prevalent. Others contend that so-called shoplifting addiction has replaced kleptomania altogether.

In fact, what we don’t know about shoplifting does hurt us. Shoplifting continues to dent retailers’ profits. In 2009, the University of Florida National Retail Security Survey (NRSS), the most reliable survey measuring American shrink (goods lost to theft and error), totaled shoplifting for that year at $11.69 billion annually, or about 35 percent of all shrink. According to
Consumer Reports
, the shoplifting “crime tax”—the extra amount that families spend on household products each year when stores raise prices due to loss from the theft—is $450. Stores measure shoplifting—indeed, all shrink—as a percentage of profits, and if that percentage balloons much above 2 percent (the industry average for that year was 1.44 percent), it can lead to layoffs or even to bankruptcy. Profit margins can be thin: Supermarkets operate on margins between 1 and 5 percent, which means that the theft of one $5 heirloom tomato from Whole Foods can require sales of up to $500 to break even.

Richard Hollinger, the criminologist who directs the NRSS
,
believes that we significantly underestimate shoplifting and its impact. Scholars from other disciplines concur. In 2004, Timothy Jones, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, found that shrink in convenience stores represented 24 percent of the profits. According to the 2009
Global Retail Theft Barometer,
the only international survey of the crime, “There has been a dramatic rise in customer shoplifting related to the recession . . .” in America, and stopping shrink costs Americans more per household than it does any other country. America’s multibillion-dollar private security industry—whose bread and butter is store detectives—has been growing at about 5 percent a year.

Just as experts can’t agree on why people shoplift, they can’t agree on how to stop it. There are behavioral schools of thought. Others put their faith in psychoanalysis, pharmaceuticals, or voodoo. Some, like a judge we will meet in Tennessee, believe in shame. Stores stockpile surveillance and antitheft devices, ensuring that going to the mall will soon resemble enduring TSA procedures at the airport. Many theft prevention techniques recall the repertoire of Buster Keaton, like the one requiring shoppers to leave a shoe at the register. Not everything is vaudeville, though. Chasing shoplifters, store detectives—some of whom have no more than a few days of training—have killed them.

In hyperconsumerist America, where shopping is part of the lifeblood of the economy and the culture, shoplifting takes many shapes and represents many things, some of which cancel each other out. It sits on one side of the struggle over a key aspect of the American identity—in the tension between “getting something for nothing” and “working hard to achieve the American Dream.” Shoplifting, like gambling, offers immediate gratification, an apparently effortless (though illegal) way to get ahead. In boom times, much shoplifting, like much shopping, is aspirational. Encouraged to covet what the superrich possess, those who can’t afford, go a step further and steal. Yet shoplifting can also be cast as a desperate theft that the little guy commits to rail against big corruption. In the wake of financial frauds perpetrated at the top, such as the prime mortgage bust, which has been justified in the name of necessary risk taking, it is easy to imagine a shoplifter thinking his crime is irrelevant, or should be. In fact, while working on this book, I heard many shoplifters say exactly that. Finally, in our tough economic decade, the crime is also regarded as proof of the failure of the so-called New Thrift—by this depressing logic, frugality alone cannot counter the recession’s woes: Americans must shoplift to survive.

Defying easy categorizing, the shoplifting going on—committed by blacks and whites, immigrants and native-borns, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, religious people and nonbelievers—is unsettling, funny, and sad. But the different sentences meted out to rich and poor and black and white reveals the tenacity of prejudice.

Even in our loquacious age, shoplifting produces squirming. Stores dislike talking about it. Retail security experts are reticent about their techniques for various reasons, including “giving the secrets to bad guys,” although most secrets can be gleaned from the Internet. One magazine that had assigned me a story on luxury shoplifting decided in the end that publishing it would alienate advertisers. An Orthodox rabbi declined to talk about what shoplifting, if any, existed in his congregation, since doing so, he reckoned, would be “bad for the Jews.” Shoplifters were unreliable narrators and “badly brought up,” I was told. Philosophers explained to me that the crime was not evil and was therefore not worthy of study. A doctor claimed to be “fearful” that the public would “misunderstand” his research to “cure” kleptomania. But the wisest psychiatrists and psychologists that I encountered understood that any “cure” for shoplifting would require refashioning both social arrangements and the human psyche.

Shoplifting has been a sin, a crime, a confession of sexual repression, a howl of grief, a political yelp, a sign of depression, a badge of identity, and a back door to the American Dream. The act mirrors our collective identity, reflects our shifting moral code, and demonstrates the power that consumption holds over our psyches. The techniques shoplifters use may change; how stores catch the crime and how the law punishes it may change. But shoplifting, whether we find it creepy, or sinister, or even exhilarating, will always ripple through our culture to torment and attract us. Inside stores, these thefts appear when we least expect it.

I didn’t mean to settle down to a career of stealing.

—Saul Bellow,
Augie March

There are no malls in the animal kingdom, so there is no shoplifting. Hyenas, grackles, crows, ravens, and other birds and mammals steal from one another, which is determined in part by the species, in part by evolution, and in part by scarcity of food. Some birds filch brightly colored string and lightbulbs to decorate their nests: avian kleptomaniacs. All nonhuman stealing is adaptive, John Marzluff, a professor of biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and an expert on crows, explains: If you steal, you can provide better, more quickly, and in a greater variety of ways for your offspring and you can spend more time doing things that advance your family, like mating and building your nest. The only difference between bird and human theft, Marzluff says, is that “we’re the only [species] who determines whether stealing is good or bad culturally.”