An Evil Addiction
Pioneer High School student Katherine Scott (names have been changed) did not go into Claire’s with intent to steal the appealing pink lip gloss on the counter. She intended to take her merchandise, pay for it, and exit the store.
But for some reason, Katherine took the lip gloss and placed it in her bag. She glanced at the sales associate who was preoccupied with customers and sauntered out.
That was the first time Katherine stole. It was the middle of eighth grade. Katherine turned to her friends with disbelief, held up the lip gloss and said, “I just took this, guys,” and they laughed, because they did not know what else to do.
Katherine is one of many teenagers who have been enticed in some way by shoplifting. “You’d be surprised,” she said, “how many of your friends have done it. People who you think are so innocent have done it. Even the workers do it. Everybody does it.”
Terry Shulman is a shoplifting expert who has appeared on Oprah and other television shows, and wrote a book on shoplifting. He agrees with Katherine on some level.
“Over the last few decades, there’s been such an increase in shoplifting across the U.S.—including by professionals and gangs—as well as an increase in employee theft and many other more severe crimes, it seems that we’ve become immune or desensitized to the ‘little stuff.’”
Katherine continued to shoplift, and her friends started to join her. Together they came up with strategies to fool employees. In dressing rooms where employees count items, they shoved extra shirts into pant legs. In shops that had tags and codes, they found ways to snip them off and hide them in between the decorative cushions. Even though it was hard, they found ways to blend in. Katherine took because she did not have money to buy the things she wanted, and did not think she needed to pay the ridiculous prices asked of her, a common reason many shoplift.
She started to show signs of having a shoplifting addiction. Like smokers need to have a cigarette in between their fingers, Katherine and her friends accepted that they would take an item from the store whether or not they actually needed it. “You go and you assume, ‘Oh, I’m going to do it again because I did it yesterday,’” Katherine said.
If Katherine did not have the money for something she wanted, she took it. As the pile of goods in her room grew, her parents became suspicious.
One day, Katherine went to Hollister with her little sister, Hannah. Katherine had taught Hannah the ways of stealing, and Hannah and her friends were eager to try them out. Equipped with money their mother had given them, they purchased some items and stole some items before heading home. At the door, their mother stopped them and asked to see the purchases.
Sweating and panicking, Katherine realized that their goods added up to about $50 more than what her mom had given them. Partially seeing the truth, Katherine’s mom asked them how they had so many things. Shoplifters sometimes dig deeper holes by lying about their stealing, and so did Katherine. She said her friend Brianna had lent her $20 dollars, and told her mom that she had used her credit card on a few of the items.
Katherine’s mom believed, or wanted to believe, what she was hearing. Katherine took the items up to her room.
Why did Katherine never get caught? She and her friends took items from Hollister, Abercrombie, Victoria’s Secret and Claire’s almost weekly. They were just teenagers, and by no means part of the shoplifting gangs major sales companies are so afraid of. They were not professionals. So how did they slip through the doors consistently and not get stopped?
Katherine thinks she knows why. “I talked to my friend who worked at Hollister, and he said they aren’t allowed to stop [shoplifters]. It’s this policy they have where if a girl needs a skirt for a party one night, that’s just like thirty bucks. If you see her take it, don’t stop her because its gonna make her scared to come back the next weekend with her mom and spend hundreds of dollars there. They still put tags on [the items] because they don’t tell people. They try to scare you.”
Surprisingly enough, this theory actually has merit. “I don’t find it hard to believe that a store has this policy for petty shoplifters, young shoplifters, first-time shoplifters or elderly shoplifters,” says Shulman. “A WAL-Mart memo was leaked a few months back that revealed the world’s largest retailer was going to stop prosecuting all first-time offenders under 18 or over 64 caught shoplifting under $25 in merchandise.”
WAL-Mart thought prosecuting these specific groups was not cost-effective. They wanted to focus on catching professional shoplifters and gangs of shoplifters, and investigating and apprehending their own employees for stealing.
That does not mean Shulman thinks this should be a policy. “I do not believe anyone caught should be given a free pass. I believe many people will continue to steal if this happens,” he says.
However, even Abercrombie confirms Katherine’s claims.
Abercrombie Assistant Manager, Sarah (she declined to give her last name because she does not officially represent the company) says that employees are not allowed to apprehend customers if they see them walk out with goods that have not been purchased and alarms do not go off. “If we see someone with a skirt, we can say, ‘Hey, would you like a nice top to go with that shirt?’ Then they know that you know that they have it so then they have the opportunity to give it back!” She explains.
But does this strategy work? According to Sarah, they have approximately 40 items leaving the store per week that are not purchased, and Abercrombie blames its employees for high quotas of loss. “Once the item leaves our store it’s counted against our store because we should be watching customers, helping people, and making sure that they have good customer service so that they don’t want to take the item,” she says. If Sarah wants bonuses or special items in her stores, she must keep their loss per week quota low.
Sarah noticed one customer recently who placed items from the store into her baby carriage. She asked the woman if she planned to purchase the items, and the woman nonchalantly said “no,” and left the store without the items. The problem is as Shulman explains. The woman could just as easily come back the following day and attempt to steal again, with no repercussions until she succeeds.
This policy often leaves management frustrated when they can do nothing to stop the onslaught of petty thievery. “It doesn’t come down to a certain race, or a certain height or a certain body style. Everybody and anybody who can do it, does it. I don’t understand why. Personally it makes me really upset. It’s like this store is my home, all of these clothes are mine. You wouldn’t go into somebody’s house and steal from them,” Sarah said.
Shoplifters do not see stealing from stores like Abercrombie and Hollister as stealing from someone’s house. Katherine sees her shoplifting as “a little silent protest” of the stores she frequents, arguing that stores like Hollister and Abercrombie have prices ridiculously above their wholesale price. “I think they’re too expensive for what I should be paying for a piece of cloth,” she says.
Shoplifting expert Chris E. McGoey says that it does not matter which store is a target, the act is still bad. “Many incorrectly feel or are taught that the large corporate retailer can afford the loss. If this sense of right versus wrong is lost in our society it is because of the failing of parents to instill these values into their children.”
Katherine’s mother had told her before, in sixth grade that she should not shoplift, but Katherine followed her mother’s example rather than her words. “My parents are stupid,” she said. “My mom used to tell me stories about how she used to shoplift all the time.”
One day, almost a year after Katherine had first stolen from Claire’s, she was back again with her friend Jordan. Jordan needed a necklace to go with her dress for the Sadie Hawkins dance, and Katherine was impatient. “Hurry up and take something,” she told Jordan, and walked out of the store.
She was almost out when the sales attendant stopped her and started to search her.
“I don’t have anything! What the f***, what is your problem?” Katherine screamed at the woman, because she wanted to appear innocent.
The employee continued to search Katherine, and then her friend Jordan, but found nothing.
“What the hell?” Katherine and Jordan yelled repeatedly.
The employee apologized profusely. “We were like, ‘You’re a douche bag.’ And then we left. We had to make it look like we really weren’t doing anything bad,” Katherine said.
It was a near miss, but not near enough. Katherine did not stop stealing.
In the summer before 10th grade, Katherine’s friend Brianna was shoplifting again, in the worst of places. Where Victoria’s secret does not notice when shoppers put underwear into a bag and Abercrombie and Hollister barely take any measures to defect thievery, Von Maur is a shoplifter’s nightmare, and most are smart enough to avoid it.
Brianna thought she could get away with a Kate Spade purse tucked firmly into her bag. Smugly, she walked towards the entrance and bumped straight into a large employee with a stern look on her face. Brianna had been caught.
“Oh, s***,” she exhaled, and cried as employees took her to a little room. There was an estimated $500 in stolen goods in her bag, from stores all across the mall. Every store came to reclaim their items, and the cops were called. They could not reach her parents, so Brianna stayed in the little room for three hours. The verdict: 36 hours of community service. The worst part: Brianna had to wear the orange prison jumpsuits and the “saggy granny-style underwear” that had been used before.
“I’m never going to get in trouble again,” Brianna vowed to herself. “You’ve caught me, I’m done.”
After an estimated $500 or more in goods, of $10 shirts, tons of lip gloss and makeup, sunglasses, headbands, thong underwear and three bathing suits, Katherine was through as well.
“I guess I’m learning from her experience,” Katherine explained. “She’s grounded forever. When she started her community service, she was telling me how she might have to go to court, I just stopped shoplifting.”
Katherine did not want her parents to find out she had shoplifted. She said she shares a trust with her mom, and tells her almost everything. “It was the one thing I couldn’t tell my mom,” she says.
She thought it would be horrible to break that trust. “I wouldn’t want to be that kind of daughter. Obviously they’re always going to love me, but they won’t have as much respect for me,” Katherine said.
Her experience speaks for many people who believe the only productive way to stop shoplifters is to apprehend and stop them. “I do think stores should drop that little policy [of turning a blind eye to theft] they have, if they really want to stop shoplifters,” Katherine agrees.
“They should know people are going to steal if they don’t protect their stores.”
Filed on 01/16/2007