The Steal Read online

  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.

  PART ONE

  SHOPLIFTING IN HISTORY

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

  —Saul Bellow, Augie March

  1. THEFT AND PUNISHMENT

  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.”

  Where shoplifting begins depends on where you think the crime falls on that spectrum. Eve was the first shoplifter, a security expert once quipped, adding that being banned from the Garden of Eden and cursed with mortality was not too severe a punishment for a petty thief. Certainly every ancient culture was preoccupied with thieves and how to stop the crime. Around 2500 BC, the laws of Hammurabi, the first set of recorded directives guiding how a society should work, ruled that the penalty for stealing from a rich man should be harsher than that for stealing from a poor one.

  In the Iron Age, at the dawn of the eighth century BC, the Greeks invented myths in which clever heroes steal in order to create; sometimes they endure terrible fates, sometimes they escape discipline. Prometheus takes fire from Zeus and gives it to mankind; birds pick at his liver. Hermes, the god of thieves and shepherds, steals cattle from Apollo and presents human beings with milk; Zeus does not punish him at all.


  Greek legislators tackled the ethics of theft. In the sixth century BC, Draco—the word “draconian” comes from his name—advocated death for any amount stolen, no matter how small. It took a hundred years for Athenian thinkers to begin to distinguish between the small theft, which society punished, and the large, abstract one committed by a despot, which, defined as tyranny, often went unpunished. These philosophers searched not just to explore whether petty theft merits a lesser punishment, but to understand the sources of different-size and differently ordered thefts, the connections among them, and how who steals matters.

  In The Republic, Plato asks whether thieves are made or born. His strikingly modern answer is that theft is the fault of both society and the individual. He also connects theft, earning, and hoarding.

  Socrates asks, “Then he who is a good keeper of anything is also a good thief?”

  Polemachus: “That, I suppose, is to be inferred.”

  Socrates: “Then if the just man is good at keeping money, he is good at stealing it.”

  Musing about theft’s causes, Aristotle, anticipating the Enlightenment and the 1960s, concluded that thieves reflect a sick social body. The Stoics were less meditative. Once, while beating a slave who said, “It was fated that I steal,” Zeno quipped, “And that you should be beaten.”

  Saint Augustine believed that petty theft was as tantalizing as sex. He begins book 2 of The Confessions by nodding to divine law’s condemnation of the crime. Recalling Eve’s temptation, he describes stealing’s sensuous allure and his theft at age sixteen of pears from an orchard with a group of friends: “Yet I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, nor poverty, but through a cloyedness of well-doing, and a pamperedness of iniquity.... Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but joyed in the theft and sin itself.” Augustine and his friends never even tasted the pears. They fed them to the hogs.

  To put an end to this sort of chicanery, the Byzantine emperor Justinian amplified the amount of restitution required, concluding that thieves caught red-handed should pay four times as much as the object’s worth, whereas those caught later on without the object should merely pay double. Justinian also made the first observation about the crime’s clandestine nature. In “Concerning Theft,” a chapter in The Justinian Institute, his legal textbook on the subject, he attributes the Latin word for theft, furtum, to the jurist Marcus Antistius Labeo, who connected it to furvus, the word for black, since theft mostly happens secretly at night.

  After the Inquisition, English judges began sentencing thieves to be branded on the thumb instead of the face, since the latter, it was acknowledged, condemned criminals to a life of crime. In France, the brand was in the shape of a V, for voleur.

  Christian thinkers in this era sought to soften the law’s severe sentences for petty theft when it arose out of necessity. On stealing to satisfy hunger, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote, “It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another’s property in a case of extreme need: Because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need.”

  Aquinas also examined the relationship between theft and shame. He concluded that theft was sometimes synonymous with shame; it could sometimes arise out of shame, and sometimes cause shame. He perceived, in other words, the complex web between shame and stealing that still haunts and confounds. Distinguishing between theft and robbery, Aquinas noted that guileful theft is considered more serious because thieves steal at night—a concrete manifestation of their shame. He went on to observe that robbery, which happens during the daytime, is punished more severely.

  Aquinas was not the only Christian writer to object to the law’s punishing petty theft by death. Responding to the regular hanging of thieves caught in the act, Thomas More asks in Utopia, “Be we then so hasty to kill a man for taking a little money?”

  For the next three centuries, the answer was yes.

  THE LIFTING LAW

  In Elizabethan London, milliners, mercers, pawnbrokers, booksellers, opticians, cheese mongers, bird sellers, curriers, serge makers, soap boilers, sailcloth makers, and linen weavers opened beautiful stores with glass windows to display their wares, inviting theft. The first shoplifters, called “lifters,” were roving bands of men. In 1591, the year that Shakespeare began the Henriad, the history plays in which “thieves and robbers range abroad unseen,” a privately printed pamphlet, The Second Part of Cony Catching, described the lifters—and the act itself—the “lift.”

  The Second Part of Cony Catching (the title refers to a con artist “catching” a dupe) was written by Robert Greene, a rake, playwright, journalist, and friend of Shakespeare and Marlowe who died the following year at age thirty-four. In the chapter “The Discovery of the Lifting Law,” Greene, under the pretense of being shocked by this vile crime, instructed would-be “shoplifters”—lifts—how to carry it off.

  “Attired in the form of a civil country gentleman,” the lift should stride into the store, wearing only hose and doublet (cloakless, he would avoid suspicion), and call to the merchant, “Sirrah, reach me that piece of velvet or satin or that jewel chain or that piece of plate.”

  The lift should continue to ask the merchant to pile more and more goods on the counter, and eventually, while the merchant’s back was turned, a second thief should creep into the store, grab some of it—“garbage” in the trade—and pass it out the window, where a third thief, whom the second pretends to engage in conversation, is strolling by.

  “Sir, a word with you. I have a message to do unto you from a very friend of yours, and the errand is of some importance.”

  If caught, Greene advised, the three thieves should swear innocence and “call for revenge” against those who accused them.

  Although these lifters were men, Greene anticipated centuries of women dominating the theft when, in yet another pamphlet, he wrote, “Women are more subtile than the cunningest . . . lift.” If “starring the glaze”—slang for breaking glass shop windows with a diamond, nail, or knife—was men’s work, lifting was a female crime. Lifting suggested illicit sex and the shame that it incited. “So young and so old a lifter,” Cressida jokes about Troilus, punning on “limb-lifter,” slang for having sex with a prostitute against a wall.

  The word “shoplift” first appeared in the tsunami of pulpy biographies, novels, and guides to criminal haunts printed at the end of the seventeenth century. One picaresque tale depicted the underworld setting that shoplifters prowled through. “Towards Night these Houses are throng’d with People of all sorts and qualities . . . Lifters, Foilers, Bulkers”—the reader is dragged on an anthropological tour of the city’s nightspots. The Ladies Dictionary, in addition to providing tips on losing weight and fixing hair, described the female shoplifter who might “go into a mercer’s shop and there pretend to lay out a great deal of Money; Whereas her whole intent is to convey into her nap a piece of some silk or satin that she may the better facilitate her purpose.” Another manual to the criminal element helpfully portrayed this shoplifter as “commonly well clad.”

  Beneath the shoplifters’ fancy clothes lay prostitutes, bounders, con artists, female pimps, and actresses. Mary Frith, aka Moll Cut-Purse, procured, shoplifted, and picked pockets. An anonymously written pamphlet attributed her stealing to her “being born under Mercury.” But The Newgate Calendar, a short, weekly biographical pamphlet about the lives of executed criminals, offered another explanation: Moll stole because she “was so ugly in any dress as never to be wooed nor solicited by any man.” Nor, The Newgate Calendar added, did this androgyne ever have her period or fall in love. Another Moll, sometime prostitute Moll King, shoplifted to dress better, or maybe to attract better clients. She stole a red petticoat (part of the prostitute’s uniform), Flanders lace, and a hair fringe, the front piece of one of the enormous powdered wigs that conferred status on men and women.

  Lady shoplifters, sometimes called Amazons or roaring girls, wore pants to pass as men in the underworld an
d to more easily rob the drunks and scoundrels whose rooms they shared at notorious lodging houses. Diarist Samuel Pepys dwelled for several entries on Maria Carlston. Also called the German Princess, or Mary or Maria Carleton, Carlston performed in a play about her own larcenous adventures. As Mary Blacke, she shoplifted before she was executed.

  In the century since Robert Greene’s guide was printed, London had doubled in size, becoming the largest and wealthiest city in the world. Londoners scrutinized clothes; the luxury-goods business exploded. A partial inventory of a mercer’s shop might include silks and brocades, cloth of silver and gold, Genevan and English velvet, satin, mohairs, and crepes. Such shops were crowded—sometimes as many as sixty customers vied for one salesperson’s attention. The shops also established credit, extending the possibilities of what people could buy—if not up front, then by paying usurious interest. Whatever the reasons for the rise in shoplifters, they crimped merchants’ profits.

  By 1699, under William III, Parliament passed a group of laws increasing punishment for theft. The Shoplifting Act was one of over 150 laws pertaining to theft passed between 1688 and 1800, creating what historians call the Bloody Code—capital punishment for petty crimes. The Shoplifting Act decreed that shoplifting an item worth more than five shillings could get you hanged. (An alternative since 1660, shoplifters’ transportation to the North American colonies or to Botany Bay was becoming less practical, as those places were increasingly reluctant to accept England’s convicts.) Another part of the law spared those who turned in shoplifters to the police from the duties of serving in public office. William also eliminated “benefit of clergy” for some crimes, including shoplifting items valued over five shillings. (From the fourteenth century, any criminal who could read verse 1 of Psalm 51—the so-called neck verse—from the Bible had escaped with branding on the “meat” of the thumb or, for a few years, on the cheek near the nose instead of transportation or death.)