Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI
Carson's not sure why he's never been able to kick his shoplifting habit. It started in his teens, when he and his friends would steal beer, and escalated when the installation of what he describes as "self-checkout silliness" made it easy to buy a couple of things, phantom swipe the rest, and walk out of Walmart with "a huge amount of shit." In his early 20s, he took a chair from Target by just waltzing out the front door with it. He figured everyone would assume he bought it.
Maybe there was a time when he could chalk his behavior up to young-adult antics, but Carson is no longer so young. He's in his 30s, lives in New York, has a good job at a nonprofit, and he still shoplifts regularly. (Carson, for obvious reasons, is a pseudonym. The same goes for all the shoplifters mentioned in this story.) A couple of weeks ago, he snatched some Benadryl from an airport shop to help him get a good snooze on an international flight. He often pockets small items at the drugstore. One of his favorite places to steal from is Whole Foods. "It's really impulsive," he told me. "I'm just shopping with my own bags and slipping small, valuable things." Salmon lox, he notes, fits nicely into a laptop sleeve.
Carson estimates that he "saves" around $1,000 by shoplifting each year, but it's hard to say since he might not get those expensive cheeses if he actually had to pay for them. He recognizes the fact that being a "white dude" gives him a certain amount of privilege in avoiding employee suspicion. And before you ask, no, he doesn't feel bad about it, especially when he pilfers from Whole Foods. It became an "open field" at the high-end grocer after Amazon acquired it in 2017, he says, in large part because of Jeff Bezos.
"It's run by a guy who's shooting himself into outer space," he said. "It just became so hard to find the reason that you actually hurt anybody by doing this."
They're like a giant organized mob, they just don't know each other.
As much as retailers are quick to point the finger at organized operators for their theft problems, there's another group that gets a lot less lip service: the opportunists, like Carson, who are pocketing things from time to time because they feel like it. These shoplifters have existed forever — adults with decent jobs who are firmly in the middle class. And they're everywhere.
"It's your normal, everyday person, doesn't matter sex, gender, age, whatever, it's just people that see an opportunity and go, 'Huh, I bet I could steal that and nobody would know,'" said Joshua Jacobson, a loss-prevention professional in California who's worked for half a dozen major retailers over the past decade. "They're like a giant organized mob, they just don't know each other."
Shoplifting is illegal, and there are costs to it, even if you don't love the company that's bearing them. Many people find this sort of behavior objectionable and unethical. But after chatting with members of the smallest-time thieves brigade, it was clear that they generally aren't concerned about the moral weight of their actions — they choose to ignore it, or they don't really consider what they're doing as wrong.
Much has been made about the increase in retail theft in recent years. Major retailers and industry groups have sounded the alarm about the rise in organized retail crime, horror stories (and videos) of smash-and-grabs are readily available online, and it seems like half the items in many stores are locked away behind glass.
But there's also a lot we don't know about retail theft. It's not clear what percentage of theft is organized, what's a one-off, and what's the result of drug addiction or mental illness. Shrink — industry-speak for inventory that's gone missing — is also caused by employee theft, operational failures, and things just getting lost. So understanding just how much is stolen by the most nondescript, "regular" people is hard to know.
In recent weeks, I spoke with nearly a dozen of these non-organized middle-class retail thieves to get a sense of why and how they do it. I also talked to loss-prevention professionals and retail industry analysts about what they're seeing. The takeaway: A lot of people steal, from small-stakes stuff at the drugstore to larger items worth hundreds of dollars at hardware chains. Their motivations are generally not the direct result of economic need, but instead, people make a moral (or amoral) judgment about what goods are unjustly expensive, especially as they deal with the recent bout of inflation. They view it as a way to get back at The Man — many have concocted a code of conduct that amounted to pilfering only from big, evil retailers (and, in one case, overpriced corporate ski resorts).
Case in point: A lot of the one-off shoplifters I talked to steal from Whole Foods with a very clean conscience. "No, I don't feel bad about stealing from Jeff Bezos," one 20-something occasional shoplifter in Washington, DC, told me. Her loot of choice is passion fruit, which she rings up as a cheaper item — bananas. She's even memorized the code: 4011. Another shoplifter, a 30-something man in New York who asked to be referred to as the "Parmesan cheese bandit," echoed the anti-Bezos sentiment. The only people who know about his habit of stuffing a block of Whole Foods cheese into his sweatpants pocket after hitting the gym (which he developed after seeing some TikTok videos about Parmesan's high protein content) are his brother — and, he said, "maybe the fucking surveillance people, I don't know."
The National Association of Shoplifting Prevention estimates that about one in 11 people has shoplifted during their lifetime and that men and women are equally likely to be the culprit. Some surveys suggest that number could be higher, like one in five. Survey data, however, often doesn't account for the difference between someone who shoplifted a candy bar one time as a kid and someone who does it with regularity.
Ernesto Lopez, a senior research specialist at the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice, told me there's not much difference among income groups when people are asked whether they've ever shoplifted, because, again, "ever" is a pretty long time. But what we do know is that about 80% of shoplifting incidents only involve one person and that the average value of shoplifted goods has been increasing.
One 2008 study found that shoplifting was more common among individuals with at least some college education and individual incomes over $35,000. As The Atlantic recently reported in a story on stealing, a 2001 study on a drugstore chain in Atlanta found that a third of shoplifters were middle-class, four of 10 were women, and white people were as prone to shoplifting as Black and Hispanic people.
Those stats track with Lopez's experience. Typically, the less serious and more accessible a crime is, the more people are going to do it. It's easy to go into a store, take something, and walk out. Jeff Prusan, a security and loss-prevention consultant to the retail industry, said most shoplifting incidents that occur and are apprehended "are sort of by your average, everyday person."
"Middle-class petty theft is death by a thousand cuts for us," one loss-prevention officer in Texas told me. At the hardware chain he works for, a lot of "regular Joe Schmoes" come in and pocket something under $100. One of the most popular items among thieves is tape measures — some people will even pop off the tag and just put it on their belts like it's their own. The store loses thousands of dollars in tape measures every year. He estimates for every three they get in stock, just one is actually sold.
I don't even feel bad about not feeling bad.
"They'll be buying something that's worth $1,000 of materials for a job, but then they're still going to pocket that tape measure because they feel that they're either entitled to it or they just didn't want to pay for it, or they feel like they're getting one over on us," he said.
When I ran this by Keith, a since-reformed shoplifter who used stolen items from Home Depot to help renovate his house, he confirmed the tape-measure thing. "That's the kind of thing you can help yourself to. That's not even stealing. That's just allowed," he said. "I don't even feel bad about not feeling bad."
While many small-time shoplifters aren't particularly proud of their behavior, they aren't deeply ashamed of it, either. In the current economic and cultural landscape, they don't see their behavior as particularly devious or out of line, or, at least, it's not any worse than what the corporations they're stealing from are doing.
Sharlene, a 30-something from Illinois, has never seen anyone shoplift at the grocery store where she works, but she hears the alarm go off when someone walks out of the side door, usually with stolen alcohol. It doesn't bother her — she steals herself. The first thing she took was a thong, in high school, which she was much too embarrassed to actually buy. Now, it's mostly essentials she feels have gotten too expensive — deodorant, groceries, makeup. Most recently, she took liquid eyeshadow from Ulta Beauty, because she wasn't sure if she'd like it.
"I know that this is not a moral thing to do if we're talking about morality," she said. "And then I'm like, 'Fuck capitalism.'"
Donovan, who earns a six-figure salary and estimates he has stolen six figures worth of stuff, told me he has a "pretty strong code" about his habits. "I never steal from small businesses — I never have, nor would I. I basically try to focus on corporations that I don't like," he said. There's a "certain class" of things he doesn't pay for — toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, meat. At the grocery store, he sees lifting some items as earning a discount. He's been spotted and asked to leave stores multiple times, and he's been seriously caught twice, which resulted in him having to hire a lawyer, pay a fine, and, in one case, take part in a diversion program that he thought was good, though it didn't work on him.
Donovan's working on his habit in therapy. He has a lot of financial anxiety — his parents weren't poor, but they were bad with money, and in his adult life, that's translated to an "insane amount of frugality." He recognizes he doesn't need to shoplift, but there's satisfaction in saving money, and it's not like he's particularly optimistic about his economic prospects. Even with his good salary, he can't afford to buy a home where he lives. So he takes out some of his rage at our "late-stage capitalism nightmare" by snagging a few items.
"It doesn't feel like a world in which I can really get by and build a life very easily anymore, " he said.
None of the shoplifters I spoke to for this story expressed a significant amount of guilt about their actions. Some said they felt some embarrassment, especially at the idea that they might get caught, but no one was really losing sleep over their activities.
One 30-something mom recently took a $160 closet organizer from Target on a whim after pushing it to the front of the store and realizing that the minimum-wage workers there probably didn't care if she paid for it or not. Another shoplifter, a 20-something schoolteacher, worries she might be a bad influence on her younger sister, but it doesn't deter her when she stops by the grocery store to load up on cheese and jam for what she's decided will be a free (for her) charcuterie night. Plus, she's Asian, the model minority that people wouldn't usually suspect of stealing. Another shoplifter, a 20-something master's student, told me she thinks there's a line between "ethical stealing and nonethical stealing," with "unnecessary items" like jewelry or watches falling into the latter camp. She worries some about getting into trouble, but if Walmart isn't going to provide her training on how to use their self-checkout equipment, "then you cannot punish me for not using it correctly."
There's no blanket explanation for why individuals shoplift. People often develop post hoc reasons for why they committed an offense, and rationalizing is a fundamental part of human nature. The logic I heard was oftentimes flawed, or, at least, your mileage may vary on how much you buy it. As The Guardian wrote in 2019, some psychologists attribute it to unresolved losses and traumas; others point to the dopamine hit and the thrill of outsmarting the establishment. For some, it's an addiction; for others, it's an in-the-moment compulsive act. And rationalizing our behaviors to ourselves, whatever the justification, is a defense mechanism against difficult or unacceptable feelings.
Despite the extent of petty shoplifting, most retail experts and loss-prevention people I spoke with said that organized retail crime was their focus. It's where they say the big dollars are lost, and it's the type of thing you can build a case on and prosecute people. Even if an individual does take enough to meet the felony threshold, cases are often dropped to misdemeanor charges.
Random shoplifters are also hard to catch. Unless you're 100% sure you see someone pocket an item or have complete confirmation they're skip-scanning big items at self-checkout, for liability purposes, it's not worthwhile to pursue it. The chances of nabbing a small-time opportunist are "slim to none unless we happen to walk into them putting something in their pocket," Jacobson, the California loss-prevention professional, said.
There are costs to theft. If enough stuff gets stolen, corporations start raising prices, which hurts everyone. Stores may also put everything in glass cases, which hurts their business and makes for an annoying shopping experience. And Jeff Bezos isn't dealing with the day-to-day of shrink; front-line, low-paid employees have to manage it. Ultimately, the mini acts of rebellion may end up hurting the little guy on a broad, shared scale.
These massive, multibillion-dollar corporations that have all of this insane amount of wealth, and people are just reclaiming some of it.
David Johnston, the vice president of asset protection and retail operations for the National Retail Federation, said that many consumers are even complicit in professional retail theft because we're unwittingly buying stolen goods — on the street, online, even in local stores — we think are just discounted. Or, we don't ask questions when we find something outrageously cheap.
"If I can purchase branded merchandise or I can purchase large quantities of similar merchandise from someone at a much lower price than I could at a national mass merchant or the branded retailer themselves, I have to double think my purchase," he said.
It's tough not to feel somewhat nihilistic about today's economy. Wealth and income inequality are daunting and seemingly unsolvable issues. Corporations prioritize their own profits and often display little loyalty to their workers. These feelings were only reinforced by an inflation surge in which profit padding likely played a part.
"If most of this is happening in Walgreens and Walmart and places like that, I don't know, is it a problem?" Donovan told me. "These massive, multibillion-dollar corporations that have all of this insane amount of wealth, and people are just reclaiming some of it."
The more I reported this story, the more I realized how many people steal a little bit. I had friends confess they pop $10 of groceries into their bag every time they shop at Whole Foods or admit that they never ring anything up as organic at self-checkout. One person revealed that a cashier recently rang up her blood orange as regular, and she didn't correct them, which is a gray area but is technically stealing. Who among us hasn't walked out of a Walmart before realizing we forgot to scan one item in the cart? Or perhaps you got a refund on a stolen package it turns out was just delivered to a neighbor?
To many of these everyday petty bandits, shoplifting is a way to take back some power. They know it's illegal, and in many cases, they're aware of the costs and possible consequences, but it's also a small, subversive way to feel some sort of economic agency, whatever their income level.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
