We’re fortunate still to have a local weekly paper when so many communities have lost theirs. Like many people in these paranoid times, I turn first to the bad news, the police report. It is quite short, just a couple of columns, but I rather suspect that an unedited version would fill the entire paper. Many of these reports are about shoplifting.
There’s nothing new about shoplifting. It’s as old as the first shops and the first small boy who snatched an apple from the counter and ran. What seems to be different now is the scale of the thing. Retailers have reported an epidemic of shoplifting, reflected in the number of reports in the local paper, accompanied by blurred pictures from the humorously named security cameras. The old-fashioned style of shopping, where the customers would choose their items, line up at the checkout, and pay, seems to be going out of style.
And today’s shoplifters are no longer satisfied with a single apple: they grab televisions, power tools, generators, building supplies, whole racks of clothing and whole carts full of food. They can be seen on camera boldly wheeling these acquisitions out of the store, apparently without shame and certainly without interference from the store security personnel, if any. It looks like a tolerated form of looting that the retail trade is unable or unwilling to stop. The reported retail losses last year totaled $55 billion, nearly enough to start a new war. Some large stores have begun closing branches where the ratio of stealing to buying has become too high. This only increases crime by forcing frustrated thieves to steal a car and drive to the next shopping center.
Some very senior citizens can remember old-style shops with counters where you asked for what you wanted. Self-service arrived early in the twentieth century, popular with retailers because it allowed them to fire all the staff who used to serve behind those counters. It seemed obvious to everyone else that displaying a cornucopia of stuff in big half-empty stores with almost no staff was asking too much of human nature, and it was, and it still is.
The situation in Europe is no better. Britain’s shoplifting epidemic is so serious that some checkout counters now look like security gates, with barriers to frustrate jumpers and cage-like booths to protect checkout personnel from assault. American retailers seem more resigned to what is politely called “shrinkage,” as in “Let’s go down to the mall and do some shrinkage.” More and more customers have obviously decided to address the affordability problem in this direct, illegal way. It is the tip of a vast iceberg of bad behavior and casual dishonesty that has crept up on us, another aspect of the “new normal.” Those of us who never even stole a piece of candy and who, incidentally, are paying for all this thievery by way of insurance premiums and police services, have a right to be rather annoyed with all these amateur criminals. They are like the bad boys at school who got away with every kind of cheating and left the rest of us wondering, as we do now when we watch these characters strolling across the parking lot with their loot, whether honesty really is the best policy.
