Tumblr Teen Bling Rings
December 2, 2015 11:44 AM   Subscribe

"Inside Tumblr's Teen Shoplifting Rings." A huge online community of anonymous high schoolers is raiding malls across America and then blogging about it.

"It's impossible to count how many active shoplifting pages there are on Tumblr. But the number is more than enough to send you down an internet rabbit hole for a week and less than enough to provoke a serious criminal investigation (at least, so far). The other reason these sites fly under the radar of the authorities is that whereas the teen reprobates immortalized in Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring stole $10,000 Birkins from Paris Hilton's house, Tumblr lifters are taking home $10 Urban Decay lip glosses, Lululemon leggings, and slogan T-shirts from Aéropostale. They're looting junior brands at the mall, not Barneys."
posted by ourt (231 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
Why? Why do they have to be so stupid? Really?
posted by Samizdata at 11:50 AM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


They're teenagers?
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:52 AM on December 2, 2015 [42 favorites]


Why? Why do they have to be so stupid? Really?
They're teens. Their brains aren't fully developed.
posted by Floydd at 11:53 AM on December 2, 2015 [13 favorites]


I thought this was going to be about groups of kids who all swarm into a store, steal stuff, and then run. Like this, but without the stupid language choice.
posted by OmieWise at 11:53 AM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


Ten pounds for the lot
We pay fuck all!

posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:01 PM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


But he also credits a recent rise in shoplifting to something specific to millennials: "a pressure to be number one." Millennials, he says, want to have the best of everything (regardless of their spending money), and the competition to outdo one another is stronger than ever.

Indeed.

I believe Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton both made similar comments about the young generation of their day, though Dreiser at least was somewhat sympathetic.

Personally, I would hesitate to publish a big "teens shoplift! anatomy of a scandal! they are feminists and have special-snowflake gender identities" article highlighting a bunch of very young people's tumblrs. I find that a lot worse than a bunch of kids making off with some goods produced by dubious corporations using sweated labor.
posted by Frowner at 12:01 PM on December 2, 2015 [50 favorites]


Pfft, this isn't stupid. Shoplifting is thrifty and clever compared to my favorite idiot teen Tumblr thing, gallon smashing.

I should not find this as funny as I do.
posted by rorgy at 12:01 PM on December 2, 2015 [17 favorites]


I have a shameful admiration and respect for Tumblr teen shoplifters. But then there ARE some of them who are just using their parents' Visas and pretending to shoplift, which is actually hilarious. Shoplifting is one of the ways I think teen girls learn to rebel in secret, along with eating disorders and talking shit behind each other's backs.
posted by SassHat at 12:02 PM on December 2, 2015 [31 favorites]


I thought this was going to be about groups of kids who all swarm into a store, steal stuff, and then run. Like this, but without the stupid language choice.

Or like "A Tumbler of teen shoplifters".

This giant cement mixer pulls up to the mall and disgorges a writhing Katamari ball of moist teens who just roll through the kiosks hoovering up Kyoceras.
posted by selfnoise at 12:03 PM on December 2, 2015 [56 favorites]


I personally know some people who are outstanding contributors to society now, but were shoplifting fiends in their teen years.
posted by maggiemaggie at 12:05 PM on December 2, 2015 [19 favorites]


This might be some kind of side effect of the absolute decimation of the economy and attendant desperation that young people are being born into. 14 year olds might not have the words to articulate it, but it affects them profoundly nonetheless.
posted by naju at 12:07 PM on December 2, 2015 [17 favorites]


They're only stupid if they're getting caught.
posted by dilaudid at 12:08 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'll be open and honest here, I shoplifted in my early- to late-teen years. It was a way to save money and still get all the items "necessary" to be accepted as a teen girl.

They say, "Heavy lies the crown," and honestly? The pressure on girls to have everything - makeup, hair products, trendy clothes - is (pardon my language) heavy as FUCK. Trust me on that. It's not stupid, it's just really, really tragic that girls feel the need to buckle to pressure and take these measures just to be more accepted.
posted by ourt at 12:09 PM on December 2, 2015 [60 favorites]


That they want the shit they're shoplifting is making my skin crawl.
posted by jamjam at 12:10 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


...I'm sorry, but why would somebody shoplift something they didn't want???
posted by ourt at 12:13 PM on December 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


Girls shoplift, guys learn magic tricks.

This is why teen girls are better.
posted by The Whelk at 12:16 PM on December 2, 2015 [21 favorites]


Doctor: What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.
Cecilia: Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl.
(The Virgin Suicides)
posted by naju at 12:19 PM on December 2, 2015 [27 favorites]


I just want to say that several of the most accomplished shoplifters I've ever known - and I've known quite a few; for some reason you tend to run into them in anarchist circles, go figure - have been young men, and they shoplifted fashion items too.

People I know who shoplift/shoplifted:

1. Friend who was too poor to buy her books in college. I gave her a hard time for this "immoral" practice because I was a little shit.
2. Trans women friends who get harassed at the make-up counter or in women's clothing departments, and who both want and need various items as part of their beginning transition.
3. Poor kids who stole a mixture of stuff they just wanted and stuff they actually needed, and/or who stole some things so that they still had cash to pay for the things that were hard to steal.
4. Broke and/or homeless people who stole to re-sell; people who found it difficult to get employment due to prison histories, etc
5. Some teens who just stole shit to steal shit - snack food, lipstick, little stuff that they could have done without but wanted, or else wanted to impress their friends. Sometimes they were kind of annoying, but whatever, we've all been annoying.

I also know someone who was merely suspected of shoplifting and knocked to the ground and rather badly injured by security.
posted by Frowner at 12:23 PM on December 2, 2015 [23 favorites]


rorgy: "Pfft, this isn't stupid. Shoplifting is thrifty and clever compared to my favorite idiot teen Tumblr thing, gallon smashing.

I should not find this as funny as I do.
"

At least with the gallon smashing, they are risking injuring themselves, so there is a price for them for their stupidity.
posted by Samizdata at 12:25 PM on December 2, 2015


Why? Why do they have to be so stupid? Really?

I just remembered I get 90% of my media through illegal means and so do most of my peers
posted by naju at 12:26 PM on December 2, 2015 [50 favorites]


naju: "Why? Why do they have to be so stupid? Really?

I just remembered I get 90% of my media through illegal means and so do most of my peers
"

Stop bragging about it already. Sheesh.
posted by Samizdata at 12:27 PM on December 2, 2015 [8 favorites]


Bragging? I'm just suggesting it's kind of a new normal.
posted by naju at 12:28 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Good for them.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 12:28 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


Alright, let's not bully other posters out of self-defense, now.
posted by ourt at 12:29 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Every generation thinks it invented shoplifting.

Or maybe every generation thinks the one after it invented shoplifting.
posted by entropicamericana at 12:29 PM on December 2, 2015 [19 favorites]


This is just an affirmation of the human spirit. Good luck to the young girls - everyone I knew did it when I was teenager too.

In the UK most shoplifting (and there is fuck load of it: 3 percent of inventory at some stores) is probably done by people who are going to sell it later.
posted by colie at 12:31 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I just remembered I get 90% of my media through illegal means and so do most of my peers

I've been told loudly and repeatedly by defenders of piracy that it is not stealing and is totally, completely different.

Not that I haven't also downloaded countless terabytes of music and movies, but there are people who will vociferously protest comparisons between their downloading and shoplifting. I'm happy to admit I want things that I don't want to pay for.
posted by Sangermaine at 12:31 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


Bragging? I'm just suggesting it's kind of a new normal.

Recently I bought—legitimately bought—a season of a TV show, and my skin would not stop crawling. It felt abnormal.

Theoretically, shoplifting is costing brands the three cents they spent on materials for that $20 whatever, versus digital piracy which is only replicating things, but I can't bring myself to feel bad for 95% of the stores being shoplifted from, so whatever.
posted by rorgy at 12:31 PM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


...I'm sorry, but why would somebody shoplift something they didn't want???

You're determined to rip away the few remaining shreds of my hopes for humanity, aren't you?
posted by jamjam at 12:32 PM on December 2, 2015


You're determined to rip away the few remaining shreds of my hopes for humanity, aren't you?

Yes.
posted by ourt at 12:33 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


You're determined to rip away the few remaining shreds of my hopes for humanity, aren't you?

Yes, humanity is doomed because teen girls like clothes and makeup. You and C. S. Lewis should throw a scorn party somewhere else.
posted by rorgy at 12:34 PM on December 2, 2015 [58 favorites]


Shoplift from a bank if you've got real brass ones.
posted by delfin at 12:35 PM on December 2, 2015 [9 favorites]


Something like this happened in DC last week.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:36 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Whoa, wait, slow down-- you're telling me that malls still exist, and teenagers still go to them?
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:37 PM on December 2, 2015 [24 favorites]


If you really want to shoplift something without pushback, try being an older white cis man, and just sort of stuffing an entire country's looted wealth into your bag.

The time and money spent on political campaigning in order to reach this level pays handsome dividends, and tends to shield you from criticism.
posted by transitional procedures at 12:39 PM on December 2, 2015 [44 favorites]


The people I know at bookstores tell me the most-stolen books are Kerouac and Bukowski, mostly by young males. Maybe that's more up Metafilter's alley of ~meaningful deep content~ to steal... nice, brooding male Beat angst.
posted by naju at 12:40 PM on December 2, 2015 [25 favorites]


Yes, humanity is doomed because teen girls like clothes and makeup. You and C. S. Lewis should throw a scorn party somewhere else.

Dig him up for me -- assuming you haven't already -- and I'll consider it.
posted by jamjam at 12:40 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I stole everything that wasn't nailed down when I was that age. Cases of everything that wasn't nailed down.
It was thinking about that as an adult that stopped me pitating media.
posted by Kreiger at 12:42 PM on December 2, 2015


Recently I bought—legitimately bought—a season of a TV show, and my skin would not stop crawling. It felt abnormal.

I perversely feel like I'm being fiscally irresponsible or not frugal enough when I legit buy tv shows/movies, never mind that I have the room in my budget for the occasional season pass or whatever. And it's weird, because it's only for tv shows/movies that I feel this way! I've been happy to pay for most of my music basically since I got my own credit/debit card! But I end up dithering for literally half an hour before I just buy a movie on Amazon. Like, "Oh maybe I should just wait until it's back on Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hulu streaming. But then what if I want to watch it when it's not available on streaming? Maybe I should torrent it. Ugh, that torrent is huge, it will take forever. Maybe one of the sketchy streaming sites has it...will this give me a virus? Should I really spend money on this thing when I can just pirate it instead?"
posted by yasaman at 12:43 PM on December 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


As a teen girl, I used to shoplift books all the damn time but without a backpack. I am still perversely proud of nicking the hardcover copy of Clive Barker's Imajica when it came out. That fucker was huge.
posted by Kitteh at 12:45 PM on December 2, 2015 [11 favorites]


So I know I am a square and all, but do kids just go out and…take shit? From stores? My friends didn;t do this in high school, and I certainly didn't.

Good Lord, what a näif I am.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:48 PM on December 2, 2015 [24 favorites]


>> I just remembered I get 90% of my media through illegal means and so do most of my peers

> I've been told loudly and repeatedly by defenders of piracy that it is not stealing and is totally, completely different.

Not that I haven't also downloaded countless terabytes of music and movies, but there are people who will vociferously protest comparisons between their downloading and shoplifting. I'm happy to admit I want things that I don't want to pay for.


Piracy is good because it is stealing: you get the thing you want, without financially supporting the industry that made it. Someone here a few days ago linked to this article by the porn actor Stoya that presents a compelling case for torrenting pornography rather than using the "tube" sites, specifically because of the deep negative influence that the tube sites (which at least superficially appear more legal and more ethical) have on the pornography industry on the whole.

Returning to the topic of shoplifting, The Coup has a great track, titled I Love Boosters!, that is about the positive influence of people in Black communities who shoplift for resale. The lyrics are here. Key passages:
Back in elementary, my shoes used to rap
Every time my soles would hit the street they would flap
Then in high school Langston Anderson would cap
Cause my jacket didn't have a brand name on the back
Years later this lady took me to her apartment
It looked like the Macy's sportswear department
Clothes on the chairs, on the couch, and the carpet
A twenty had me icy like pissing in the arctic
[...]
This ain't the way the society raised ya
But most of it was made by children in Asia
The stores make money off of very low wages
The next time you see two women running out the Gap
With arms full of clothes still strapped to the rack
Once they jump in the car, hit the gas and scat
If you have to say something, just stand and clap
I don't have great shoplifting skills myself — on a baseline level I'm a squirrelly and anxious person, and so I seem squirrelly and anxious even when I'm not up to no good (or maybe I'm just an abject coward). Also, though, I'm a white man living in the Bay Area, a context wherein white men who look like they got dressed in the dark are perceived as being at or near the top of the social hierarchy, and so there's less social pressure for me to learn how to shoplift. But I have tremendous respect for the good shoplifters in the world. Shoplifting, or buying from a booster, is basically the only way to ethically acquire clothing without spending all of your free time combing thrift stores, and may in fact be even more ethical than thrifting, because of the direct negative effect that shoplifting has on the bottom lines of clothing manufacturers.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:49 PM on December 2, 2015 [18 favorites]


"Well, it's just a simple fact. When I want something, man, I don't want to pay for it."
posted by aught at 12:49 PM on December 2, 2015 [9 favorites]


Honestly this entire thread turned out far more in support of theft than I could have ever dreamed of anticipating... Was kind of expecting a "stupid little girls"-fest. So, so happy it isn't, I'm having a blast.
posted by ourt at 12:55 PM on December 2, 2015 [26 favorites]


The only physical thing I ever boosted were tapes from answering machines at thrift stores.

Piracy is good because it is stealing: you get the thing you want, without financially supporting the industry that made it.

YCTAB, are you seriously advocating the idea that we should avoid supporting any and all industries whenever possible?
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:55 PM on December 2, 2015 [6 favorites]


My friends didn;t do this in high school, and I certainly didn't.

Nthing the "I was a teen girl who shoplifted everything not nailed down." But I certainly didn't discuss it with my friends. What's different now is that with the anonymity Tumblr offers, people are able to discuss it without outing themselves. I am 100% sure I would have done this had there been a Tumblr when I was 16.

In other news, I am baffled by this Sephora haul. What Sephora has that much untagged inventory??
posted by DarlingBri at 12:57 PM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


Shoplift from a bank if you've got real brass ones.

15-20 year jail sentence. Shoplifting? Nobody really cares.
posted by colie at 12:59 PM on December 2, 2015


What Sephora has that much untagged inventory??

Well, I'm sure the inventory is tagged? But you just rip the UPC label off. Easy-peasy.

I shouldn't be saying that, but there it is.
posted by ourt at 12:59 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


> because of the direct negative effect that shoplifting has on the bottom lines of clothing manufacturers.
What negative effect? Shoplifting clothes affects the bottom line of the stores that stock the clothes, not the manufacturers. The more likely effect is that stores adjust prices higher to account for the loss in inventory.
posted by ReadEvalPost at 1:01 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


YCTAB, are you seriously advocating the idea that we should avoid supporting any and all industries whenever possible?
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:55 PM on December 2 [+] [!]


I am seriously advocating the idea that we should specifically avoid supporting the clothing industry, because it's a complete nightmare that operates through the use of quasi-slave labor (or in some cases, literal slave labor). Buying new clothes in America is like buying street drugs from South America or Afghanistan, oil from Saudi Arabia, or fish from Thailand — you can do it, but you are materially supporting some of the worst people in the world by doing so.

I'm a hypocrite here — I'm just now learning how to thrift effectively and I'm not brave enough to boost from Uniqlo instead of buying from them — but yes, there are certain industries that we do in fact have a clear moral imperative against supporting.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:01 PM on December 2, 2015 [10 favorites]


So I know I am a square and all, but do kids just go out and…take shit? From stores? My friends didn;t do this in high school, and I certainly didn't.

Good Lord, what a näif I am.


Indeed. Aside from that pack of Bubble Yum I took from the McKinleyville Circle-K in the Fifth grade (it was a dare!), I wasn't much for stealing, and I don't recall many of the kids around being much into thievery, either.
posted by notyou at 1:01 PM on December 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


My girlfriend when I was a teen wore JNCO jeans expressly because she could walk out with half the damn store hidden in them.

Also unless things have massively changed since my retail days, at most stores the most they can do is holler at you, they can't detain you.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 1:01 PM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


I don't have great shoplifting skills myself..

That's okay. We need you to keep to keying the Man's automobiles.
posted by notyou at 1:03 PM on December 2, 2015 [29 favorites]


I'll bag me a Tesla someday, I know I will...
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:05 PM on December 2, 2015 [6 favorites]


Also unless things have massively changed since my retail days, at most stores the most they can do is holler at you, they can't detain you.

Well, during my time at George Washington University, theft from the Foggy Bottom Whole Foods was running rampant. To combat it, they put a rent-a-cop on front door security detail.

Funnily enough, I got falsely accused of shoplifting because my cashier asked if I wanted my receipt, and I said no. When the rent-a-cop stopped me and asked for a receipt, and I explained, he didn't believe me, brought me downstairs, had my driver's license AND student ID scanned, and I was banned from that store for five years... For "not paying" for two cookies... billed at $1.88 total...

So... I guess it depends????
posted by ourt at 1:05 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


My circle in (quite poor) middle school shoplifted a little bit, like once or twice.

But my (very rich) high-school was packed with people stealing shit. They just didn't have tumblr.
posted by French Fry at 1:06 PM on December 2, 2015 [9 favorites]


As a former retail employee, I have mixed feelings! Because the employees get shit on when "shrinkage" gets high (also we often get suspected of doing it) (of course, some of us were) (not me).

Though I will tip my hat in respect to the kid that came in, threaded about 20 of those CDs on plastic hanger things (remember those?) over each arm and then ran like hell out the door.
posted by emjaybee at 1:08 PM on December 2, 2015 [10 favorites]


I was really softcore about this as a high schooler: I wanted a book at Borders but didn't have enough spending money, so I moved a "30% off" sticker from another book to that one and they gave me the discount. Stealing was unthinkable to high-school me, but for some reason that felt right in the moment.
posted by LSK at 1:09 PM on December 2, 2015 [13 favorites]


But then there ARE some of them who are just using their parents' Visas and pretending to shoplift

Based on a career in retail operations, I'll go ahead and wager that the vast majority of them are in fact real shoplifters.

The retail industry obviously doesn't want it published, but shoplifting is on the rise (and retailers can't stop it), notoriously difficult to stop, and the vast majority of shoplifters get away with it.

One of the user names quoted it the article is "liftliketheresnolp" - LP is the industry acronym for Loss Prevention, the security department of most retailers responsible for stopping this kind of inventory loss (and other types). Many of these kids are clearly well versed in what they're up to.

It's an addiction, they get a high from it, it's insanely expensive for retailers to try to police, and it makes the cost of everything more expensive for the actual paying customer. It's very, very real.
posted by allkindsoftime at 1:09 PM on December 2, 2015 [19 favorites]


As a teen I was stupid enough to shoplift. I was not stupid enough to publish the fact. And before anyone tells me about how much easier it is now, stupid is still stupid in the computer age.
posted by Splunge at 1:10 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


As a former retail employee, I have mixed feelings! Because the employees get shit on when "shrinkage" gets high (also we often get suspected of doing it) (of course, some of us were) (not me).

Sounds like you got played for a chump! Next time around, steal more stuff.
posted by rorgy at 1:10 PM on December 2, 2015 [9 favorites]


I mean, there's all kinds of ways to think about shoplifting writ large - "what if everyone shoplifted? would capitalism collapse or would we all just lose our jobs?" "what about independent businesses" "what if employees get blamed". My thought is just that I'm not going to get into some kind of moral panic about people - gasp! - failing to respect property under capitalism.
posted by Frowner at 1:10 PM on December 2, 2015 [18 favorites]


I feel like I should apologize for never having shoplifted anything. Which doesn't seem like how things should be. Shouldn't we be ashamed of stealing from people?
posted by Justinian at 1:11 PM on December 2, 2015 [26 favorites]


But he also credits a recent rise in shoplifting to something specific to millennials: "a pressure to be number one." Millennials, he says, want to have the best of everything (regardless of their spending money), and the competition to outdo one another is stronger than ever.

Man, "millennials" sure is an elastic term. I'm one, and I'm in my thirties. And I have ZERO pressure to be number one at anything, because I grew up in the 1990s, the age of apathy.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:11 PM on December 2, 2015 [16 favorites]


I would argue that, regardless of your ethical position, if pirating media was half as scary to do as shoplifting it would be remarkably less common.
posted by French Fry at 1:11 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


In my experience in retail (worked at Banana Republic, it was miserably oppressive, but that's an entirely different story), we literally were not allowed to confront suspected shoplifters. We could try to be overly friendly to make them "feel guilty," but other than that, we were not allowed to "accost" or directly ask if a person took a thing.

I mean let's be honest, the markup prices of most of this shit MORE than pay off the profits lost from shoplifters.
posted by ourt at 1:13 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


Man, "millennials" sure is an elastic term.

For the record, people my age legitimately loathe that as a label. It is not even remotely representational, and it's just a word Old Media uses to pander to Old People about us pesky, meddlesome Bernie Sanders and Obama lovers.
posted by ourt at 1:14 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


when i was 5 i stole a pack of gum at the supermarket because i thought it was free like the gross candy by the cash register at the rascal house

maybe 4 years ago i stole a half dozen peaches from westside market because an incredibly hot lady hit on me in the produce section and i panicked and fled

this concludes the list of my thefts
posted by poffin boffin at 1:14 PM on December 2, 2015 [45 favorites]


Oh man. There is a Shoplifting subreddit. OF COURSE THERE IS.

I'll be back in a week. I'm just going to read, okay? I don't even live in the same country as a Sephora!
posted by DarlingBri at 1:14 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


Among my friends who shoplifted, the only one who got caught was a black guy. Ended up in jail, the very first time he tried it. Figures.
posted by naju at 1:17 PM on December 2, 2015 [11 favorites]


When my brother was 17 or 18 he shoplifted constantly. Particularly from Wal-Mart, like literally every day. Mostly small stuff like energy drinks and candy, but occasionally more ambitious items. On one memorable occasion he stuffed a 64-oz bottle of grapefruit juice into his baggy sweatpants and strolled out of the store with it.

There wasn't much to do around where we lived so we went to Wal-Mart a lot. It got to the point where I refused to exit the store at the same time he did because no matter how many times he promised me he wasn't stealing anything this time, I had a feeling he definitely was.

He shoplifted all our Christmas presents from the mall, and only told us after we'd opened them. Our younger brother tried to follow in his footsteps and shoplift some Christmas loot too, but got caught on his first try. Instead of calling the police, mall security called my mom (hello, White Privilege), who then refused to celebrate the holiday that year because the bad-at-stealing brother "ruined Christmas."

Anyway, one fateful day at Wal-Mart, after a year of shoplifting and probably hundreds of dollars in merchandise, the other brother finally got caught. He'd stuffed whatever it was into the front of his sweatpants and the employee who stopped him tackled him near the shopping carts, knocking him to the ground and yanking his pants down. He was henceforth banned from Wal-Mart for life. Inconvenient since, as previously mentioned, it was kind of the only thing around.

I would like to reassure you that he grew up and turned out just fine, but he really didn't.
posted by the turtle's teeth at 1:17 PM on December 2, 2015 [17 favorites]


I mean let's be honest, the markup prices of most of this shit MORE than pay off the profits lost from shoplifters.

They'd have to, wouldn't they? Otherwise stores would go out of business. Prices are probably higher due to shoplifting.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:18 PM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


Framing shoplifting as an anti-capitalist measure is extremely confusing to me when, in this case, the people doing the shoplifting are participating in the kind of conspicuous consumption that capitalism explicitly celebrates.

Am I missing something here?
posted by ReadEvalPost at 1:18 PM on December 2, 2015 [68 favorites]


Framing shoplifting as an anti-capitalist measure is extremely confusing to me when, in this case, the people doing the shoplifting are participating in the kind of conspicuous consumption that capitalism explicitly celebrates.

I used to be one of those "this is bringing down capitalism" types, but then I realized it was buying into consumerism wholesale.

As someone who works retail currently, fuck shoplifters for wasting my time. I'd much rather be straightening my section than following your entitled ass around the store. Yes, we know you're stealing. No, we won't say anything about it to you.
posted by drezdn at 1:22 PM on December 2, 2015 [20 favorites]


Nthing the "I was a teen girl who shoplifted everything not nailed down." But I certainly didn't discuss it with my friends.

Huh, weird. Shoplifting was definitely a social activity, with one person taking stuff and another two or three acting as a watch/creating a diversion. And then we'd split the stuff once we were out of the store.

My husband got banned from a Borders for stealing a D&D handbook when he was in his teens, which is like the least badass shoplifting story ever.
posted by dinty_moore at 1:22 PM on December 2, 2015 [14 favorites]


My husband got banned from a Borders for stealing a D&D handbook when he was in his teens, which is like the least badass shoplifting story ever.

Bonus points if the manual in question was The Book of Vile Deeds.
posted by rorgy at 1:24 PM on December 2, 2015 [10 favorites]


Am I missing something here?

youths are terrible and should be banned.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:26 PM on December 2, 2015 [10 favorites]


Am I missing something here?

Yes! "Shrinkage" is also a great excuse retailers trot out every time they feel like increasing their profit margins.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:27 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]



Framing shoplifting as an anti-capitalist measure is extremely confusing to me when, in this case, the people doing the shoplifting are participating in the kind of conspicuous consumption that capitalism explicitly celebrates.

1. I think the idea is that enjoying stuff isn't itself uniquely capitalist - it's the bad distribution and destructive production processes that are capitalist. Enjoying make-up isn't capitalist - lots of people, historically, have enjoyed ornamentation in non-capitalist societies.

2. Also the idea that most working class people are basically being robbed by capital, and the whole "oh, you poor person can be forced to make shit wages and fired if you try to unionize, but if you help yourself to a chocolate bar - belonging to the boss, not you!!!! - you are a sinner and should go to jail" idea being nonsense.

3. And I think a subsidiary idea that, as long as you're facing a life of relatively bleak social prospects - shitty precarious work, never being able to own a house or afford to have kids, lack of benefits, dull work constantly under the technological panopticon - you have a right to some little bits of enjoyment whether you can pay for them or not.

It really doesn't, to me, have anything to do with "bringing the system down" - it's much more about what is still alive and resistant in ordinary people. Ordinary people are supposed to have respect for "the law" even if it's unjust, and the courts, and the prisons, and the bosses, and the banks, and the cops, and all kinds of social conventions that exist to conceal inequality and suffering (like the forcing of visibly homeless people out of city centers, for instance). We're supposed to really believe in all this received wisdom about these awful institutions even when they hurt us. Disrespect and skepticism about these things is, to me, healthy and a sign of life, even when it's pre-political.
posted by Frowner at 1:31 PM on December 2, 2015 [55 favorites]


I remember having to take annual "shoplifting review" quizzes or something. Like, we'd have to review the "hot spots" of the store and the most stolen items, and how much was stolen for each item and so on. The notion that thousands of dollars worth of men's blazers that literally had three different anti-theft devices LOCKED onto them were stolen every year basically had me thinking, "Damn, at that point, these people deserve the win..."

If you can outfox the fox, you shouldn't be punished, y'know?
posted by ourt at 1:31 PM on December 2, 2015


I think the idea is that enjoying stuff isn't itself uniquely capitalist - it's the bad distribution and destructive production processes that are capitalist. Enjoying make-up isn't capitalist - lots of people, historically, have enjoyed ornamentation in non-capitalist societies.

On top of that, in the instances of teen girls specifically, we're not just talking consumerism, we're talking patriarchal consumerism, in which our society intentionally and brutally crushes the self-esteem of young women by pushing the message that they should value themselves entirely according to how valued they are by men—men who, the message goes, will value them more if they buy all the things that're being shoplifted here. But I'm just restating what the OP said far better.
posted by rorgy at 1:36 PM on December 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


yeah, shoplifting by itself isn't like a bold strike against The Man or whatever, but it's not exactly wrong either.

I totally get the "this is conspicuous consumption by other means" argument. However (stepping back a second from the cartoon radical thing I've been doing too much lately), one thing about that Coup track that made me appreciate shoplifting and shoplifters more is how it observes on the fact that participating meaningfully in our own cultures sometimes requires making what looks like conspicuous displays of wealth — you can't get into the club without the right clothes, kids get bullied at school without the right clothes, and so forth. You could say that boosting is wrong because you don't really need to go to the club (you could go to the library instead like a nice young man!), or it's wrong because brave kids should organize to stop bullies and you know change fashion to deprivilege displays of wealth or whatever, but these solutions are not entirely realistic. (and as you know, I'm all about measured, realistic stances).

To my eye the chief weak point for pro-booster arguments is that respect for the law is in and of itself such a positive good that we should tolerate the abuses of the clothing industry more than we tolerate violations of property rights. YMMV on this; for my part, even though in large part I don't share the political views or aims of the Silicon Valley people around me, I've nevertheless soaked up from them the idea that the law frequently must be treated as damage and routed around.

I have often had little sleepy fantasies about what it would take to turn theft into an organized, coherent, forceful, influential political statement. Maybe by figuring out which brands and which clothing lines are produced under the worst terms, and then promulgating the idea that people should steal specifically those items whenever they can. Think of it as an "advanced boycott" — not only will stores hesitate to stock boycotted brands because they won't sell, but they'll also hesitate to stock them because they might vanish.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:43 PM on December 2, 2015 [11 favorites]


I thought I once stole a candy bar to eat from a convenience store where I was working. I got fired for it. Turns out that wasn't me but Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites. Stupid memory.
posted by misterpatrick at 1:55 PM on December 2, 2015 [8 favorites]


MetaFilter: determined to rip away the few remaining shreds of my hopes for humanity
posted by Jacqueline at 1:56 PM on December 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


A Tale of Two Junkies

I had a client who was a college graduate with a heroin problem. She would put on a business suit, walk into Wal-mart, and fill her cart with the largest, most expensive items she could find. She would then very purposefully walk out the door and time her exit with someone else. The alarm would invariably go off, and she would not even flinch. Typically, the other person walking out at the same time would stop at the alarm and look for their receipt. She did this repeatedly in stores in a three state area.

I represented her when she got caught. She was unusual in that she was very educated and candid about what she had done. She estimated that she had taken over $100,000 worth of merchandise from Wal-mart. She would bring her stuff to the same couple pawn shops who would pay her out each time. The reason she got caught was because an employee had seen her the day before in another town walking out with a cart full of stuff. When he saw her again that day someplace else, he started paying attention.

Another client I had was shoplifting some makeup from Wal-mart. When she was exiting, she was confronted by a Wal-mart employee who had seen her stealing. She tried to keep walking, but the Wal-mart employee tried to grab her purse (she had seen my client put the items in her purse). My client jerked the purse back from her, and there was a brief tussle. The contents of the purse spilled out, revealing the merchandise, some baggies of heroin, and some needles. The employee suffered a scratch during the altercation and was panicked that she had contracted HIV from the needles. My client was charged with Common Law Robbery (stealing from the person by using some amount of force) and Assault with a Deadly Weapon (the theory being that my client intentionally pricked the employee with a used needle).

One of the interesting things about that case was that it showed how a the actions of an employee could elevate what would have otherwise been a misdemeanor shoplifting charge into a felony (Common Law Robbery) simply by putting hands on the suspect. If the suspect stopped and submitted to the employee, it would remain shoplifting. But if the suspect used any force to free herself, she has just used force to steal something -- felony.
posted by flarbuse at 1:57 PM on December 2, 2015 [43 favorites]


Tumblr is also home to a lot of anti-capitalism memes so I'm not surprised.
posted by Jacqueline at 1:58 PM on December 2, 2015


When I was a teen shoplifters annoyed the living shit out of me because I worked in my parents' shop and hated knowing that people my own age would just take things for no obvious reason and there was very little I could do about it. I mean, shoplifting isn't the worst thing ever and there are some good reasons why people need it, but you're probably making your local marketplace and retail workers' lives worse and not really striking at The Man.
posted by thetortoise at 1:59 PM on December 2, 2015 [18 favorites]


Blankfein and Dimon should start a tumblr where they post every time they swindle some public employee retirement fund in Peoria out of twenty million. I would definitely read that.
posted by bukvich at 2:01 PM on December 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


Wow - I definitely feel square for never having shoplifted now. And for having judged a coworker for casually telling the story about how she'd told her daughter that yes, she'd buy the daughter a coffee drink at Starbucks if, during the transaction, the daughter would steal a bunch of tea for the mom.

I... am ok with continuing to pay for things I like.
posted by ldthomps at 2:04 PM on December 2, 2015 [15 favorites]


About shoplifting as a political act . . . if you're proud of the fact that you wear Diesel jeans specifically, and you shoplifted them so that you could wear them around not just as cool jeans but as Diesel jeans, aren't you validating Diesel's claim to be a trusted arbiter of cool? Like, presumably the individual store manager is angry at you, but I bet the people in the branding room at Diesel Headquarters are psyched.

I vaguely recall some story about the CEO of a young and hip clothing company (maybe Dov Charney in the early days of American Apparel?) instructing managers not to take some basic anti-shoplifting precautions, because if someone was both daring enough to steal clothes and clothes-focused enough to want to, he wanted that person walking around wearing his brand.
posted by ostro at 2:04 PM on December 2, 2015 [14 favorites]


As I said above, I know a lot of people who were big shoplifters as teens, mostly boys actually; I was never able to do it myself. Once in college, in desperation, I did ask my boyfriend, a skilled shoplifter, to shoplift an expensive textbook for me.

Having said all that, I just can't get behind shoplifting as sticking it to the man or whatever... it just seems like a petty and indulgent vice, especially as practiced by teens. There are other, better ways to stick it to the man.
posted by maggiemaggie at 2:06 PM on December 2, 2015 [8 favorites]


I don't see that shoplifting in the current regime undercuts the regime more than it reinforces it. Looks like differently-precarious boosters and everyone is worse off for the things that can't be lifted. allkindsoftime's summary sure sounds like another way online shopping extinguishes stores on the street, but online is even more alienation and panopticon, as currently constituted.

Trivially, the seeming Good Girls in my UMC high-school who I know shoplifted have probably had the greatest worldly success. Storytelling, seems to me the entitlement and nerve needed probably explain the difference.
posted by clew at 2:07 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


Man, the only thing I ever stole was a paintbrush in college from the campus art store that I needed for a project. Nothing fun.
posted by Windigo at 2:07 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think an issue here is lack of data. We don't know how many people are, like, stealing Diesel jeans because Diesel is just so cool, versus people who are stealing random nailpolish because they like wearing nailpolish and don't have any money, versus people who are stealing to re-sell, versus people who are stealing due to some meaningful component of need, versus people who are stealing due to discrimination problems (trans folks who can't access gender-appropriate clothes, for instance, due to harassment or to employment discrimination). Or, for that matter, people who are stealing Diesel jeans because they like the jeans. It's rather difficult to theorize the why of any individual act when you don't really know what's being done.
posted by Frowner at 2:08 PM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


To be fair a nice mid-range paint brush can cost 50 bucks easily.
posted by Windigo at 2:08 PM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


Also, I couldn't afford cool clothes in high school, and I grew up in a place that very much cared about cool clothes. So I shopped a KMart and took to sewing things like keys and a mudflap to my jacket and being a rebel in ways that seem more creative than shoplifting, but maybe that's my ethical snobbery showing?

I don't know. When that coworker above told me the story and I boggled at her, I was even more baffled when she said "well, you know Starbucks doesn't need the money". Like, under that same rubric would she steal from all corporations? I don't love corporations, but it doesn't make sense to me if we want to live in a civil society..
posted by ldthomps at 2:12 PM on December 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


Not stealing is now ethical snobbery! I love it.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:13 PM on December 2, 2015 [36 favorites]


I'm guessing that admiration of shoplifters' cleverness must be predicated on it being small-scale and done by the powerless, or y'all would feel a lot better about multi-level marketing and hedge funds.
posted by thetortoise at 2:16 PM on December 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


yeah, that's the other thing about shoplifting — because this is yet another case where the law is differentially enforced, the people who least need to shoplift are the ones who have the easiest time of it. Maybe all of us privileged people should do everything we can to make shoplifting easier for the underprivileged — walk around stores wearing tshirts reading "Lift like there's no LP" or whatever. hamburger

The Dov Charney thing makes so much sense — it's the meatspace version of Adobe's old strategy of making photoshop easy to pirate so that kids would learn how to use it and then later want their bosses to buy it. And like when I was in my Linux dude phase I'd try to evangelize for The GIMP to anyone I could, but nevertheless there are real inherent reasons why none of my graphic designer/artist friends would listen to me, and why all of them just kept pirating Photoshop.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:17 PM on December 2, 2015 [6 favorites]


Let's just hope the shoplifting trend doesn't merge with the shop small & local trend.
posted by Monochrome at 2:19 PM on December 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


Trivially, the seeming Good Girls in my UMC high-school who I know shoplifted have probably had the greatest worldly success. Storytelling, seems to me the entitlement and nerve needed probably explain the difference.

Also, uh, they probably weren't followed around as much. There's a reason why we had the black and latina girls act as a distraction while the white girls handled the merch.

I mean, we weren't doing this as some sort of anti-racism thing. We were being obnoxious, but that wasn't even the most dangerous/obnoxious/stupid thing I did as a teen in a mall. I just have a hard time getting het up about this small scale stuff.
posted by dinty_moore at 2:20 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


The few times that I've read about shoplifting, it was wildly amusing/horrifying to me because it just proved another iteration of structural racism to me, that a) white girls /do know/ and profit off of racism and racist gazes from being able to steal without being seen as suspicious b) the fact that part of the deal is that you still had to split the labor and profits across race.
posted by yueliang at 2:24 PM on December 2, 2015 [13 favorites]



I'm guessing that admiration of shoplifters' cleverness must be predicated on it being small-scale and done by the powerless, or y'all would feel a lot better about multi-level marketing and hedge funds.


There is a real moral difference though between acts that redistribute wealth toward the people who have a lot of it and acts that redistribute wealth toward those that don't. My go-to moral framework here is vulgar Kantianism; we can favor acts that redistribute wealth outward because, if they were treated as a universal maxim, wealth would tend toward a flat distribution that benefits everyone. On the other hand, acts that redistribute wealth inward toward the people who already have it would result, if turned into a universal maxim, in all wealth becoming concentrated in the hands of a few very central players, benefiting basically no one.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:27 PM on December 2, 2015 [9 favorites]


"Shoplifting is a victimless crime. Like punching someone in the dark!"
posted by bigendian at 2:29 PM on December 2, 2015 [13 favorites]


I have often had little sleepy fantasies about what it would take to turn theft into an organized, coherent, forceful, influential political statement. Maybe by figuring out which brands and which clothing lines are produced under the worst terms, and then promulgating the idea that people should steal specifically those items whenever they can. Think of it as an "advanced boycott" — not only will stores hesitate to stock boycotted brands because they won't sell, but they'll also hesitate to stock them because they might vanish.

This is interesting. My suspicion is that stores wouldn't stop stocking those brands but would just lock them up or keep them by the register, which might have a small negative impact on sales? Or they'd make them online-only. But there's something here.
posted by thetortoise at 2:30 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


They're teens. Their brains aren't fully developed stupid.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:32 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


If we were redoing Oliver!, we could have the teens be Fagin's squad, and he drops them off at malls to do their worst. He recruits his squad via Tumblr posts of their hauls/unboxing videos on YouTube, etc.

If his full name was Dean Fagin, they could be "Dirty Dean's Tumblr Teens" and you just slap some new lyrics on "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" and bam, heist music.
posted by emjaybee at 2:42 PM on December 2, 2015 [19 favorites]


When i was younger i liked stealing shit because it was fun. Not because i wanted it, just because it was fun. Most of my friends did it for the same reason.

Getting away with it(or switching price tags and doing the same) was fun. You were STICKING IT 2 TEH MAN and getting one over on them.

There were also a couple instances of being straight up violently assaulted by security guards or asshole older customers, including a couple in which the person straight up deserved a serious ass beating or jail, that just cemented the "2 4 6 8 smash the church and state" of it. Like they treat us like we're stealing all the time even when we aren't, and then beat the shit out of us over $5. Why should we give a shit about them?

It was fun, and it felt righteous, and it's fun in retrospect too. I'm not going to feel bad about it, and neither should anyone in this article.

We weren't playing the knockout game, or hurting anyone else like any number of stupid pranks did. We weren't wasting anyones time or creating more work for them either unless they were huge power tripping assholes who wanted to scream in our faces and insult(or assault) us. We were just some stupid ass kids putting different stickers on dreamcast games and putting headphones in our pants.

My fond-memoryness of it has only been reinforced by curmedgeonly fucks over the years who think we were ruining society by stealing $10 of shit from international big box chains or whatever. "Oh shit frank, we had to take the loss on that one, we have to lay off ten people because some kids stole some beer". Oh my god, go fuck yourself.

I completely relate to this too. We were mostly boys, but if we had been girls(and it was, with the girls we knew) then we would have been stealing... stuff girls want? There's nothing to really LOL girls at here. This is a teenager thing.

Wait. Are they stealing from mom and pop shops or from like forever 21, Macy's, Claire's, etc....?

Like, on preview, yep. It was entirely chains. The few times it wasn't, it was like chips at gas stations or bodegas or whatever. At least it was with everyone i knew in middle/high school.
posted by emptythought at 2:46 PM on December 2, 2015 [10 favorites]


Are they stealing from mom and pop shops or from like forever 21, Macy's, Claire's, etc....?

Forever 21, Victoria's Secret, Sephora, WalMart and a bunch of national chains I've never heard of seem to be the big ones.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:46 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


"what about independent businesses"

I have long been fascinated by the lifting tumblrs, and they're pretty much invariably against shoplifting at independent/small stores.

What I do not get is these girls (mostly) who steal hundreds of dollars of crap a month -- where do their parents think they got the stuff (or the money from selling it)?
posted by jeather at 2:46 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


Getting away with it(or switching price tags and doing the same) was fun. You were STICKING IT 2 TEH MAN and getting one over on them.

The only thing I don't understand about this (and so much of what kids post online) is the total lack of discretion. Not just so you don't get caught (but, yeah) but the feeling of getting away with something. It's not that they're doing things that every generation before them did, but that they advertise it on social media. I don't even think it's just that they don't think they will get caught; something else is going on. Do they actually not care of they get caught? And are they doing things that they aren't posting? Because there seems to be no limit to what they will post under their own name.
posted by Room 641-A at 2:52 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


> "Shoplifting is a victimless crime. Like punching someone in the dark!"

In conclusion, shoplifting is a land of contrasts.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:54 PM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


where do their parents think they got the stuff (or the money from selling it)?

Don't underestimate the power of parents to believe that their kids are perfect little angels and would never ever do something like THAT.
posted by naju at 2:54 PM on December 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


What I do not get is these girls (mostly) who steal hundreds of dollars of crap a month -- where do their parents think they got the stuff (or the money from selling it)?

Denial.
posted by Room 641-A at 2:56 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


The hour before my girl scout troop met was spent by the girls fanning out in our college town shopping area and stealing as much as we could. Mostly trinket type stuff. It was a game. None of us ever were caught. This was when I was in 4th and 5th grade, over 40 years ago. :/
posted by futz at 3:01 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


People are going to shoplift. It happens. I can understand that.

I can NOT understand why anyone would be stupid enough to photograph the evidence and brag about it openly online. My brothers and I all did stupid juveline things in high school. Only my little brother was dumb enough to photograph what he did. Photos of his stupid juvenile pranks got him into legal trouble. And this was back when the photos were physical objects that he was dumb enough to have on his person when stopped by a cop for an unrelated reason. These days, and these kids? Anyone can find their Tumblrs, and any company annoyed enough by them will have enough resources at their disposal to track them down.
posted by caution live frogs at 3:11 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm just now learning how to thrift effectively

I'm seriously doubting your East Bay communist bona-fides.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:17 PM on December 2, 2015 [10 favorites]


You Can't Tip a Buick: “Shoplifting, or buying from a booster, is basically the only way to ethically acquire clothing without spending all of your free time combing thrift stores, and may in fact be even more ethical than thrifting, because of the direct negative effect that shoplifting has on the bottom lines of clothing manufacturers.”

Stealing is wrong. It's wrong even if the person you're stealing from has done bad things. It's not possible to steal from "an industry," because industries don't own things; people do. Stealing from a store doesn't even mean stealing from the manufacturer; that's not how product stocking works. When you steal from a store, even a chain store, you're stealing from the people that own the inventory and the people that work there – not anybody else. They are the ones who suffer when things get stolen. The manufacturer, and even the people who run the chain from some tall building somewhere, don't care; they already sold the stock down to the store. It's the store itself that gets screwed – meaning the people in the store.

The idea of property isn't some capitalist lie. Capitalism twisted it, tried to turn it into a tool for the acquisitive desires of the greedy; but it is a basic, fundamental human thing, at its basis. It's a spiritual reality. You'll know this if you've ever been stolen from; when someone else takes something of yours, it's a violation, a desecration of the agreement that we humans have with each other not to do violence to people or the things people keep around them to stay safe and sheltered. That doesn't mean thieves are necessarily evil people; on the contrary, the only rational way to approach thieves is with pity, since the act of violating someone else's belongings by taking them only really harms the thief. As Plato said, to do injustice is worse than to have injustice done to us, for to do injustice is to harm one's own soul by violating the intimate trust we have with all other humans and therefore separating ourselves from others.

I don't think these girls are terrible. A lot of kids do this crap. If they're lucky, they grow out of it eventually; it's really no way to live. I don't think "boosters" are terrible; in many cases, they're just trying to get by, trying to help the people they care about by making the sacrifice of engaging in an unhealthy business – so if anything, I am angry at a world that forces so many people into a position where they have to harm themselves by thieving in order to get by and to help others get by.

But I do have a problem when those of us who have the option not to engage in such stuff twist ourselves around into believing it's laudable or desirable. No rational adult who thieves for a living would choose thieving over a world where they get to participate in society with full trust and credit; and there's no way that stealing will ever bring about that world.

Stealing is wrong. It's worst for the thieves. Pretending it's right isn't going to fix the systemic injustices of the world. It's only going to make them worse.
posted by koeselitz at 3:19 PM on December 2, 2015 [81 favorites]


DarlingBri: "In other news, I am baffled by this Sephora haul. What Sephora has that much untagged inventory??"
The thing that baffles me is that that sorry spread retails for $743.99. That could buy you a working automobile around here.
posted by brokkr at 3:21 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


As somebody who has tried to jam a working automobile into her pants, I can tell you that it is more difficult than you may assume.
posted by transitional procedures at 3:34 PM on December 2, 2015 [16 favorites]


This thread is giving me insight into the rationalizations people go through when committing higher-level theft. And I don't mean this as a condemnation, I really don't. Shoplifters aren't the same as embezzlers and the people who defraud companies. But the thought process is so similar; it's a window.

- Everybody does it. Just don't get caught.
- People have always done it.
- The system is corrupt, and this is valueless junk anyway. I refuse to feel bad about it.
- I've been treated badly; I've been falsely accused; I didn't get the American Dream; I don't see why it matters if I get something out of this.
- Come on, they know this happens. If they were really losing money, they'd close the loopholes in the first place.
- Anyone clever enough to work out how to do this must deserve it.
- I'm not the Man. If anyone's affected, it will surely be somebody more powerful than me.
- Oh, like you're really laying people off over this. Whatever.
posted by thetortoise at 3:37 PM on December 2, 2015 [38 favorites]


I can't criticise desperate people for shoplifting, but I don't understand how it can be a postitive political act if you're rich enough to get by without stealing. Workers in crappy factories are making clothes for you, and getting
paid and treated poorly because a middleman is skimming most of the profit. I can respect activism that looks
for ways to cut out or rein in the middleman. But just grabbing a handful of the contested loot for yourself, and running off to enjoy it at home? That's a conveniently self-serving kind of "activism", when you're not the one who's been cheated.
posted by xris at 3:43 PM on December 2, 2015 [15 favorites]


I mean – trying not to go overboard here, but as a white liberal guy it really feels like a good dose of white liberal entitlement when we fetishize "boosters" and set up stealing as the great societal equalizer. They're human beings doing this stuff – real human beings who are, given the state of law enforcement in the US, quite literally putting their lives on the line every day in order to make it by stealing. They've been doing it for nigh-on half a century, so it clearly isn't bringing about the revolution any time soon. Their intransigence in a tough situation is indeed to be celebrated on a certain level, but it has to be with the clear understanding that, if the world is such that theft is a necessary aspect of life for people in certain economic situations, then this is a monumentally shitty thing, and we must find some way to change it. That doesn't mean becoming social tourists, slumming it for fun because we think the lifestyle is neat. That means actually working to end those economic strictures. Stealing, like drug dealing, is a problem capitalism long ago solved and turned to its benefit. The capitalists want you to steal. It gives them excuses to step up the police state, and it only makes money for the manufacturers and well-insured corporate conglomerates, who get to fill double orders.

All this is separate from the problem of teens shoplifting – although I'm not sure how separate. Young people who shoplift are often clearly doing it because of a dislike of the nameless, faceless authorities that clearly don't give a damn about them. It's not really good for them, but I gather the feeling that you're sticking it to that nameless, faceless authority is somewhat satisfying. Teens' lives are less often in danger when they steal, although I confess that initially I was assuming these were white teens acting out. If they are white teens, it could be another instance of white privilege – young people knowing, deep down, that they won't be at risk, won't be taken seriously, if they steal things (and probably feeling pretty spiteful under the weight of that knowledge.) But there are probably some who actually put themselves in danger out of bravado.
posted by koeselitz at 3:44 PM on December 2, 2015 [15 favorites]


We used to have shoplifting contests at Chapters in high school. One night four of us filled one guy's car trunk full of books. At least I read most of what I stole .... fuck the suburbs were a boring place to grow up.

Once, also during high school, a friend's dad got really drunk and started telling us stories about a 'friend' of his who stole to pay for college rather than work part-time (only years later did it occur to me it was probably him). The biggest thing the 'friend' ever stole was a canoe. Just walked right into Canadian tire, put the canoe on his head, and walked out like he had paid for it. Said one of the sales people even ran over and held the door open for him.
posted by mannequito at 3:46 PM on December 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


The idea of property isn't some capitalist lie. Capitalism twisted it, tried to turn it into a tool for the acquisitive desires of the greedy; but it is a basic, fundamental human thing, at its basis. It's a spiritual reality. You'll know this if you've ever been stolen from; when someone else takes something of yours, it's a violation, a desecration of the agreement that we humans have with each other not to do violence to people or the things people keep around them to stay safe and sheltered. That doesn't mean thieves are necessarily evil people; on the contrary, the only rational way to approach thieves is with pity, since the act of violating someone else's belongings by taking them only really harms the thief. As Plato said, to do injustice is worse than to have injustice done to us, for to do injustice is to harm one's own soul by violating the intimate trust we have with all other humans and therefore separating ourselves from others.

There's some sleight of hand at play in this passage; some takings of property are just, some aren't, and you're implicitly identifying just takings with legal takings and unjust takings with illegal takings. I hold that under property law as currently configured, justice and legality are on almost entirely orthogonal axes.

Plato was a tremendous thinker, maybe the best of his era — which is no small feat, given that he and Buddha lived at roughly the same time — but engaging with his work requires interrogating it rather than just mining it for homilies. Most notably, you must take into account Plato's famed tendency, and Socrates's famed tendency, to prefer abstract ideal forms over actual living and breathing people. Aristotle, to his great credit, lacked this tendency — but then again, Aristotle also thought it was natural and just for some people to be the property of other people, so it's not like he had it figured out either.

If we're appealing to the Greek boys on the idea of property, my guy is Diogenes. As the story goes, the only item he kept to himself was a plain cup, until one day he saw a child drinking from his hands. He then threw away the cup and announced "a child has beaten me in plainness of living!"
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:48 PM on December 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


I never stole during my teens, I was too frightened of my parents. But once I was in my early 20s and a poor undergrad student, I kind of considered it my duty to steal books from the big box book-store I was working at. Mostly because I hated everything that the company and the CEO represented. The sad thing is that I did this despite already getting a 30% discount off of in-store purchases. It was mostly just me wanting to give this CEO and the company the middle finger.

At the end of our shifts each night, our store manager would ask people to hold open their bags to prove they didn't steal any books but since most everyone who worked at the book store was a voracious reader, we all had loose books in our bags to begin with. It was not difficult to slide one or two books inside each and every night. This was about 8 years ago before the store put in security cameras. I was working during a golden age of relaxed security standards it seems.

I no longer steal books from that store or any other stores. I've shifted my thieving habits online. It's easier and less risky. I should probably feel bad about these things I've done in the past. But I honestly don't. I know how much money these large corporations have made off of the average consumer. People say that this drives up costs even further. I'm not sure I believe that argument. I'm now in my 30s and I've made my peace with the way I behaved in my early 20s.
posted by Fizz at 3:55 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Girls shoplift, guys learn magic tricks.

Studying magic tricks easily doubles your shoplifting skill.

In my dark, mostly-friendless junior high years, I became brazen. Like walk into Walmart with one of their largest shopping bags, fill it with Legos and nonsense, stash it behind the dumpster out back and go back in for a second bag brazen. I lucked out in that, the day I got caught, I was only getting started and had very little on me, and was able to beg my way out of it. After that I called it a good run and quit.

I can't imagine posting photos online though. Are you fucking kidding me? The thought of my parents, or someone who knew my parents, finding the page and recognizing something on it that would identify me would make it impossible to get any sleep ever.
posted by rifflesby at 4:07 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


Rick: You put that back! That's my personal property!
Neil: You just said all property is theft, Rick.
Rick: Well, yes, it is.
Vyvyan: Yeah, so I'm nicking it.
Rick: Stop! Thief! Thief!


-- The Young Ones, "Sick"
posted by Countess Elena at 4:08 PM on December 2, 2015 [17 favorites]


I wonder how many copies of Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book were stolen. Mine was.
posted by rifflesby at 4:10 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


You Can't Tip a Buick: There's some sleight of hand at play in this passage; some takings of property are just, some aren't, and you're implicitly identifying just takings with legal takings and unjust takings with illegal takings. I hold that as pertains to property law, justice and legality are on almost entirely orthogonal axes.”

I didn't say anything about legal takings or illegal takings, although "legal takings" is a vague term that needs definition and clarification.

I hold the opposite: justice and legality are on almost parallel axes, because law is the understanding people approach society with, for better or for worse, and violating that understanding is always wrong.

Theft is always unjust. The injustice might sometimes be less than the injustice the theft prevents – the classic case is of a person who steals to avoid the starvation of his family – but the stealing does not cease to be unjust in that case. Why is it unjust? Because it's doing harm to the thief, who has to worry about being caught, has to think about what she or he has done, has to confront the consequences. That's unjust, even if I would pardon them knowing that they were trying to prevent greater injustice.

“Plato was a tremendous thinker, maybe the best of his era — which is no small feat, given that he and Buddha lived at roughly the same time — but engaging with his work requires interrogating it rather than just mining it for homilies.”

This is probably true in the grand sense, but note that I didn't ascribe any doctrine to Plato; I merely repeated what he said. More to the point, if any doctrine can rightly be said to be "Platonic," this is probably it. Plato explicitly mentions this argument, to my count, at least four times: it figures most famously in Socrates' valiant refutation of Callicles in the Gorgias, but it also appears in the first book of the Republic, the Parmenidies, and – in the mouth of the Athenian Stranger, so we know this is not merely a Socratic dictum – in the Laws. He implicitly discusses it many more times throughout the other dialogues. In fact, I would argue that Plato spent more time developing the idea that it is worse to do injustice than to suffer it than he did developing the idea of the forms.

But that's just my humble opinion. Plato may not mean the argument seriously – I take that point, and I understand the importance of irony in the dialogues – but I am convinced by it fully.

“Most notably, you must take into account Plato's famed tendency, and Socrates's famed tendency, to prefer abstract ideal forms over actual living and breathing people. Aristotle, to his tremendous credit, lacked this tendency — but then again, Aristotle also thought it was natural and just for some people to be the property of other people, so it's not like he had it figured out either.”

I can't really figure out what this means, for the life of me, having read almost all of the Platonic dialogues and letters and having studied Aristotle at length. As far as I can tell, Plato is close to the other end of the spectrum as far as understanding the grim and gritty reality of human behavior. But again, I'm not certain that's what you mean.

You Can't Tip a Buick: "If we're appealing to the Greek boys on the idea of property, my guy is Diogenes. As the story goes, the only item of property he kept to himself was a plain cup, until one day he saw a child drinking from his hands. He then threw away the cup and announced 'a child has beaten me in plainness of living!'"

Throwing belongings away is different from having them forcibly taken from you against your will. Platitudes about the importance of simplicity are nice, and are easy for those of us like myself who don't have to worry about the prospect of actually losing those belongings. I don't think this really reflects the moral universe humans live in, though. Again, having your belongings forcibly taken from you is an injustice; throwing them away willingly is not.
posted by koeselitz at 4:14 PM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


This is why the provisional title of my first book is Steal That Other Book Over There, Yeah, to the Right, That One.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:15 PM on December 2, 2015 [13 favorites]


I'm a square; the one time I shoplifted, it was by accident. My friends and I were at the local mall, spending time before some movie browsing books at B. Dalton's. I picked up some SF paperback that looked interesting, and started reading.

When my friends told me it was time to go to the movie theater, I was engrossed and did the walking-while-reading thing. Walked right out the door, right to the movie theater, and only then did I realize I had just walked out with a book without paying. By the time the movie was over, all the mall stores were closed.
posted by fings at 4:19 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


When you steal from a store, even a chain store, you're stealing from the people that own the inventory and the people that work there – not anybody else.

Who owns the inventory? It's not the people whose labor produced the stuff. It's not the people who work there; they just get paid (poorly) to handle the stuff, or to manage the people who do. With large, centrally-operated retail chains, ownership is vested in a corporation. That corporation has managers, executives, shareholders, and a board of directors, but it exists independently of all those people; they're certainly not personally "violated" in any sense by shoplifting. So this notion that you are stealing from real people begins to ring a little hollow to me.

when someone else takes something of yours, it's a violation, a desecration of the agreement that we humans have with each other not to do violence to people or the things people keep around them to stay safe and sheltered. [...] As Plato said, to do injustice is worse than to have injustice done to us, for to do injustice is to harm one's own soul by violating the intimate trust we have with all other humans and therefore separating ourselves from others.

We are not talking about stealing your neighbor's prized possession. That would be a violation of human community. Shoplifters are separated from any conceivable personal "victims" not by the act of shoplifting, but by the social relations of capitalism -- especially, in this case, the relation known as private property. Any human connections here are already so abstract and alienated, so fundamentally based on violence and exploitation, that it's absurd to speak a community whose trust is being violated. We are already alienated from one another. Shoplifting isn't going to overcome that alienation, but if you want to locate a stain on the human soul, you're looking in the wrong place.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 4:23 PM on December 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


When I worked in a used bookstore, we habitually locked every copy of Steal This Book in a case behind the register. Before we did that, pretty much every copy ordered would disappear. (The counterculture section was up in the attic room that was rumored to be haunted. I always hoped it was haunted by Abbie Hoffman.)
posted by thetortoise at 4:27 PM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


Metafilter: stealing isn't wrong when it's from The Man, because we have the mindset of larcenous teenagers capitalism alienation privilege!

When I see the same sophisticated arguments being thrown around to support other left-wing/anti-capitalist political ideas the MeFi likes, I will no longer feel vaguely guilty for disagreeing with them.
posted by Rangi at 4:32 PM on December 2, 2015 [8 favorites]


Sometimes at the self-checkout register, I will lie and ring up my organic red onions as conventional red onions.

mods please anonymise this comment/don't tell the cops on me
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 4:34 PM on December 2, 2015 [16 favorites]


Shoplifting isn't going to overcome that alienation, but if you want to locate a stain on the human soul, you're looking in the wrong place.

Something can be bad and an action we should frown upon without being a "stain on the human soul". The idiots here in Beverly Hills using thousands of gallons of water while other people scrape to conserve every drop aren't single-handedly killing society either but we still think they're jerkholes.
posted by Justinian at 4:43 PM on December 2, 2015 [8 favorites]


Gerald Bostock: “Any human connections here are already so abstract and alienated, so fundamentally based on violence and exploitation, that it's absurd to speak a community whose trust is being violated. We are already alienated from one another. Shoplifting isn't going to overcome that alienation, but if you want to locate a stain on the human soul, you're looking in the wrong place.”

Exactly my point – though I don't think it's a stain on any soul; rather, as I said, a world that forces people to steal is a shitty, unjust world.

And – to put it a little more pragmatically – those who are forced to steal are not separated from the very tangible sense that they're going to be punished disproportionately if they are caught. That, all on its own, is extra, added alienation they're subjected to. Which, again, is a terrible thing that needs to be changed – not by them simply deciding not to steal (they wouldn't if they had another legitimate option, I believe) but by those of us who have quite a bit more power doing something about the institutional violence being done to them.
posted by koeselitz at 4:44 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


Who owns the inventory? It's not the people whose labor produced the stuff. It's not the people who work there; they just get paid (poorly) to handle the stuff, or to manage the people who do. With large, centrally-operated retail chains, ownership is vested in a corporation. That corporation has managers, executives, shareholders, and a board of directors, but it exists independently of all those people; they're certainly not personally "violated" in any sense by shoplifting. So this notion that you are stealing from real people begins to ring a little hollow to me.

Are we only talking about the biggest boxiest nasty corporate stores at this point? Because, yeah, stealing from those is not the same as mom-and-pop stores, and it's what the link is referring to, but I'm not convinced any significant number of shoplifters limit themselves in consideration of venue and carefully avoid small businesses and co-ops and even the privately-owned fast food franchises. I mean, this is anecdotal, but I've worked on the retail side for one big evil grocery chain and a handful of small shops and nonprofits, and big evil store had probably the lowest rate of shoplifting because of security safeguards and could cope with it the easiest in terms of profit. In the other stores, I looked at the person/people who owned the inventory every day, and if stealing from them isn't exactly the same as stealing someone's bike, I'm not comfortable with reducing it to an abstraction, either.
posted by thetortoise at 4:45 PM on December 2, 2015 [9 favorites]


koeselitz: I mean basically we have a fundamental and basically irreconcilable difference of opinion about what counts as a just taking, what counts as an unjust one, what counts as a morally neutral one, what counts as force (feel free to put the "now you see the violence inherent in the system!" Monty Python clip here) and what have you. But it's cool.

For the record, and this may indicate the nature and breadth of the gulf between us, my favorite reading of the Gorgias by far is Bruno Latour's in his Socrates’ and Callicles’ Settlement. The short (and sloppy... apologies to people who've read this piece or the Gorgias more recently than I have) of Latour's reading is that Socrates and Callicles are in a very important way on the same side: both are interested in silencing and controlling the masses (which for Latour, as a practitioner of science studies, means both the people of Athens and actual physical objects themselves, but never mind that). The chief disagreement between Socrates and Callicles, as Latour has it, is on means of control; although Socrates wishes to use reason and truth as a tool for silencing and controlling the common people of Athens, Callicles prefers something more like raw power. As such (and this is me speaking and not Latour), law is better viewed as a framework laid over the actual relationships between things and people in the world, a framework that can match the real relationships or not match them, encourage healthy relationships or discourage them, be just or unjust. This is why I'm a big fan of civil disobedience as a tactic (among other tactics), and why even though it's cheesy and basic as hell, I love the bit of Huck Finn where Huck decides to go to Hell, rather than doing the "right thing" by narcing on Jim, who by law was both a thief and a piece of stolen property.

Rather than seeing law as, as you have it, "the understanding people approach society with, for better or for worse," I hold that we must always assess the law in terms of whether or not it matches the world (by whatever contingent, imperfect ways we see the world), rather than assessing the world in terms of whether or not it matches the law. As such (and it's completely okay with me at least that we disagree on this; I think you're an interesting guy and hope you don't find me to be a total twerp), I think that stylish, pointed violations of the law should be celebrated, especially when they result in the distribution of goods outward toward the poorly connected fringes of the network of capital rather than inward to the well-connected center. Because I think that the things that we do can be better than the law, I do not think that violating the law, as an understanding of the world, is as you put it "always wrong."

(one freaky side-effect of Latour's reading: he holds that the Athenian mob was absolutely right to kill Socrates.)
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:47 PM on December 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


achievement unlocked: cite Bruno Latour and Boots Riley in the same thread.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:55 PM on December 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


I'm not exactly shedding a tear over chain stores' shrinkage, but this shit is stupid, and the (quasi-)defenses of this stuff are...unpersuasive.

That said: when I was a teenager in the 90s, there was an online CD store which had $5 coupons. However, if you cleared your cookies, you could get infinite CDs, so long as no purchase was ever above $5.

So, after getting a few $3 CD singles for myself, I eventually just started sending random CD singles to random people in the phone book.

This shit was also pretty stupid. But, hey, teenagers.
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:00 PM on December 2, 2015 [10 favorites]


Huh. I realise that I'm a million years old and teens today may have changed, but in my high school the girls who bragged about shoplifting were invariably the rich mean ones. They used to enjoy the fact that the security guards didn't dare stop them. It doesn't mean, I guess, that others didn't do it, but if they did they didn't make a game out of it. It seems to me it's easy to overlook a whole lot of entitlement on the part of teens who would brag about it on tumblr-- and also easily step over the retail coworkers who are often blamed or charged with stopping them. (Depending on the company structure, a chain can be a franchise or otherwise licensed-- shoplifting for reasons unrelated to poverty may seem small and petty to the total brand, but can really screw the local guy who owns the local inventory).
posted by frumiousb at 5:03 PM on December 2, 2015 [11 favorites]


Oh my God you guys. Apparently this is such a regular occurrence that law firms are SEO-ing Sephora shoplifters specifically.
posted by DarlingBri at 5:11 PM on December 2, 2015 [8 favorites]


I can't criticise desperate people for shoplifting, but I don't understand how it can be a postitive political act if you're rich enough to get by without stealing. Workers in crappy factories are making clothes for you, and getting paid and treated poorly because a middleman is skimming most of the profit. I can respect activism that looks for ways to cut out or rein in the middleman. But just grabbing a handful of the contested loot for yourself, and running off to enjoy it at home? That's a conveniently self-serving kind of "activism", when you're not the one who's been cheated.

For what it's worth, i in no way saw it as a greater radical political act. I saw it as basically egging the front of a walmart.

And i was, and am, completely fine with that. None of us thought we were bringing the system down or burning the middleman, we knew we weren't.

It's a minor act of rebellion more about getting shit you want and vaguely sticking it in a generic sense. We were all "broke" in that lower middle class urban kid sort of way where your parents have a place, and have most of what you need, but you don't have any pocket money and don't have much to do besides play nintendo and aimlessly wander around the city.

It became more of a hobby, and more of a good skill to have when i was abruptly out on my ass at 17.

I definitely didn't think i was like linking arms inside PVC pipes to stop a forest from getting clearcut. I don't believe that any, or at least 99% of these people do either. Ascribing it to that almost feels like a straw man to me to be honest.
posted by emptythought at 5:17 PM on December 2, 2015 [6 favorites]


I hope they're remembering to strip the EXIF data from their pictures, or that Tumblr does it. Otherwise it could be surprisingly easy to track them.
posted by Mitrovarr at 5:30 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


I definitely didn't think i was like linking arms inside PVC pipes to stop a forest from getting clearcut. I don't believe that any, or at least 99% of these people do either. Ascribing it to that almost feels like a straw man to me to be honest.

Some of the other posters here have been explicitly defending it from an anti-capitalist base-- that's where the response is coming from.

I think comparing it to egging a store is pretty right on, to be honest.
posted by frumiousb at 5:44 PM on December 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


parade.gif

Me with @sloan @cameron in Chicago #yolo #dayoff #donttelldadaboutthecar
posted by Room 641-A at 5:45 PM on December 2, 2015 [10 favorites]


> I think comparing it to egging a store is pretty right on, to be honest.

word. it doesn't do much good, but it doesn't exactly hurt (unless you screw up and get caught, which is an ever-present danger). Although it's theoretically possible to put together some sort of radical intersectional form of shoplifting, and although shoplifting can be a vital survival tactic, in most cases the best thing you can say about it is at least you didn't buy any of the stuff you got.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 5:46 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yup, came here to say that it's not some conscious anticapitalist act, just basically a "fuck you" to mall stores (and as a former retail worker, I am all about saying "fuck you" to mall stores). Now when someone would come in and return $400 worth of obviously stolen merchandise, that did affect our sales numbers for the day and therefore the hours we'd be able to assign out next week (and our pay), but shrinkage? Nah, who cares.

The irony is that I've always been waaaaayy too much of a scaredy-pants rule-follower to shoplift, even though I'm fully in favor of people shoplifting from, say, Sephora. The time I was most tempted to steal something was when I was waiting in line at American Eagle to buy a ring that was on sale for like $3.99 and whatever transaction was going on was taking way longer than it needed to, but instead I was good and wasted five minutes of my life.
posted by sunset in snow country at 5:56 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I feel like I sound much harsher in this thread than my actual feelings just because I think shoplifting kinda sucks. I mean, I'm against any kind of penalties for teens or really anybody who isn't reselling the stuff or approaching it in a clearly organized fashion, and I know that most people do it because they're broke (and even rich show-off kids who do it for sport probably will grow out of it or are going through something screwed up). But I'm the child of petit bourgeois shopkeepers, so the subject makes me grumpy.
posted by thetortoise at 6:03 PM on December 2, 2015 [9 favorites]


The only thing I can contribute are two anecdotes:

The first time I shoplifted, was the only time, as I got caught with the $1.60 item in my pocket. I was arrested and had to pay a $101.60 fine, which as a 14-year-old, wasn't happening. Queue end-of-the-world from parents, etc.

The second is to this day I am hyper-vigilant about clearly putting down items I pick up, and that I actually went back inside a home depot a couple of years ago to pay for a few things which I forgot I had put inside a bucket (with lid) I was buying.

I do not think either of these anecdotes adds to my sex appeal, alas. But I'm also much less invested in whether others boost than I was for a long time. ("How come YOU never get caught???" Wah, wah.)
posted by maxwelton at 6:28 PM on December 2, 2015


I stole from the big box mall "record" (CD) store, called Record Town, the last day I worked there, as a kind of retribution since they never raised my wage past the bare minimum and kinda treated me like shit, and also they were charging people $20 for CDs and that was insane even in the 90s when the music industry was still booming. I stole a few CDs and a few DVDs, nothing majorly worth raising a fuss over. It was as easy as shucking the cases in the back room and walking out the back way, sidestepping the security sensor.

In retrospect they must've known exactly who it was, given my idiosyncratic tastes that everyone knew about. Like, who else would have stolen a DVD filled with a bunch of music videos from experimental electronic artists? Lol. Surely they just let me get away with it as a parting gift and/or were too lazy.
posted by naju at 6:37 PM on December 2, 2015


Because there seems to be no limit to what they will post under their own name.

They're not posting under their own name, they're posting under their Tumblr pseudonyms.
posted by Jacqueline at 6:41 PM on December 2, 2015


My husband once caught a 13 year old shoplifting a bottle of liquor from the corner store. The store owner rolled his eyes and let him go. The kid told my husband his REAL NAME. (Husband is not a cop, just an adult authority figure). Later, husband looked up that last name in the phone book of our very small town and called and told the kid's mom - I think if it had been anything other than booze, he wouldn't have called, because he hung up the phone with a hang dog look on his face and said, 'Now I'm a grown-up.'
posted by bq at 6:59 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


mannequito : The biggest thing the 'friend' ever stole was a canoe. Just walked right into Canadian tire, put the canoe on his head, and walked out like he had paid for it. Said one of the sales people even ran over and held the door open for him.

One of my friends growing up told me this exact story of his older brother and a friend of his doing just this, except at a Sears. Now I'm wondering if it's an urban legend.
posted by dr_dank at 7:02 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


Definitely a blow against capitalism, especially if you're white. Brave, even.

I didn't think I could be surprised any longer at the lengths people will go to justify wanting to take free shit from other people but apparently I was wrong. Because I have been surprised.
posted by Justinian at 7:05 PM on December 2, 2015 [12 favorites]


A couple years ago I was daydreaming in a convenience store and when I walked out the door couldn't honestly remember if I had paid for the drink and snack in my hands. I went back in and (re)paid, and the clerk looked at me like I was insane. Im not sure if the look was because I was paying twice or because I walked out and then came back to pay. I was too embarrassed to ask.

When I was younger though, I stole everything. No particular rhyme or reason. It was thrilling I guess.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:05 PM on December 2, 2015


If you really want to shoplift something without pushback, try being an older white cis man, and just sort of stuffing an entire country's looted wealth into your bag.

Also nobody will notice if you pocket some candy.

Anyway back when I was a teenager - i.e. ten years ago - the most notable thefts I knew about were of booze. Obviously none of this is new though, just the bragging about it in the Internet. That's also the stupid part but they'll learn.
posted by atoxyl at 7:13 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I would sometimes slip something into someone else's pocket and then pick that, if to elusive, there was satisfaction that Mr. Siminsky was refreshingly suprised at the new can of Binaca in his frock.
posted by clavdivs at 7:22 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


I've never shoplifted. But as a fat, middle-aged woman, going on the amount of attention I usually get from department store salespeople, I could probably walk out with the whole store before anyone noticed. (Seriously! Being overweight, female, and 44 is like a Cloak of Invisibility.)
posted by Daily Alice at 8:30 PM on December 2, 2015 [9 favorites]


The few times that I've read about shoplifting, it was wildly amusing/horrifying to me because it just proved another iteration of structural racism to me, that a) white girls /do know/ and profit off of racism and racist gazes from being able to steal without being seen as suspicious b) the fact that part of the deal is that you still had to split the labor and profits across race.

I mean, I don't know how it was for your friends, but it didn't take any grand detective work to figure out that there was some racism at play in the mall. Hell, the reason why I was there half of the time was because mall security was known for kicking out groups of black teens for loitering, but if you had a couple of white kids with you as chaperones, it was suddenly okay (and I mean security straight up walking up to the white kids and telling them that they were in charge and responsible for keeping their friends in line. As happened to me a couple times). I don't think that's where we got the idea to split up and have racially appointed tasks to shoplift, but it did make us damn sure that we could get away with it.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:45 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I wish society was this willing to see petty crime as endearing and cute when it was done by black male teenagers.

I stole cigarettes when I was teenager, because they wouldn't sell them to me. Otherwise I prefer victimless crimes. I always think of Mike Brown when I think about stealing tobacco, security guard just let me go the one time I got caught. Much different reaction than police finding and shooting you.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:04 PM on December 2, 2015 [6 favorites]


That's a vivid backdrop to your story, dibty_moore - to underpaint mine, I'm making comparisons among an entirely WASP group of girls. The non-WASPs would mostly have known the shopkeepers of the little independent gift-and-notion shop through their families. We didn't have a mall!
posted by clew at 9:09 PM on December 2, 2015


I've never even once deliberately shoplifted anything. The closest I've come is this one time when I was shopping with my then two year old, she grabbed four pairs of of underwear from the rack as I pushed her through and threw it under the stroller. Not even my size. And I couldn't bring it back because (for obvious reasons) underwear is final sale. I win the square-person title.
posted by Go Banana at 9:23 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


Wow. My estimate of Metafilter as a whole just shot down by more than I had thought possible.

But you go guys! Stick it to the man! Go boost a Che Guevara shirt and be edgy!
posted by Bugbread at 9:57 PM on December 2, 2015 [22 favorites]


one time when I was 5 i ate a pistachio out of one of those giant pistachio buckets in the supermarket

my mom caught me eating a second one in the back seat of the car in the parking lot and made me walk back inside the store and hand the partially chewed up pistachio shells to an employee

i cried for a full day and now i'm allergic to pistachios

don't steal, kids
posted by suddenly, and without warning, at 10:12 PM on December 2, 2015 [14 favorites]


One of my friends growing up told me this exact story of his older brother and a friend of his doing just this, except at a Sears. Now I'm wondering if it's an urban legend.

My dad worked at sears when he was young, and a bunch of my friends worked at best buy right after high school.

They had a bunch of stories like this. And of people walking in, getting a cart, putting a TV in the cart, walking over towards customer service, then just out the door.

Sometimes employees would follow them out and help load it in their cars.

I don't think it's an urban legend for a second, this shit just happens fairly often. And it's only a memorable story when they don't get caught. "Lol look at what this idiot tried" has way less staying power than "you won't believe what this smartass got away with".

Wow. My estimate of Metafilter as a whole just shot down by more than I had thought possible.

I'm having the same reaction, but for the reverse reasons. Like

And, as a fun bonus, when you wear those jeans, you're contributing to the tacit acceptance of that exploitation. Definitely a blow against capitalism, especially if you're white. Brave, even

What does that have to do with shoplifting? What jeans, even if they do cost $300 could a teenager even buy(or afford) that didn't? This applies to basically all this stuff.

I agree that you're not any less guilty, but the framing of this post really sounds like you're trying to imply that you're more guilty. Which just... what?

And like, i never thought i'd be on mefi defending shoplifting but holy shit you guys are coming off pretty badly here. I'm not even pro shoplifting so much as i'm anti however the heck a lot of people here are approaching it. "white teens who shoplift are actually racist because they knowingly benefit from racism" is the type of argument i'd expect to see from the absolutely most disingenuous parts of tumblr.(something something "allosexuals") Which kinda almost makes me feel like we've gone full circle. We can talk about tumblr without sounding like the trolls on there and using the same clubs.
posted by emptythought at 10:18 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]




I vaguely recall some story about the CEO of a young and hip clothing company (maybe Dov Charney in the early days of American Apparel?) instructing managers not to take some basic anti-shoplifting precautions, because if someone was both daring enough to steal clothes and clothes-focused enough to want to, he wanted that person walking around wearing his brand.

This is also a Nathan For You episode, except he does the usual squirmy one-step-further thing and actually tells the customers to their faces whether he thinks they're cool and sexy enough to be allowed to shoplift, or whether they have to pay for it.
posted by en forme de poire at 11:31 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh man, looks like I missed "shitty excuses for bad behavior" day
posted by jklaiho at 11:52 PM on December 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


A few years ago I bought something from eBay, something small, like a $15 item. I didn't receive it, and started a dialogue with the seller. They were as helpful as they could be, but I still didn't have my item. We decided to report the loss to eBay for a credit. We submitted the claim and eBay approved* it without delay.

About a month later, I discovered the package was sitting at my mom's house, a few miles away. I have no idea how that happened, but I called eBay to ask how I could settle up. Two people had to put me I hold to find out the procedure because no one had ever asked them how to give back money. They ended up telling me not to worry about it. I'm pretty sure that had no way to take the money back.

*When the claim was submitted one of the checks they did was review our correspondence, which they decided was legitimate. I found that out when they approved the claim.
posted by Room 641-A at 11:55 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


Lol @ not shoplifting. If you aren't someone I know running a place with affordable and quality things, and it's not bolted down, I'm going to sieze any opportunity I see to take it. I did it brazenly as a teen (like everyone else I knew) and I do it sneakily as an adult. When the opportunity arises, pine nuts become peanuts, and whatever is in my left hand never makes it to the conveyor. It's the greatest life hack of all.

I'll stop once I'm no longer burdened by crippling debt.
posted by still bill at 12:18 AM on December 3, 2015


i, too, believe stealing is wrong.

emptythought: "For what it's worth, i in no way saw it as a greater radical political act. I saw it as basically egging the front of a walmart. "

You Can't Tip a Buick: "word. it doesn't do much good, but it doesn't exactly hurt (unless you screw up and get caught, which is an ever-present danger)."

Hi there, currently working in retail over here. As somebody who would probably be drafted into cleaning up after such an asinine act of "rebellion," I can tell you with certainty that it would ruin my day and make me extremely irritable with people in general and the vandal in particular. Even if you think of Wal-Mart and friends as history's greatest monsters, that's no excuse for taking it out on the folks who happen to work there.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:42 AM on December 3, 2015 [26 favorites]


Not surprisingly, there's now some people going around and doxxing the tumblr shoplifters. Parents, cops, colleges.
posted by dragoon at 12:48 AM on December 3, 2015


This thread is depressing as hell.
posted by Lou Stuells at 12:50 AM on December 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


Man, before reading this thread I really thought that most shoplifters were, like, Jean Valjean types stealing out of necessity and a lot poorer than me, but that probably isn't true at all. I don't know what to do with this information.
posted by thetortoise at 1:00 AM on December 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Well, here's a detailed article on who shoplifts, in case anyone else is also thinking far too much about this now. My preconceptions were way off; shoplifters tend to be more educated and in higher income brackets, and it's probably more associated with psychiatric disorders, impulsivity, and drug dependence than with other demographic stuff.
posted by thetortoise at 1:36 AM on December 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


Was it really responsible for i-D to name and link those Tumblrs directly, even just with the username? They're minors, they may be acting stupidly, but the consequences of being potentially outed and doxxed (as seems to already be happening) are scary.

I had a friend during my Masters (a PhD student) who would steal from local restaurants and bars. Small stuff, like a cup or something. I "inherited" a sundae cup and a salt shaker from her that she insisted on gifting me for some reason.

The i-D article links to a Jezebel article that, for some reason, tries to conflate shoplifters with findoms (financial dommes). I don't understand why - is it because both subcultures prize luxury name-brand goods? The latter are usually adults (it is a form of sex work after all) and in their case their subs are willingly giving them money, they're not stealing it without the owner's knowledge. I come across a lot of findoms but haven't seen a lot of crossover with the shoplifting people i-D are talking about (indeed this is the first I've heard of such a Tumblr subculture though I'm not surprised really).
posted by divabat at 5:39 AM on December 3, 2015


I work in retail goods manufacturing. Many actual manufacturers want people to lift or at the very least don't care.

Almost no stores MAKE what they have, they buy it. One brand stores like American Apparel being a rare exception as they actually control their whole supply chain. Most are buying from manufactures that you've never heard of, domestic and foreign, who make all the store labeled shit. Loss at a store means increased out of stock, which means more buying, which is more bottom line for a manufacturer.

But Shrink is an overstated part of the profit equation. A boogie man for the media because "those damn teens!!". Stores are getting clothes and accessories at about 1/5-1/3 the cost they sell them. Shrink accounts for a very small percent of operational loss. Oil prices, climate issues (for cotton) and dock workers strikes etc etc matter radically more to profit margins than teens taking stuff. But it's a much sexier more sensational topic.
posted by French Fry at 6:59 AM on December 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Like some others, the reactions in here to this surprise me.

I stole a candy bar once when I was a child, never got caught, no one ever found out, but I felt guilty every time I went to that store afterwards.

I've justified downloading things from the internet only when my DVR screws up a recording. Other than that I'm happy to pay for what I want, or borrow it from the library if I don't need to own it/ want to pay for it.

Everyone in here that's on board with this behaviour, you're saying that if it were your teenage child you would tell them it is ok? Show them this thread & say "Stick it to the man!"?
I kind of hate to use the term, but isn't shoplifting a "gateway" to other illegal behaviour where you steal/ cheat/ act immorally & get things you shouldn't have? I'm sure I'm being a bit naïve but I feel like someone that thinks shoplifting is their right probably has issues with ethics.
Man, I know I sound like a straight up goody two-shoes, but I just don't get the acceptance of this. I mean, I get that it doesn't really hurt the big companies, but I think acceptance of it could hurt a lot of people/ smaller businesses.
posted by Laura in Canada at 7:00 AM on December 3, 2015 [12 favorites]


Wow, this thread is a lot more pro-shoplifting than I expected it to be!

As a fundamentally anxious person, I could never shoplift without it eating away at me forever, but I guess it doesn't bother me when it's teenagers ripping off mall stores. I work in a small independently-owned vintage store, though, and you'd better believe shoplifting pisses me off there. Every single item in our store was hand-picked and purchased by me, the owner, or one other lady, with our own damn money, and when people steal from us they are stealing from US, personally. And our customers know that. And stuff still goes missing.
posted by nonasuch at 8:02 AM on December 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


All I can say is : 3edgy5me.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 8:24 AM on December 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Was it really responsible for i-D to name and link those Tumblrs directly, even just with the username? They're minors, they may be acting stupidly, but the consequences of being potentially outed and doxxed (as seems to already be happening) are scary.

God forbid they have to face consequences for stealing.
posted by Justinian at 8:25 AM on December 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


Personally I don't see as much "stealing is really good!" or "this excuses stealing in all situations!" so much as an understanding that the system is pretty damn broken and rational actors within a broken system sometimes act in a way that seems broken, and well it's kind of a mess and moral black and whites rarely ever paint a full picture when it comes to our choices w/r/t consumption under capitalism. I see people working through those issues in sometimes provocative ways. Nothing out of the ordinary on this here internets and I don't believe it warrants an "I'm so shocked and disappointed in you" scolding.
posted by naju at 8:38 AM on December 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


Also this thread introduced me to The Coups' "I Love Boosters" and that's a real jam.
posted by naju at 8:40 AM on December 3, 2015


God forbid they have to face consequences for stealing.

Surely we're not saying that the consequences of teenage foolery should be the internet rage machine, no matter what our views on shoplifting? Especially given that most of these people appear to be quite young women, and we all know how the internet deals with young women.
posted by Frowner at 8:40 AM on December 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


I hope none of them are successfully doxxed for reasons Frowner mentions, but if they do, they have made their own bed, because bragging about your criminal activity on the internet is an enormously stupid thing to do.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:48 AM on December 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


So I work at a tiny, independent Mom and Pop record store. The owner is one of my close friends. I've worked there for the last thirteen years. To say the store is not a profit-making operation would be a mammoth understatement. Staying open is a constant challenge and a thing the owner does because he loves it. End of story. I was a 12-13 year old that shoplifted from the mall (mostly bodice-rippy historical/Gothic "Pirate's Passionate Slave"-style romances that I was embarassed to be seen buying at the register). I understand the impulse and know the feeling. It was hard to feel sorry for Books-A-Million.

But you know what? It sucks when it happens to us. Our mark-up, even on used stuff, is really small, which is to say our profits are also small. Loss of sales means we don't have the money to make an order. Loss of sales make it hard for us to continue existing in an environment largely surprised that we still exist anyway. Not a lot of people pay for music anymore. That's their choice and I won't make them feel bad about it. I can't stop you from stealing online. That's your business and your prerogative. I can (and will) stop you from stealing from my store. Because for me, and the other people that work there and shop there, the store is more than just a free copy of the new Adele record.

Also, preppy teenager with the popped collar: if I see you swap price tags on Hip-Hop vinyl again, I swear to Christ, I will find your mother and I will call her.
posted by thivaia at 8:59 AM on December 3, 2015 [11 favorites]


Sorry, I just don't buy that. Doxxing women generates death threats and rape threats. Even if every one of those young women was convicted in a court of law - which they haven't been! - they wouldn't be punished with death threats and rape threats, and I absolutely resist the idea that death threats and rape threats ought to be used as punishment for anyone.

"You - someone we've arbitrarily decided is privileged based on statistics and your tumblr layout - should be subject to death threats, sexual harassment and all the armaments of the meanest parts of the internet - based on something you may have actually done or something you may have boasted about doing, we're not sure - so that other, less privileged people will be too terrified to shoplift" is pretty incoherent reasoning if you ask me.
posted by Frowner at 10:29 AM on December 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


Especially the "we need to harshly punish people we think are privileged precisely in order to protect marginalized people from the same kind of harsh punishment" - that's just weird. "Our court system is racist and class biased, so we should have random internet justice against white and/or middle class people to remind people of color and/or poor people that our court system is racist and class biased so the people of color and/or poor people won't be under any illusions about getting away with crimes".
posted by Frowner at 10:31 AM on December 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


This – including the comments here – all reminds me so much of a King of the Hill episode.
posted by ignignokt at 11:12 AM on December 3, 2015


In fact, I think there may have really been one about this? I may be thinking of the one with the cool kids panhandling.
posted by ignignokt at 11:12 AM on December 3, 2015


There is nothing "random" whatsoever about kids getting in trouble for publicly bragging about stealing baubles and gewgaws. It is actually very nearly the opposite of randomness - they're stopping just short of personally driving themselves to juvie.
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:15 AM on December 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


There is nothing "random" whatsoever about kids getting in trouble for publicly bragging about stealing baubles and gewgaws. It is actually very nearly the opposite of randomness - they're stopping just short of personally driving themselves to juvie.

Maybe, but still doesn't mean we should do things that will lead to them getting rape threats. Enabling that behavior seems like a greater social ill than shoplifting.
posted by dinty_moore at 11:27 AM on December 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


it's probably more associated with psychiatric disorders, impulsivity, and drug dependence than with other demographic stuff.

Kleptomania is a thing.
posted by atoxyl at 11:31 AM on December 3, 2015


Kleptomania is a thing.

As is stealing shit to sell to buy drugs, obvs.
posted by atoxyl at 11:44 AM on December 3, 2015


Doxxing women generates death threats and rape threats.

From what I can tell, they're being doxxed in the "Let's find their Real Names, tell the authorities about them and watch the fireworks" sense. I'm not seeing death or rape threats. And the doxxing predated the Vice article by months, just to be clear.
posted by dragoon at 12:24 PM on December 3, 2015


Kleptomania is a thing.

Yeah, it just has little to do with the various abstract defenses of shoplifting offered in this thread. (The study is worth a look.) But we seem to have moved on to a conversation about doxxing and how it's bad, which is much less contentious.
posted by thetortoise at 12:44 PM on December 3, 2015


Ew. Doxxing teen girls out of a twisted sense of justice is never okay. Period. Get a hold of yourselves...
posted by naju at 12:48 PM on December 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


and FYI I think retail workers have about a bazillion times more of a sensible reason to steal from their employers than randoms on the street do

It's the best way to feel better about your job.
posted by phearlez at 1:57 PM on December 3, 2015


Shoplifting among wealthy women became a known phenomenon in the 19th century. As awful as this tumblring is, I can at least take comfort in the fact that it's nothing of recent invention.

Some parts of this thread make me feel the way Republicans must feel all the time. (That's a borrowed joke, I'll put it back where I found it.)
posted by Countess Elena at 3:48 PM on December 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm suggesting that doxxing them might have prevented a substantial amount of harm.

When has that ever been the case for any doxxing, especially of a minor?!
posted by divabat at 4:36 PM on December 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


This thread reads like a "would you kill someone for a million dollars if you knew you wouldn’t get caught" discussion.

This seems to about narcissism and privilege. You have people who think they can do whatever they want and are sure there will be no consequences, and aspiring assholes who wish they had the means. This reads to me just like the people who abuse retail workers without the conflict, with the same rhetoric, and $100 bucks says most of these people engage in that too, or will when they get braver.

I don’t see any sort of liberal radicalism, I see admirers of Donald Trump.

If you want to hurt corporations you don’t engage in their game. Everything else is profit or advertising for them.
posted by bongo_x at 5:01 PM on December 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Because doxxing Marin Shkreli totally made a difference in the price hike, totally.

Also again: these are minors! Many of them female! Tumblr already has a massive problem with minors being the target of major Internet hate to the point of suicidality for stuff as benign as drawing a POC character kinda white-washed! Do we really want to side with the Internet rage machine?!
posted by divabat at 5:04 PM on December 3, 2015


but seriously though, I don't think anyone was saying this. So perhaps get ahold of your jerking knee.

Just because someone didn't write a sentence exactly saying that doesn't mean there isn't a gross undercurrent of it in here. There's certainly more than a couple "they deserve whatever they get" comments, which yea, are tacitly approving of that even on the nicest possible reading.

What the hell nerve did this thread poke? I feel like I'm reading bizarro mefi.
posted by emptythought at 5:33 PM on December 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


What the hell nerve did this thread poke? I feel like I'm reading bizarro mefi.

Probably the nerve of people who had to deal with the direct consequences of this behavior, if I had to guess. But I give up; the lengths that people will go to in order to avoid even feeling bad about stealing are ridiculous. It's just rationalizing all the way down. Someday we'll probably all understand the psychological side of this better and the two sides of moralizing/rationalizing will feel outmoded. (Now to go read the gun violence thread, which will surely give me less of a stomachache, right?)
posted by thetortoise at 6:14 PM on December 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Reading that study again, I'm even more convinced that punishments for shoplifting tend to be a bad idea, because not only is the crime often based in disorders of impulse control (in which case threats of long-term consequences could be less effective) but also because the blame and punishment for shoplifting will continue to fall disproportionately on low-income people and stigmatized minorities, who not only are less likely to actually shoplift in the first place but also more likely to be treated brutally by the criminal justice system. (I remember my sister working for one of the mall clothing stores in St. Louis a few years back and being told by her boss to follow young Black women around and her refusing to do it, which led to constant conflict with the boss.) Anyway, sorry, I'll give the thread a rest now.
posted by thetortoise at 7:16 PM on December 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


This is the example I was thinking about - people who drove a teenager to mental hospital because she drew art in a style that wasn't "social justice" enough. And she is far, far from the only one.

I've been burned too many times from seeing people I know being doxxed for the crime of being female/sex workers/queers/games critics/POC/trans/framed for some interpersonal drama or another and have come thisveryclose to being doxxed myself for one tweet that I'm turned off by the idea of doxxing as a means of doing good.
posted by divabat at 8:08 PM on December 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


Holy hell, divabat. That's horrible.
posted by rorgy at 8:38 PM on December 3, 2015


There are two very different kinds of “doxxing” being discussed here.

Finding out who’s behind the pseudonym and privately contacting the kid’s guardian, the retailer, and/or law enforcement: many people are okay with that.

Posting the kid’s details publicly so they and their families can be harassed by strangers: this is a significantly less popular idea.

You can argue for or against either or both of those, but let’s please not conflate them.
posted by Fongotskilernie at 9:09 PM on December 3, 2015 [8 favorites]


When I was younger I worked at a boutique in the fashionable part of the city.

One day, I was in the store by myself and I saw a well-dressed, middle-aged white man come in with maybe 3 boys around the age of 12. They were all wearing sunglasses (which they didn't take off) and they walked very swiftly to the back of the store. Maybe 30 seconds they walked back out, and on their way out the door, one of the boys said "I got a-" before the others shushed him. I walked to the back of the store and saw that a bunch of cups from our tea sets had been stolen. Of course, by then the people were all long gone, and it's not like I would have been able to do much anyway.

To this day I haven no idea what that was about. It was almost like it was a ritual, like he was teaching them how to be badasses, or something. Of course the owners discovered that a bunch of stuff was missing and freaked out, but I never got in trouble, the store stayed in business, and I guess ultimately nothing came of it. But it gave me a totally new insight into how totally bizarre the world can be. I felt really used.
posted by teponaztli at 12:58 AM on December 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


Yeah so, as a person who upthread was making a lot of the "yeah shoplifting seems aight, whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" comments, maybe it matters that I, personally, don't shoplift, have never shoplifted, and feel anxious at the thought of shoplifting. If anything, I lean towards being a stern moralizing sort, in both this and other instances; in college, being around people who I knew had stolen things usually skeeved me out.

What changed my perspective on this, mostly, was the recognition that moral judgment can't take place in a vacuum; the culture we're a part of places pressures and stresses on individuals and assorted groups of people unevenly. You can call an act unethical while understanding that it operates within a realm that's already so unethical as to skew everything which occurs within it.

I don't think shoplifting is gonna upend patriarchy or end sweatshops or fix capitalism or, I dunno, whatever else people who're defending shoplifters in this thread are accused of loftily claiming. I think shoplifting can hurt small businesses, I think it requires an amount of privilege to get away with that is itself problematic/reinforces structural inequality at a different point from the one it allegedly alleviates, and I think it's immoral or at best amoral in a way that I, personally, as a person who basically has a Privilege Cards royal flush, have never felt the need for and can't help but mildly disapprove of. But I understand the reasons it happens, I think that the people who're shoplifting are dealing with things of their own, and I think that shoplifting probably makes their lives suck less, at a time when a lot of them probably benefit from anything that keeps things being totally wretched.

Furthermore, given all the methods that I know of teens trying to get away from the abject misery of their surroundings, shoplifting is probably one of the most benign. You can do things as a Youth that screw you up for years if not decades. Shoplifting, though? Not unless you get caught. That makes it only about as risky as recreational drug use (and most recreational drugs are far more damaging than I imagine the criminality of shoplifting is to a shoplifter's soul). There's worse out there than drug use, too, and depressingly commonly resorted to, as well.

So yeah. In an ideal world, I would be free to sternly wag my finger at those rascal shoplifters and their godless ways. In this world, when I hear that somebody's shoplifting, my feelings are a mixture of "I hope they don't get caught" and "Good for them! I hope it helps." Certainly I don't think doxxing young girls is a smart idea, on account of having looked at a web page at any point between now and 2010.
posted by rorgy at 6:54 AM on December 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


Wow, tough thread

Teenagers are supposed to do stuff like this. If you have a teenager who doesn't rebel and use bad language and who gets good grades and is preternaturally mature who all the authorities love, then what you have there is a sociopath.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:40 AM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Finding out who’s behind the pseudonym and privately contacting the kid’s guardian, the retailer, and/or law enforcement: many people are okay with that.

I'm not.

I know the tenor of the thread is "shoplifters are all rich girls with entitlement problems, so it's okay to make sure they get what [I think] they deserve and rich girls basically can't suffer any real injury anyway", but:

1. You don't know that someone has been correctly identified in the first place - you just know that you think LittleSaraLifter is really Claire Thompson of Wherever, NY.

2. You don't know whether they really stole anything or whether they are faking it as described upthread.

3. Very often you can't know that Claire Thompson of Wherever is really a rich girl who is protected by her privilege. I've witnessed enough internet dramaz doxxing to realize that even when people think they know someone's class, racial, gender and sexual identities, they often do not. Wouldn't it be interesting if Mean Girl Claire were actually, say, Marginalized Adoptee Claire who has a really shitty home life? Or if Mean Girl Claire isn't actually rich and she ends up getting fucked over by the cops?

4. You don't control consequences once something is on the internet or in the legal system. Claire should probably know that, of course, but you're an adult, and shouldn't risk someone else's future employability, etc, over the possibility that for a year or two in their adolescence they stole from Sephora.

5. You don't know what their homelife is. What happens if Claire has added all her gender/sexuality stuff to her tumblr, as a lot of the ones linked in the article do, and her parents find out that she's trans or queer or whatever and they are not cool with it? What happens if her parents are abusive and she was stealing all along because it gave her a sense of control?

My point is, this isn't Claire down the street whose parents you chat with all the time and who you can be reasonably sure will deal with Claire's shoplifting in an appropriate way [for whatever your value of appropriate].

Metafilter routinely advises people that if you become aware of, say, what seems to be a co-worker's or neighbor's affair, you don't intervene - precisely because you don't know what's going on. I think this ought to be doubly and trebly true for total stranger teen girls on the internet, for cripes sake.

I would also suggest that we as a culture kind of fetishize the punishment of "bad" young women, especially "bad" young women who are explicitly or implicitly sexualized by their consumer choices, and that this seems to me to be a factor in the desire for these girls to get what's coming to them.

"Marginalized girls who steal suffer terrible, disproportionate consequences, so we ought to take it upon ourselves as private citizens to see that privileged girls who steal also suffer terrible, disproportionate consequences" seems like the absolute reverse of the kind of reasoning we should be doing.
posted by Frowner at 7:44 AM on December 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


Well said.
posted by naju at 7:57 AM on December 4, 2015


Teenagers are supposed to do stuff like this. If you have a teenager who doesn't rebel and use bad language and who gets good grades and is preternaturally mature who all the authorities love, then what you have there is a sociopath.

If we can get anything at all positive from this thread, it could maybe be that being a young person who makes different decisions than you did at the same age doesn't necessarily mean that they are a terrible human being and/or have a serious mental illness.
posted by Copronymus at 8:06 AM on December 4, 2015 [15 favorites]


Teenagers are supposed to do stuff like this. If you have a teenager who doesn't rebel and use bad language and who gets good grades and is preternaturally mature who all the authorities love, then what you have there is a sociopath.

Nice false dichotomy.
posted by aught at 8:49 AM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


If you have a teenager who doesn't rebel and use bad language and who gets good grades and is preternaturally mature who all the authorities love, then what you have there is a sociopath.

I mean I didn't rebel or use bad language and got good grades and I grew up treating other people as manipulatable objects to be toyed with and dispens---oh wait I see what you mean
posted by rorgy at 8:54 AM on December 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


I was very mature and never used bad language and authorities all loved me, etc.

I was just biding my time, though, until I could leave home and begin again as a punk and general nogoodnik.

But then when I did leave home, I discovered I was forever marred by my polite and tractable habits, had developed a guileless expression and manner, etc, and no matter how many transgressive hairstyles and facial piercings I sported, strangers would still ask me for directions and assistance, hard-bitten and skeptical merchants would still take checks from me with no ID and people would just generally assume that I was truthful and well-meaning. The worst part was that I seemed to be utterly unable to act with proper sociopathic ruthlessness and continued the general mild-mannered and courteous practices of my youth.
posted by Frowner at 9:09 AM on December 4, 2015 [9 favorites]


In this thread I learned that sociopaths are the ones who don't take stuff from other people.
posted by Justinian at 11:07 AM on December 4, 2015 [12 favorites]


My wife used to work in a retail store in a mall which had a policy that they couldn't make any attempt to stop shoplifters. But, she was somehow still supposed to be accountable for preventing shoplifting. If I recall correctly, her store manager was pretty good about not being a jerk about it, but it still meant that whenever there was days with more theft, corporate would hound them about it. You can rationalize with whatever anti-capitalist theory you want to try to convince yourself that your act is justified, but at the end of the day you're still making the poor schmucks who work at the store's day a little worse.
posted by biogeo at 11:34 AM on December 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


In this thread I learned that sociopaths are the ones who don't take stuff from other people.

Yeah, "people who act prosocial are the real sociopaths" is the kind of truism that appeals to antiauthoritarian intellectuals, but it isn't borne out by reality as far as I can tell. You can argue that antisociality isn't a thing and that the concept exists primarily for social control, but stealing, lying, and not respecting others' property do tend to be correlated with other not-very-nice behaviors, and even if they come from understandable psychological causes, are not great for people's ability to trust each other. Once again, I don't think the teens in this link or any others deserve to be punished, let alone doxxed; I'm just saying there are actual victims here.
posted by thetortoise at 11:36 AM on December 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


NO ONE SAID THIS OR EVEN ANLYTHING CLOSE

I'd much rather be straightening my section than following your entitled ass around the store. Yes, we know you're stealing. No, we won't say anything about it to you.

Huh. I realise that I'm a million years old and teens today may have changed, but in my high school the girls who bragged about shoplifting were invariably the rich mean ones.

Trivially, the seeming Good Girls in my UMC high-school who I know shoplifted have probably had the greatest worldly success. Storytelling, seems to me the entitlement and nerve needed probably explain the difference.

If they are white teens, it could be another instance of white privilege – young people knowing, deep down, that they won't be at risk, won't be taken seriously, if they steal things

Less privileged kids are much more likely to get caught and face serious consequences, which is not going to be posted on a tumbler with a kickin' minimalist template

While there's a question of interpretation, people have pretty clearly said, repeatedly, that the shoplifters in question are privileged - with several comments to the "rich mean girl" effect - and will not face serious consequences. "Will get what they deserve" is a bit hand-wavy, but a number of people have voiced support for the idea of telling cops and parents.

The funny thing is, in this thread I've actually said very little in support of shoplifting, and certainly nothing about individual capitalists "deserving" it. If anything, I think the issue is that marginalized people can deserve a few of the fruits of the earth even if they can't pay - sort of the reverse argument.

I wonder how many of us use our AmazonPrime membership or otherwise participate [by choice - I'm thinking of those of us who could afford / arrange other alternatives] in patronizing business that engage in wage theft. I wonder how many of us - and I'm sure I'd be on this list, at least - routinely buy things made from materials mined from recently - not even in colonialist days! - stolen indigenous land. Theft is everywhere. Capitalism is theft; it's been theft since enclosure days. The poverty that renders people unable to buy stuff, the social strictures that make so many things necessary or seemingly necessary - that's all built in to the system.

It seems very strange to say that the anti-social behavior which counts is stealing some nail polish when you're a teenager or when so immiserated that you are stealing to support yourself. What erodes trust for me? Sudden layoffs! Heavy police presence! Workplace bullying! Racial profiling! Wage theft! And yet I bet most of us wink at most of those things most days, because we're not, most of the time, at the sharp end. We have to power to punish teenage girls, so we support that; but we don't have the power to punish CEOs, so we just pull out our credit cards.

I am not a shoplifter, but that's because I was able to afford my books in college since I didn't come from a poor and abusive family; because transmasculine people are much more readily able to access gender-appropriate clothing; because I am not barely squeaking by on food stamps, etc. That's what separates me from the majority of the people I know who do or have shoplifted regularly. And it's because I know those people that I object so strongly to the narrative about shoplifting that's being promulgated here.
posted by Frowner at 11:55 AM on December 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


But that said - look, I feel like this has turned into probably a much crappier conversation than it had to be. I can't help but feel that if we were face to face, we'd be able to understand each other with more nuance.

Maybe we could agree on these things?
1. When working people have to make up for shoplifted merchandise, or small businesses have to eat the cost, it's rough and no one can be expected to just sit back and welcome shoplifters in the name of social critique.
2. Rich mean kids who shoplift to be assholes or seem cool are acting badly.
3. Not everyone who shoplifts is a rich mean kid, and some people have reasons for shoplifting which are graver than the reasons for not shoplifting.
4. We don't agree about the precise consequences for posting about your shoplifting on the internet, but we all agree that if there are going to be consequences, they should be proportionate and just.
5. We all have different experiences with shoplifting/shoplifters, and this informs our feelings about it - what's more, different experiences legitimately call for different responses.
6. We all have different feelings about capitalist systems, but we would all like to see a social system which is less economically hierarchical, less exploitative and less about getting more and more shiny things.

Would that work?

When not in the heat of typing, I would really much rather work out this stuff and find common ground, and I feel like maybe we're not seeing each other at our best.
posted by Frowner at 12:18 PM on December 4, 2015 [12 favorites]


I think part of the argument being ignored here is that this is not just a discussion about people who shoplift, it’s about people who do it and brag on the internet. That changes the dynamic. Leaving that part out is like leaving out the shoplifting part and defending people who post pictures of themselves.
posted by bongo_x at 12:26 PM on December 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


Frowner, stop being reasonable and fair.
posted by Justinian at 1:23 PM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


ourt: "They say, "Heavy lies the crown,""

I think they say, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."
posted by Chrysostom at 1:25 PM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Why is doxxing considered an appropriate response when you can simply report the offending blogs to Tumblr for promoting illegal activity and they'll get shut down? Enough of that and it'll simply get too frustrating to make yet another new blog, find new followers etc and they'll give up and go do something else. These aren't hardened criminals showing where they buried the bodies, I don't think we really need to call the Internet Detective Squad here. They usually don't have anybody's best interests at heart but their own sense of schadenfreude.

As for shoplifting - I've shoplifted (very rarely) from large chain stores when it's been necessary. I prefer to buy things. Most of the people I've known who have done this out of necessity wouldn't consider bragging about their haul on social media. Not simply because it's evidence, but because it's not really something worth bragging about. I'm not gonna cry any tears over lost corporate profit margins, but walking out of a store with free shit doesn't make you Robin Hood either. It means you're either desperate or selfish.
posted by Feyala at 1:04 AM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Now, if all these shoplifters were grabbing toys to donate to poor children for Xmas or something a bit less ego-driven and entitled, I might be a bit more open-minded to their arguments, but as far as I know, this is not actually a thing...
posted by Feyala at 1:14 AM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've justified downloading things from the internet only when my DVR screws up a recording.

Late to the party, I know, but recently I discovered that a tabletop RPG book written by a friend of mine had been plagiarized quite heavily by another company. I asked him if he had ever done any work for the plagiarizing company, and he said no. I said, "Guess again."

He agreed that about 85% of his prose had made it verbatim into the plagiarists' product with an occasional synonym sprinkled in for variety. He wasn't too worked up about it as he had done it as work for hire, but he figured he might drop his original publisher a line to make sure they knew.

He said to me that he was going to go find a pirated copy of the plagiarized version to compare: "Usually I do not do the pirate thing, but I guess in this case I am okay with it."
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:20 PM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


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