The Steal (15 page)

Most people who work in bookstores condemn shoplifting as arising from a specious morality and sometimes bad taste. A young salesclerk at Myopic Books, a gloomy used- and rare-book store in Chicago, whispered in my ear that the most-shoplifted book at his store was
Mein Kampf
. Louisa Solano, the former owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop—a small, legendary store in Cambridge, Massachusetts—sold it in 2004 in part because of shoplifters. Solano told me that a monk shoplifted from her.

Among editors, a book’s shopliftability alternated between a mark of its popularity and proof of a writer’s unoriginality. One editor who had worked in academic publishing felt “perverse pride” when one of his books went “behind the counter”—slang for the bookstore putting a title out of shoplifters’ reach—but sneered that the majority of such books were written by impenetrable theorists who themselves shoplifted metaphorically anyway. They deserved their fate. Jacques Derrida bragged about graduate students shoplifting the 166-page
Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs
more than his lengthier works; another editor confided, adding that “my own conviction is that his entire method and philosophical perspective constitute a form of shoplifting.”

“For a time after its release, this book was the most frequently shoplifted book in America,” boasted the back jacket copy on Ann Marlowe’s
How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z
, published in 1999. There’s no way of knowing who was shoplifting the book and whether it became notable despite or because of stealability.

A recent surge in stealing rare books inspired the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America to protect its members by listing the five types of book thieves in its newsletter: the kleptomaniac,the thief who steals for profit, the thief who steals in anger, the casual thief, and the thief who steals for his own personal use. But many bookstore owners (rare or otherwise) and security professionals reject Bukowski Man, the kleptomaniac, and the rest of them as prime shoplifting suspects:
Professionals
, they insist, are the ones grabbing Harry Potter, art books, sex treatises, computer manuals, anything they can resell. Including the book that commands us not to steal. Which, according to anecdote, is the most frequently shoplifted volume in the Bible Belt.

“It’s the best-selling book of all time,” explained Melissa Mitchell, in 2006 the director of loss prevention for LifeWay Christian Stores. Mitchell said professionals and amateurs stole Bibles. “As much as we would like to think of it as a spiritual thing, some people think of it as a commodity.” She speculated that the amateurs were Christian Yuppies who preferred $40 leather-bound versions with zippers. As to the Yuppies’ motives, Mitchell guessed, “It’s probably the desire to have nice and pretty worldly things.”

The manager of a LifeWay store in Knoxville, Tennessee, who declined to be identified, said, “We have no idea who is stealing Bibles. We just see the empty boxes, the crumpled plastic wrappers. . .. We live in a fallen world.”

If book shoplifting is endangered due to the Internet, luxury lifting as an amateur pastime is all but extinct as a result of the new antishoplifting technologies. Women shoplifting lace out of frustrated love, or to get back at their husbands, has fallen from fashion: Madame de Boves is an endangered species. One has to look back to the early 1990s to find essays like Daphne Merkin’s “The Shoplifter’s High,” originally published in
Mirabella
magazine as “Stolen Pleasures.” Merkin tells how she and fellow “imbiber[s] of high culture” discussed shoplifting at a high-end boutique as though it were a larcenous version of
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
.

By the time “The Shoplifter’s High” appeared in Merkin’s essay collection
Dreaming of Hitler
five years later, luxury goods had begun to go mass market. Revered haute couture houses were imploding or being bought by conglomerates. Counterfeit It Bags were flooding Canal Street. Venerated French designers partnered with big-box stores. “The Shoplifter’s High” was placed in the section of Merkin’s book titled “The Self, New and Improved,” which also included accounts of her breast-reduction surgery, tanning, and binge dieting. Shoplifting is a less invasive alternative for aspirational women: If you can’t afford liposuction, shoplift a status tchotchke.

Like grocers, luxury retailers connect the professionalizing of shoplifting to their embracing of state-of-the-art surveillance systems: Shoplifting a $6,000 Birkin bag, furs from Bergdorf’s, caviar from Petrossian, chocolate from La Maison du Chocolat, $1,700 bras from La Perla, scallops from Citarella, handbags from Prada, or sequined Italian skirts from Barneys is too daunting for amateur thieves. You have to go back to before Merkin’s essay—the 1970s—to read a news story about a theft at a luxury jeweler that uses the word “shoplift.” Barry Matsuda, the former director of security at Richemont North America, which owns Cartier and a dozen other “mansions,” including Chloé and Montblanc, says, “You don’t shoplift a $300,000 necklace. You shoplift peanut butter, toilet paper, shirts, skirts.”

Matsuda meant that to steal the most valuable jewelry in Cartier required more skill than an amateur shoplifter could muster. In the flagship store on Fifty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, except for a few silk scarves, one or two lonely bottles of perfume, and stationery, there was hardly any merchandise at all outside the glass cases. In the High Jewelry Room, where the most expensive jewelry is displayed, a thick, plaited ruby-and-diamond choker and a platinum ring featuring one emerald as big as a marble were heavily surveilled. (There are ninety-six cameras and eight guards in the Fifty-third Street store.)

Wrapped in a heavy, flat satin ribbon, the catalog—the size of a large, hardcover coffee table book—is sent exclusively to the handful of finicky clients known to spend half a million dollars on a necklace. To even get close enough to such a necklace to steal it, you’d have to be able to impersonate a Greek shipping mogul, a Saudi prince, or a Russian tycoon at close range. You’d have to make small talk about Cannes while you and the sales associate waited for the necklace and sipped glasses of wine or lattes in a small private viewing room—a sort of jewelry confessional. You would have to be a Houdini of jewel theft, volleying banter across the small table, concealing your theft from the camera, slipping the real necklace from the wrap box into your sleeve and replacing it with a paste version in an instant. Not for amateur shoplifters.

 

In eighteenth-century London, clothing accounted for 27.1 percent of all shoplifted goods. It is impossible to know whether these shoplifters wanted to dress better or resell the clothes for profit or both. But over the centuries, clothing has continued to be a frequently shoplifted item. Defeating clothing shoplifting, the first job the antitheft technology industry took on fifty years ago, is a multibillion-dollar industry today.

Some of the most ingenious clothes shoplifters I heard of were drag queens and transvestites who stole for their pageants—burlesques of Miss America contests and antecedents of reality television competitions. The most “legendary” thefts occurred in the 1980s, when the most important category was “labels,” that is, designer labels, Terence Dixon, aka Terrence Legend, a community historian, told me. (Legendary was something all contestants wanted to be.) One time, he said, a group of ball walkers, as contestants were called, lined a Louis Vuitton satchel with tinfoil to make a high-end booster bag and then hit Saks. The contestants were organized into houses, or teams. Tina Montana, a prolific shoplifter, or “crafter,” as scam artists are referred to in this community—and one-time head or “mother” of the house of Montana—shoplifted a $25,000 Versace bustier, Dixon told me. A 1997 photo at the Ebony Ball showed her in a full-length Versace gown. Some ball walkers still shoplift haute couture, although many others, Dixon said, have moved on to jeans. Like everything else, the pageants are less formal these days.

First reported in newspapers in the 1880s, filching corsets and women’s underwear was for years snickeringly attributed to kleptomaniacs and erotomaniacs. Today, lingerie lifting, though supposedly a for-profit crime, is still treated as a lurid pulp subject with headlines such as “Victoria’s Secret Missing Its Panties” or “Undiecover Thief.” Although the occasional bold amateur shoplifts from La Perla, and one does read about a panty-swiping cross-dresser or a loving husband stealing a thong for his wife, the most common underwear lifters in the news are boosters rushing into Victoria’s Secret with their foil-lined bags, sweeping thousands of dollars’ worth of push-up bras and matching low-rise panties from the front table, where they are displayed to lure customers into the store. The boosters abscond with the underwear and then resell them over the Internet, at swap meets, or from warehouses.

The retail industry pays close attention to what professionals shoplift from luxury and big-box stores, but it is less vigilant in tracking what amateurs steal. Some of the items swiped by the latter can never be deemed luxurious—even in our psyches’ funhouse interior. The amateur shoplifter takes ill-fitting blouses or high-heeled sandals she doesn’t like or other unusable or unsellable items—a piece of gum, a pencil, or a marble. These shoplifted souvenirs languish in the closet or the desk drawer; records of such jejune thefts fade from view or are destroyed.

Perhaps it is to be seen that some amateurs shoplift items that are so big they stretch the definition of the crime. One shoplifter I met dragged rugs out the side exit of a home emporium, another fled carrying a folded-up mattress, and a third pushed small ornamental trees through the garden section at Home Depot into the parking lot. Another person shoplifted kayaks. The scion of a wealthy Detroit family shoplifted so many fishing rods from sporting-goods stores that he needed a tractor trailer to move them. The fishing rod shoplifter countered his outdoorsman pose by shoplifting a $10,000 Montblanc pen and a $32,000 watch.

In our anything-goes time, shoplifting forbidden objects is more difficult than you might think. Take cigarettes: A lot of people used to shoplift them, particularly young people. That is no longer possible now that the law mandates that cigarettes be placed behind the cash register. You have to commit an armed robbery to steal smokes. Or take pornographic magazines, once widely stolen. (For the articles.) Today, with Internet porn available at the click of a mouse, why bother shoplifting
Playboy
?

But take condoms. After two decades of selling them on the open shelves, chain pharmacies, citing shoplifting in the 1990s, began locking them up. In the spring of 2006, an article about CVS doing so in its twenty-two D.C. stores appeared in the
Washington Post
. (Walgreens and Duane Reade only lock up Trojan Magnums.)

The article did not just label this obstacle to practicing safe sex as an inconvenience. It condemned it as a public health issue. “Most of the stores that locked up condoms were in poor neighborhoods,” the
Post
noted, with populations at risk for AIDS/HIV, adding that these measures tied in with the abstinence-only education movement, which aimed to prevent young people, especially poor young ones, from having sex.

It was this conjecture that inspired graduate students at George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services to launch the “Save Lives: Free the Condoms” effort as part of a group class project. After the class ended, four of the students formed a coalition with public health groups, drummed up media attention, and then, store by store, convinced CVS to install “power wings,” or “end caps” (stands at the ends of aisles) and “click boxes” (clear plastic dispensers that snap over the shelves), essentially housing the condoms in vending machines. The condoms were more accessible but still unshopliftable.

By the early winter of 2009, the condom radicals had won. Just one of the fifty CVS stores in the District of Columbia still sold only locked condoms—the one at 2646 Naylor Road, Southeast, near Howard University, a low-income, mostly African American neighborhood. But then the Washington-based coalition of labor groups, Change to Win, stepped in. In February, backed by two hundred liberal and community organizations, Change to Win launched the “Cure CVS: Unlock the Condoms Initiative” by sending “Valentines” to CVS’s CEO with the message “Have a heart. Unlock the condoms” on them and by staging protests in front of CVS stores. In June, Change to Win released a study claiming that CVS was three times more likely to lock up condoms in poor, minority neighborhoods in cities including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The only places in the country where CVS stores did not lock up condoms, the organization found, were D.C. and Fairfield, Connecticut.

In a prepared statement, CVS responded to Change to Win’s accusations by blaming shoplifting. “In stores where condoms have been heavily shoplifted, a selection of condoms may be kept in a locked display to ensure that there is stock available for customers to purchase. This decision is based on the theft experience of the store, not its specific location. In stores that have a locked condom display, we maintain a selection of condoms that are not locked and are available for customers to purchase without asking for assistance from store employees.”

When public health leaders, social service advocates, and journalists decried CVS’s policy of locking up condoms, they took for granted that condom shoplifting happened because of the shame incurred when young people were forced to push the call button at the pharmacy, ask sales staff to open locked drawers, or wait while an employee requested assistance in the family planning department over the store loudspeaker. By refusing to reveal raw data about shoplifting condoms, CVS has thrust anyone wanting to buy a prophylactic back into the 1950s.

The flagship mall of the Simon Property Group, Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, is nestled in a valley on Route 32 in the shadow of Averell Harriman’s estate, one hour north of New York City. Not that you can see much from the interstate of the 137-acre parcel of land that the former governor of New York and industrialist donated to the town of Woodbury twenty-three years ago. Woodbury Common only bursts into view once you go right onto a long, sloping driveway across from Monroe-Woodbury High School, a good-looking brick building that the Common is partly responsible for. But for years perks like the school barely consoled the locals, who regarded Woodbury Common, the nation’s largest luxury discount shopping mall, as a mixed blessing.