Black Friday is for baby boomers. The hottest deal for the youth, if the headlines are right, is the five-fingered discount.
And this isn’t the sneaking-an-item-under-your-shirt sort of shoplifting. It’s brazen, light-of-day, walking out with merchandise in hand without paying — sometimes in smash-and-grab mobs and sometimes solo.
In Olney, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., one woman wrote the police to report the two men she saw rushing out of a Safeway with tote bags stuffed with goods.
“They walked right out of the store,” the woman wrote on NextDoor, the social media site. “The store manager, cashiers, and other employees can’t do anything but watch, per corporate’s instruction. The employees say it happens every day,”
A 24-hour Safeway in San Francisco’s Castro District had to scrap its overnight hours “due to rampant theft,”
according to the local CBS affiliate
. They hired a lot more security guards, installed automatic, one-way gates at the entrances, and attached large poles to each shopping cart to make it harder to remove the carts from the store.
Some cities hit by a wave of shoplifting reports are responding in kind. Outside Seattle, the King County Sheriff’s Office, which is
absorbing
some of the police fleeing the city, hatched a shoplifting sting that
nabbed
five shoplifters in one evening.
In some places, though, the thieves are enjoying intentionally lax laws. In California, for instance, a local district attorney demanded stricter shoplifting and theft laws: “We cannot function as a society where we have told people over and over again that there is no consequence for stealing other people’s property.”
The local precinct commander in Olney, Maryland, however, said the problem is at the store level. “Over the past year, many retail establishments have stopped contacting police when shoplifting occurs due to new corporate policies.”
Maybe it’s just a media feeding frenzy, as in the summers when every shark attack gets saturation coverage, falsely leading us to believe it’s a trend.
On the other hand, there are plenty of reasons to believe that a national mood of tolerance toward minor crime and property damage has encouraged a wave of it. Reducing prosecutions has its upsides, but it also seems to set a tone.
