Why shoplifting is bad

“Shoplifters of the world/ Unite and take over” — The Smiths

“When she wants something, man, she don’t wanna pay for it” — Jane’s Addiction

Seven years ago, when I wanted some toothpaste, I would walk down to my local Walgreens, grab a box of Crest off of the shelf, pay for it at the register, and walk home with it. Today, when I want some toothpaste, I open up Amazon.com and buy it in bulk. What changed? Amazon was just as good in 2019 as it is today. But now, when I walk into Walgreens, the toothpaste is locked behind a clear plastic case. In order to buy it, I have to call a store employee over to open the case for me.

That’s just too much of a hassle; the convenience of being able to walk into a store is canceled out by the inconvenience of having to stand there waiting for a human being to help me buy a goddamn tube of toothpaste.

People argue about whether there was really a nationwide epidemic of shoplifting in the U.S. in the early 2020s, and about whether that caused a wave of store closures. Some retailers claimed they were closing stores because of petty theft; some critics argued that this was a flimsy excuse. But no one can argue with those clear plastic cases covering the shelves. Those barriers, and the corporate investment and labor costs required to install and maintain them, are indisputably real. Numerator, a market research company, found the following in 2024:

Numerator, a data and tech company serving the market research space, has issued a new report—Unlocking Shopper Reactions to Secured Products—sourced from verified purchase data and a sentiment survey of over 5,000 consumers on their awareness of and reaction to merchandise being locked up in stores. Three-fifths of shoppers reported seeing locked-up merchandise on a regular basis, and 27% said they would switch retailers or abandon the purchase altogether instead of waiting for assistance for a locked-up product…

61% of shoppers reported seeing an increase in the number of products under lock and key over the past year. 33% have not noticed a change, and 7% say there are fewer items locked up now…35% of Western consumers say they encounter locks on the items they are trying to purchase almost every time they shop and 30% of urban consumers say the same…17% say they will switch retailers (10% online, 7% in-store), and 10% say they will abandon the purchase altogether. [emphasis mine]

When people cite numbers showing that shoplifting is down in San Francisco and many other metros since 2019 (despite almost doubling nationwide), you have to take into account the fact that a lot of merchandise is now being locked up. Unless companies are just stupidly wasting their money on those cases, and on the increased labor costs required to operate them, the existence of those cases is direct evidence that shoplifting has real costs.

If anti-theft barriers drive 5% of a store’s revenue to Amazon, that would mean that either A) theft would have caused the store to lose 5% or more of its revenue, or B) retail companies are being stupid and wasting money on anti-theft barriers. Chain stores like Walgreens and CVS are hyper-efficient optimizers — they really don’t like to make stupid decisions that lose money, and they have a ton of data and very good statisticians. Therefore, it’s extremely likely that theft imposes significant costs on many retailers.¹

Who pays those costs? Maybe the shareholders of Walgreens and CVS just take a hit and see their share prices and wealth decline. Maybe their CEOs take a pay cut. Or maybe the stores cut wages and force their employees to work longer hours. Maybe they raise their prices, forcing regular people to pay more for toothpaste and shampoo and Advil. Maybe they close their least profitable stores — i.e., the stores in poor areas. Maybe poor people have one less Walgreens in their neighborhood to give them jobs and sell them their daily necessities.

In general, the cost will get divided up among those various people. But the pain will land much more on the poor and working class. Suppose that people start shoplifting more from Whole Foods, and it costs the company $20 million — 0.1% of its revenue. Now suppose that cost gets evenly divided — $5 million comes out of Jeff Bezos’ pocket, $5 million comes out of the salaries of the company’s executives and top managers, $5 million gets recouped by the company via price hikes, and $5 million gets saved via store closures and job cuts.²

Think about how much pain that would cause to each of the parties involved. If Bezos loses $5 million, he won’t even notice. It’s a rounding error on his wealth. The executives and top managers of Whole Foods will probably be slightly annoyed, but their lifestyles won’t change. Whole Foods’ middle- and upper-class customers will be a little more annoyed when prices go up. But the worst pain by far will land on the people who lose their jobs when stores close and staffing gets cut. $5 million is almost 100 employees.

Obviously some of the pain gets canceled out when shoppers go online instead. But online stores have a much lower labor share than brick-and-mortar retailers — if someone spends $1000 on Amazon instead of at Whole Foods, Bezos actually gets to keep a lot more of the money. And shoplifting does destroy some economic activity completely — regular people end up consuming less and getting paid less.

Every time you shoplift, in other words, you’re stealing from the people who work at grocery stores and drugstores and discount stores. You’re stealing from the communities that those stores serve. You’re contributing to food deserts. You’re raising unemployment. You’re making food less affordable for the most vulnerable. What you’re not doing is hurting rich people in any appreciable way.

If you’re shoplifting because you’re poor and desperate, the pain you’re causing to society might be worth it. But if you’re shoplifting because you’re a bored, arrogant multimillionaire with a chip on his shoulder, you’re just a rich person hurting poor people for fun.

Why am I writing this? Because in a recent roundtable discussion at the New York Times, leftist commentator Hasan Piker and New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino defended shoplifting — which interviewer Nadja Spiegelman renamed “microlooting” — arguing that it’s a way to strike out at the rich.

Here are some quotes from Piker, doing his usual shock-jock routine and endorsing theft of various kinds before admitting that he personally doesn’t steal:

Yeah, I’m pro-piracy all the way, like, across the board. Would you pirate a car? Yes. You know, if you could…If I could get away with it, if it was as easy as pirating intellectual property, I would do it…We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature…I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers…Yeah, chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go…

I — ironically enough — I don’t personally do it. I never do it. When I was younger, I stole some Pokémon cards from a friend and my father punished me. And it was such a harrowing experience that I literally can’t even steal a candy bar. When we were in college, a lot of my friends used to love doing that…I would never participate in it. And I still can’t, to this day, participate in it.

And here’s Tolentino, recounting when she stole lemons from Whole Foods to help a family friend, and then defending the idea of shoplifting on a more systematic basis:

I will say, I think that stealing from a big box store — I’ll just state my platform — it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action. But I did steal from Whole Foods on several occasions…[E]very week I would go get groceries for Miss Nancy, my now family friend who lived nearby…I’d be getting Miss Nancy all of her groceries, and…I forgot four lemons. And on several occasions I was like, I’m just going to go back, grab those four lemons and get the hell out.

Tolentino and Piker then engage in a long discourse about when it’s politically acceptable to steal things. Tolentino says it’s acceptable to steal from the Louvre. Piker says