Why shoplifting is bad
It may feel like a small act of rebellion, but it hurts a lot of people who don't deserve it.
“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 it’s acceptable to steal from big-box stores, but not from restaurants. Tolentino says it’s OK to steal from Ikea and Whole Foods if you give the loot to the homeless. Piker says that IP theft is OK, but stealing from a government-owned store is wrong.
It’s possible to see this as the amoral self-justification of two selfish rich people — petty millionaires resentful of billionaires, taking out their resentment by trashing the society around them. And sure, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some of that going on. But when you look closely at these people’s actions, they aren’t actually wanton thieves — Piker admits that he doesn’t personally steal anything, while Tolentino only admits stealing lemons for a family friend back when she was much less wealthy. They talk a big game about chaos and piracy and rebellion, but they’re mostly behaving like standard well-behaved highly-educated rule-following progressive coastal elites.
It’s also possible to see pro-theft rhetoric as part of American leftism’s intellectual heritage. The old European left had two basic factions — communists, and anarchists. The communists generally defeated the anarchists in Europe, but the American left is mostly descended from anarchism. Individual rebellion against the rules of society tends to be prized above collective action and hierarchy.
But what I really think we’re seeing is a combination of political posturing with a weird kind of effective altruism. Piker and Tolentino’s judgements of when stealing is OK and when it’s not OK are explicitly based on their judgements of when stealing is good for society, and when it’s bad. They envision a purely situational morality, in which people decide, moment-by-moment, whether to follow the law based on a sophisticated judgement of whether following the law will make the world a better place.
You could easily write down an economic model in which that sort of behavior is both rational and good. The problem is that it envisions every citizen as a sort of superhuman homo economicus, able to accurately make a complex calculation about the social costs and benefits when deciding whether or not to pay for every piece of fruit at Whole Foods.
In reality, that approach is doomed to fail. One big reason is that making decisions about whether to “microloot” usually requires a lot more knowledge about the workings of society than even the smartest human possesses.
Look closely, and you’ll see that Piker and Tolentino’s situational judgements sit on top of a gigantic stack of questionable assumptions about how economics and politics work. Piker says that stealing from a local diner is bad, probably because he implicitly assumes that the theft would come mostly out of the pocket of the restaurant’s independent owner, rather than out of the pocket of the restaurateur’s landlord or its corporate suppliers. But they both agree that stealing from a big-box store is OK because they assume the cost will come out of the pockets of corporate shareholders and executives.
Both of those assumptions are almost certainly wrong. Stealing from an indie restaurant will hurt corporations a bit; stealing from a big-box store will hit working-class employees and customers to some extent. Piker and Tolentino don’t understand much about how economics works, and they seem very confident in their simplistic mental model.
The second reason this kind of homo economicus approach to morality is dangerous is that there are tons of externalities involved. When you steal things, you probably give implicit permission to other people to steal things (and their reasons are likely to be less altruistic). You make stores more likely to install anti-theft barriers, which gives society a more militarized dystopian feel. Shoplifting forces marginally profitable stores to close, leading to vacant storefronts that attract crime, while depriving local governments of tax revenue to fund infrastructure and education. And so on.
It’s very difficult to calculate all of these externalities when you take each action. That’s probably why society has a social contract — a system of rules that we follow instead of calculating the results of each action from first principles. That social contract is often unfair, and we have many mechanisms dedicated to constantly revising it — democracy, the free press, and so on. But individual anarchism — the rejection of any social contract in favor of personal morality based on current assumptions — pretty much instantly runs into the hard limits of individual human knowledge.
Fortunately, if the decision is whether to shoplift five lemons or pirate a movie, the consequences of getting this sort of thing wrong won’t be catastrophic. Yes, shoplifting is wrong, but most people I know have done it at some point in their lives, and society hasn’t collapsed.3 But there are plenty of higher-stakes issues where the kind of fine-grained consequentialism advocated by Tolentino and Piker can have much more serious consequences.
For example, in the NYT roundtable, Tolentino says that blowing up a pipeline should be OK, but getting iced coffee in a plastic cup is morally wrong:
One thing that should be legal that isn’t — it’s interesting, because I have to regularly explain this stuff to a small child, and have so thoroughly explained to her that some things are against the rules, but they’re OK, depending on who you are. And some things are not against the rules, but they’re not OK. There are so many perfectly legal things I do regularly that I find mildly immoral. Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action. I have taken so many planes for so many pleasure reasons; I have acted in so many selfish ways that are not only legal, but they’re sanctioned and they’re unbelievably valorized, culturally. So, maybe things like blowing up a pipeline, let’s say that.
Tolentino is obviously thinking purely about climate change when she says this — getting ice in a plastic cup raises emissions because ice and plastic are carbon-intensive, blowing up a pipeline lowers emissions by curbing fossil fuel use. But even if those assumptions are correct — and that’s a big if! — climate isn’t the only consequence in the world. Blowing up a pipeline can kill or maim innocent people. It can release toxic pollutants into the local environment. It can deprive local poor people of income that the pipeline owner agreed to share, and so on.
Piker, meanwhile, downplayed Luigi Mangione’s murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson in 2024, while accusing Thompson of “social murder”:
Brian Thompson, as the United Healthcare C.E.O., was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. The systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit, paywalled system of health care in this country — and the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths…[B]ecause of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place…[T]hat is the reason why, I think, the reaction to Luigi Mangione, especially by younger generations, was not so negative.
This life-and-death judgement also rests on a teetering tower of shaky assumptions. It assumes that health insurance companies — rather than providers — are chiefly responsible for high health care prices in America. In fact, as I wrote after Thompson’s murder, that’s just not true:
In fact, health insurers have consistently terrible profit margins; they are not giant pots of profit that could be used to pay for regular people’s treatment. Insurers are almost entirely a pass-through — it’s overpriced health services themselves that are responsible for the high cost of care in America.
Getting these things wrong can result in a lot of unnecessary violence, death, and conflict. Making excuses for terrorism and murder is a lot more consequential than deciding whether to steal a few lemons, and yet Piker and Tolentino are just as comfortable doing the former as the latter. Their mental models of economics and politics are a dense tangle of undergrad-level misunderstandings, leftist memes, and political talking points — victims of American progressives’ increasing epistemic closure. And yet they are arrogant enough to feel comfortable discarding all of society’s rules on a case-by-case basis in favor of their own personal calculations.
This is a bad direction for the progressive movement, the Democratic Party, and educated coastal elite culture in general. Yes, there are many arenas of human life in which modern society has overly constrained individual judgement with a thicket of rules and procedures. But stealing from stores, blowing up pipelines, and gunning down corporate executives are not good examples of situations where we need fewer rules and more individual judgement.
Economists have tried to estimate these costs.
For simplicity’s sake I’ve assumed that Bezos owns 100% of Whole Foods, which isn’t true. But this assumption isn’t important to the point I’m making.
I have only shoplifted one thing in my entire life: a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s book Steal This Book.
I cant believe you had to write this article. Jeez
That this needs to be said is… well.. something. Well said.