Why I Love Shoplifting from Big Corporations

One day I was attempting to steal an apple, a single organic Pink Lady, from Whole Foods, simply because their prices are prediculous (ie. NY slang for pretty ridiculous), when a lady grabbed my arm at the till and said: “watch it”. I was like: “fuck…I’m so busted…” But really, she only grabbed my arm because she was walking behind me with a full plate of food. Exhale.

I don’t shoplift from Whole Foods anymore because they are the one store I couldn’t stand to be banned from, but this moment reminded of the vid below…

Shoplifting…

In elementary school, we were shown a film on a projector in the gym where a girl who shoplifted a sweater was cuffed and charged, but then her friend, who was with her but stole nothing, was also charged, simply because she knew it was happening. The movie resonated with me. Months later, when a friend of mine wanted to steal friendship rings with me downtown one day, I was extremely distraught and, although I wanted the ring, a gold trinket with a little hanging pearl, I silently urged her not to and reminded her later about “the movie”. Brainwashing works.

I started shoplifting in high school after noticing my cousins with boxes of Colors perfume after we’d left Shopper’s Drug Mart when they hadn’t bought anything. It took a minute to put two and two together:  “heyyy, where did you guys get those???”… Then, it was whatever was small enough to fit into my pockets. Why pay for anything I could slip up my sleeve? Then it went to another level, stealing bikinis and bras at outlet stores south of the border. And then one day, at the end of a stealing spree at the mall, in Le Chateaux where all I had stolen was a few accessories, the shopgirl thought for some reason I was stealing clothes (I wasn’t). While I was paying for whatever cheap thing I decided to use as my decoy at the till, I heard the girl calling security. My friend was coming into the store at just this time and I grabbed her arm and booked it out of the mall, reluctantly ditching the stuff I’d stolen in a public washroom garbage. After this, I stopped stealing, not out of guilt, out of fear of being caught.

Later in life, I had girlfriends a few years younger who were busted for stealing rave paraphernalia at Zeller’s: soothers, fake eyelashes, glitter, Vicks Vapour Rub. They were banned from the mall for months. One of the girls was pretty wealthy, and her parents couldn’t figure out why she was stealing. Same reason she went to rave parties : ) As for their consequence, it’s pretty hard to identify a few young girls among thousands of people a day on tiny cameras.

Usually there are no consequences to stealing unless you’re doing it Winona stis. Once while chatting with the manager of a big box video store, he told me that when he suspects people of stealing, he just lets them go. Because he can’t prove it without accosting them and risking assault, and because once an employee of his did chase a guy down and grabbed the thief’s fanny pack to stop him, which was full of dirty needles – the guy was a smack addict. The crimestopper had to take AIDS tests for years afterward.

If you  shoplift at Wal*Mart and someone says: “hey you, stop right there” All you have to say is: “No, thank you!”

(The guy in this vid is a little uptight, maybe due to the sleeves of his gap-t cutting off circulation to his bulging biceps.)

So on this Earth Day, steal a thing or two from the man to help keep your sense of adventure high, and the homogenous corporate spread down.

Revolution, baby.