The White Affluent Shoplifter

I’ve seen every kind of person steal. This one is the absolute worst.

I was furious.

I pounded on his fitting room door. “We can see what you’re doing. You’re shoving t-shirts up your pants, man”.

“What? I’m fixing my socks”, he replied.

“We can see what you’re doing and we’re about to close so you need to leave.”

My sales associate had bent down to the floor to pick up a hanger and noticed his feet under the fitting room door. She alerted me to what he was doing. Not sure why he was putting shirts up his pant leg and tucking them into his socks but that’s the path he chose.

This guy was killing me. He had been in the store for over an hour. Slowly looking through every rack. He shopped as he had never been in a store before. He closely examined everything.

Was he high? Probably. You never can tell with people on drugs. Sometimes they’re stoned and will just shop slowly but they are mostly harmless. If they are tweakers, odds are they will try to steal from you. But, like everyone else, you never can be sure.

I’ve had 12-year-old girls steal from me, bored 20-year-olds, and organized retail crime groups. It’s all infuriating. It is sometimes scary.

When laws were changed in 2014 regarding shoplifting in California, we saw a huge spike in theft. Prop 47 was known as the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act. What it did, among other things, was increase the amount you could steal to face a felony, from $450 to $950. Thieves were on it. They knew about the change in the law and they knew that most retailers weren’t going to risk the safety of their employees and send them running after a shoplifter.

Organized retail crime groups (ORC groups) started to get aggressive. One hit my store in 2018, a group of five. I was leaving work at the time and I watched the whole thing go down. They came in quickly together and then split up, four of them targeting our highest price/most desirable stuff, and one was a lookout. They grabbed armfuls of stuff — as much as they could carry and they ran to a car waiting out front. They were in and out in less than three minutes.

I stood there watching it all. There was nothing I could do. There were more of them than there were of us. Store employees in LA had been punched trying to stop such groups. One girl was yanked to the ground by her hair and broke her arm. I was not about to stand in their way.

It got really bad for a while. It crossed my mind to quit retail altogether. I was not about to get hurt by some stupid shoplifters. This is not why I chose this career path.

Things settled down a little bit and then COVID hit. At least no one is going to steal from us right now, I thought. We got a bit of a break from loss prevention and we happily took it.

Sure enough, once we opened they were back at it. It’s not quite as many ORC groups now as it is petty theft. Opportunists. Fitting room theft. That kind of thing. The guy the other night was a petty thief. That guy put me over the edge.

He was white, early 20’s, not too tall. His outfit also tipped me off: weird baggy pants, a huge blazer, and a beanie. It looked off. After he left his room, he went up to the front to buy one item. I asked him where all his clothes from the fitting room were. He mumbled some answer about where he put them and I shot back, “okay — yeah, right.”

His demeanor was so odd. The entire time I was confronting him he was super mellow and acted like he had no idea what I was talking about. I followed him to the front door so I could shut the doors behind him and he tried to stare me down as he walked out. “You can stare at me all you want man. I have you on camera for over an hour”.

He walked around the side of the building and gave me the finger. I gave it back to him. Fuck that guy.

We watched him roam around the parking lot which was now emptying as stores were closing. After about 5 minutes he finally jumped in his car — a new VW Jetta. I got his license plates too. Dummy.

Guys like that don’t need to steal. They have money. He has enough money to be stoned out of his mind and in my store for over an hour choosing things to steal. He has an abundance of time, clearly. The audacity. It kills me. I work in an affluent area. These are white kids that are well off. They’re just bored or something. I don’t know. But I’m over it. Everyone at my store works for a living and to have some idiot with too much time on his hands and nothing to do come in and disrespect us. It was the last straw.

To conclude the night I then have to go do more paperwork. I have to write a report about said idiot, what happened, and what he stole. I list all the events and include the information on his car. The entire time all I could think was man, what a loser.

After I finally got home I was starving. Intense emotions are so taxing. I started shoving corn chips in my mouth as I put away the dishes. I found tortillas and a block of cheese in the fridge…yes — quesadilla. I ate it all. I then slept so hard.

The next day, in hindsight, I was still furious. But with a good night’s sleep and the support of my amazing team, I was ready to face another day of customer service and possible shoplifters. We help everybody. We do what we can. We stay out of harm’s way. We take care of each other.

Retail workers are amazing. Preventing theft is part of the job unfortunately and you do get mad sometimes. We’re only human. We take it personally because we take pride in what we do. I usually roll with it and do what I can but man, white affluent shoplifters are the absolute worst.