What do Britney Spears, Megan Fox and Winona Ryder have in common?
All three have been accused of shoplifting. And they are not alone.
Nearly one-quarter of American adults have shoplifted, according to a new survey from LendingTree, the personal finance site. Roughly 1 in 20 consumers have shoplifted within the past year.
Shoplifting is a complicated crime. The motive can range from adolescent rebellion to adult thrill-seeking to hand-to-mouth poverty. Many of us steal things we don’t need and won’t use.
“I’ve learned that a lot of people have given shoplifting a try for lots and lots of reasons,” said Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree.
“Some people did it for kind of the cliché reasons that you would think: They were young and they were just seeing what they could get away with,” he said. “And there was unquestionably a group of folks who are doing it because they need to.”
Nearly half of shoplifters have been caught
Here’s what the LendingTree survey found:
- Nearly all recent shoplifters (90%) said they steal because of inflation and economic hardship.
- Shoplifters are more likely to steal from large chain stores (52%) than mom-and-pop shops (28%).
- Nearly half of shoplifters (48%) have been caught in the act.
- The most-shoplifted items are food and, counterintuitively, nonalcoholic drinks.
“This isn’t people stealing thousand-dollar purses or things like that,” Schulz said. “For the most part, we’re talking about stealing things that are staples of life.”
LendingTree’s first shoplifting survey covered 2,000 adult consumers. The inspiration, Schulz said, came from an earlier survey about self-checkout, a millennial retailing phenomenon with which many consumers sustain a love-hate relationship.
In the self-checkout survey, 69% of shoppers said they thought the technology made it easier to steal – and, as if to prove the point, 15% said they had shoplifted at self-checkout.
Shoplifting may be even more common than those surveys suggest. Another recent survey, from the finance site Express Legal Funding, found that 40% of consumers admitted to shoplifting.
Does self-checkout encourage shoplifting?
Self-checkout largely removes cashiers from registers, leaving shoppers on an uneasy honor system. Several big retailers, including Target and Dollar General, have pulled back on self-checkout this year, citing theft, price-switching and other misdeeds, as well as concerns over customer experience.
“Shrink,” the industry term for shoplifting and employee theft, drove $112 billion in retail losses in 2022, up from $94 billion in 2021, according to the National Retail Federation.
“Retailers are seeing unprecedented levels of theft coupled with rampant crime in their stores, and the situation is only becoming more dire,” said David Johnston, the federation’s vice president for asset protection and retail operations, in a release.
As a crime category, shoplifting covers everything from the lone-wolf teen swiping chewing gum at Walmart to vast, organized, multimillion-dollar retail crime operations.
Shoplifting and other property crimes declined in the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, when stores shut down and shoppers stayed home, according to the nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice. Property crimes rose anew in 2022 and 2023, as consumers returned to the malls.
“The pandemic gave us a master class in criminology,” said Adam Gelb, CEO of the criminal justice group.
In the first half of 2024, crime statistics trended downward in eleven of 12 categories in 39 American cities analyzed by the criminal justice organization. Only one category went up: shoplifting. Reported shoplifting incidents were 10% higher in January through June of this year than in the same months, pre-pandemic, in 2019.
“I think that’s why you’re seeing some stores shut down their self-checkout lanes,” Gelb said.
Rampant inflation and rising interest rates may have driven some of the recent shoplifting spike, based on findings from the LendingTree survey.
In shoplifting, the motive is not always financial
But shoplifting is a complex crime, and the motive is not always financial.
Spears, the iconic singer, reportedly walked out of a gas station with a $1.39 lighter in 2007, quipping “Oh, I’m bad,” to the assembled paparazzi outside.
Fox, the Hollywood actress, reportedly confessed she had been banned from a Walmart for swiping cosmetics in her teens.
Ryder was famously arrested in 2001 for taking thousands of dollars in merch from a Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills.
“The majority of the people who shoplift are actually people you would least expect to shoplift. I call them the head-scratching cases,” said Terrence Shulman, founder of the Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft, Spending and Hoarding. “They’re typically polite; they don’t run away; they don’t fight back if they’re caught.”
The range of motivations for shoplifting could fill a psychology conference. Many people shoplift because of tough times, or on a juvenile dare, or by accident, Shulman said. Others steal because they are angry at life, grieving over a loss, or struggling with depression.
In many cases, “the stuff people take is really ridiculous,” Shulman said. “Clothing that doesn’t fit. A magazine they have no intention of reading.”
Shoplifting can be addictive, and costly
Shoplifting can be addictive, like gambling. And it can be costly.
In many states, because of low felony theft thresholds, a shoplifter could face a year or more in prison for stealing a cellphone, according to the lobbying campaign Raise the Threshold.
“If you’ve ever shoplifted, one time, at any point in your life,” Shulman said, “it’s probably a good idea to take a pause and ask yourself: Why did I do that?”
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