Now, where was I? Riiiiight… the fart. Or rather, the woman I’d seen stuffing something under her clothes earlier was in my line of sight, just across the store from me now. My heart started to pound faster as I looked for the floor manager lady I’d been speaking with before. (This is a continuation from yesterday – go read and catch up. It’ll only take about two minutes, I promise.)
Do I really care about this? I thought to myself… I’m not exactly some kind of do-gooder, looking for ways to show how moral and correct I am. Seriously. I should just walk away from this… it’s not like it’s my store.
But it kind of is my store. I do some of my best shopping in this place (have a look around my house and you know I ain’t lyin’) and what this woman did was dead wrong. I proceeded because the memory of the little old lady pilfering food has never left me… and I’m still not sure what I think about that, years later. Maybe it’s okay to steal food if you’re hungry. But, stealing a can of tuna isn’t at all the same as stuffing a cowl-neck tunic under your tracksuit, no matter how you spell it. It’s just not right to take things that don’t belong to you. It’s not my rule – it’s the rule of the world.
. . .
One of my closest girlfriend’s in high school could not leave a corner store without first filling her pockets with stolen chocolate bars, candy, gum, and whathaveyou. She stole cans of coke. She swiped freezies by sticking them down the back of her pants. She’d steal beef jerky from the stand RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE CASHIER, and wouldn’t even eat it, because she didn’t even like beef jerky very much. I think she got off on the challenge.
And, she liked to drive me crazy.
When we’d leave the store, and she’d start snacking on her recently acquired bounty, offering me some, I’d decline, furious with her for carrying on all kinds of illegal activities around innocent little me. My anxiety shot through the roof at the thought of her getting nabbed, and me getting picked up along with her for aiding and abetting… I knew my parents would kill me, and by proxy, would have totally killed her too, and then my dad would go to jail for a double-murder, and what, oh what would my mother do with my sister, all alone for the rest of her life? What then, huh?!
See? Shoplifting is tricky business – and you never know when you’re gonna get pinched.
Sidenote: This girlfriend of mine? Always had money. Always. And, she was one of the luckiest humans I’ve ever met in my life – forever winning concert tickets from radio contests and the like… she still does. She was also diagnosed as being schizophrenic sometime in our early twenties, which explains almost everything about her crazy behaviour(s) except for the stealing part. I think she just enjoyed it. And she adored this song a bit too much:
We sat around the pile, we sat and laughed.
We sat and laughed and waved it into the air!
And we did it just like that.
When we want something and we don’t want to pay for it,
we walk right through the door…
walk right through the door.
Hey alright! If I get by, it’s mine.
Mine all mine.
– Jane’s Addiction
. . .
And hey – everyone makes mistakes…
Once while strolling through a department store with the carriage when Oliver was a baby, I had the sunshade protracted back (since we were indoors) where I had my coat and a sippy cup and whatever else balanced on it, when I picked up two boxed picture frames, and nestled them on top of my stuff. After roaming around for another twenty minutes or so, I left the store, meandered through the concourse, all the way to the metro, where I meant to put on my jacket, only to discover the frames I had accidentally lifted. I felt just awful about it, but I’d come too far to turn back… and I was too embarrassed to return them, so the next day, I went back to the same store and purchased two more. Whatever.
Another time, a few short years ago, while backstage at a Police concert, I made my way to the washrooms with two of my cohorts – the three of us clapping and skipping at our last-minute good fortune finding us just STEPS away from The Police – when I spied a clothing rack in front of us. Hanging on it was the t-shirt Sting Himself had JUST been wearing on stage moments before, and was now drip-drying after a gentle handwashing in the sink, with eco-friendly washing solution, to boot. (The bottle was still sitting on the side of the sink.) I’ve never been so conflicted about stealing something in my entire life… my parents would surely murder me, even though I was thirty-eight years old, and anyway it would have been wrong, right? So I left it hanging there. And Sting Himself probably still has that white designer t-shirt with the artful slash marks in it folded and stowed away in a dresser drawer in a cottage on the shore of a dark Scottish lake. Many miles away. Thanks to me.
(Okay, that wasn’t exactly about shoplifting, but it’s still a pretty good story.)
. . .
So, with my heart racing, I find the manager lady, and say, “I see her there… see?” I point in the direction of a woman walking away from us, dressed in black. I could tell it was her by the way her hair was styled. “There she goes, that way…”
The manager craned her neck left and right. “Her? Right there?!”
I nod, pointing to the same woman. “Yes, that’s her!”
“Uh… that’s [name withheld]… she works here!”
We each turn out heads slowly to face each other. I blink, and clap my hand over my mouth. My eyes get wide and round.
She sucks in a huge amount of air, and makes the same face, and we stand there for a moment, both struck dumb, just blinking at each other.
I don’t know what to say. I replay what I saw over and over in my head… and I understood the reason I’d lost track of her before was because she’d gone through the heavy Employee Only doors near the back of the store.
So. Not a fart in the wind after all.
“Listen,” I begin, “I could be mistaken… but, I really don’t think I am. I’m sorry, but I know what I saw. I don’t know what to say…” I stood shaking my head, feeling kinda bad.
She replied, “No. It’s okay. Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. I’ll be looking into it personally from here.”
“Employees steal too, I guess.”
“Yeah, they certainly do. More than you’d think, really.” She smiled her weary smile at me again. I managed a weak smile in return.
Uch. Why did I bother? Was it the right thing to do? I’m not completely sure why I did, and I’m not even sure I’m glad about it. I’m chalking to up to being a you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t kind of thing. T’is the ugly grey-zone of life. Ack.
Would you have turned her in? Have you ever turned anyone in for shoplifting?
Christine says
My friend was napped for pinching a lipstick from Shoppers Drug Mart when we were in grade 8. A Shoppers employee came up behind us after we exited the store, tapped her arm and said to her “Excuse me. Could you please come with me?”
I had NO clue what she had done.
A few minutes later a police officer arrived and went into the office were they were. A little while few after that her irate (and mean) mother arrived, cursing in french and told me I likely wouldn’t see my friend for awhile. I was terrified and that was the moment I knew I’d follow the rules (until I started underage drinking…)
As terrified as I was about my friend and the trouble she had gotten herself into, I was relieved it was not me. I never wanted to be on the other side of the door.
CharlesKiddell says
I went into the Five Seasons on Greene Avenue with a couple of twenty-something women once. This was back in the 90s. After we got out one of them proudly produced a box of tampons that she’d shoplifted. She explained that they should be provided for free by the government, so it was okay to steal them.
(This was around the time that Dykes on Mikes, the McGill Radio program, was advocating shoplifting women’s products (as well as advocating man-hatred, and a government enforced reduction of the cost of women’s haircuts to the same price as men pay)).
The other girl with me at the FiveSeasons confided that when she was a teen she had an aunt who was a professional shoplifter. “Oh!? it’s your birthday? tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you.”
I’ve seen a lot of shoplifting since then. One of the most awesome was when I walked into the S.A.Q. on Sherbrooke near Grand Boulevard and found the clerk kneeling on some guy’s chest and holding him by the throat while waiting for the police. This little shoplifter had, under a thin jeans jacket, four 750 ml bottles of whiskey and several mickeys of gin.
And yeah, most “shrinkage” historically has been due to employee theft.
Tracey says
I know what you mean, Jen – if I’d have had a kid with me, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. I think I had a chunk of time on my hands that day. Le sigh.
Jen says
I think what you did was admirable and I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I would likely not have bothered out of sheer laziness. Good for you.
Tracey says
Aw, thanks mum. And thanks for not completely murdering me the first time… I was raised right after all, considering what a hooligan you REALLY are… heh. xox
pat steer says
Stealing is stealing is stealing. Rest assured.
xoxo