Stacy Innerst, Post-Gazette

Attention, Wal-Mart shoplifters

Last month, Wal-Mart, sensitive to its little-people base, cut small shoplifters a break. The world's largest retailer no longer prosecutes first-time thieves who steal less than $25 worth of stuff. OR are over 65. (Always the senior discount.) So think small, Wal-Mart shoplifters.

Wal-Mart joins a number of retailers who are focusing more on the likes of Samih Fadl Jamal of Mesa, Ariz., said to be the ringleader of an organized theft operation that cleared $11 million from the sale of $22 million in stolen baby formula, as The Associated Press reported.

The numbers

Organized theft costs retailers an estimated $30 billion annually. But don't think corporate shoplifters are squeezing out the little guy. About 550,000 shoplifting incidents occur each day in the United States, and as many as one in 11 Americans have engaged in the practice, according to retail experts. This, we conclude sadly, includes one of every 11 Morning File readers. (By the way, did you pay for this newspaper?)

Five-finger discount

Justine Sharrock, in LiP magazine (lipmagazine.org):

"Boosting, racking, ganking and gaffling; whether we liberate, lift or fence, most of us have done it: The five-finger discount is not new, nor is it rare. Everyone has a story. Bring it up at your next work party or family reunion; shoplifting is one of the few crimes that most people will admit to having engaged in at least once. Unlike so many other crimes, shoplifting is highly accessible to most people. It doesn't require the kind of criminal connections, know-how, equipment or risk involved in, say, hacking, credit card fraud, tax evasion, vault cracking or breaking and entering. The main technique of the shoplifter is to act like a shopper -- something we're all trained to do.

From the AP
• Man Buys Smoker, Finds Human Leg Inside • Coach Stops Runaway Horse by Biting Ear • Man Allegedly Tries to Use 'Blurry' $100 • Police Break Up Brawl at Chuck E. Cheese • Suggestive Card Ruffles Farmer's Feathers • Nerds to Auction Themselves to Women • Toilet to Tap? San Jose Probes Plan • Seattle to Allow Pygmy Goats As Pets • Yankees Rookies Dress Up in Oz Costumes

"The term shoplifting itself was created around the turn of the century to differentiate between poor people stealing food and the new widespread epidemic of middle-class women's theft from department stores. The stores were blamed for tempting weak, willpower-deficient women with luxury goods that were out from behind haberdasher's counters for customers to touch for the first time. When a poor African American man takes something from a liquor store, it's called stealing (and, if he gets caught, he will likely be arrested). When a middle-class white teenage girl takes something from Hot Topic, it's called shoplifting (and, if she gets caught, she will likely be punished by her parents).

"Shopping is America's national pastime. After 9/11, we were told to 'shop for America' in order to express patriotism and pull our nation out of national disaster. Many of us spend our free time at malls. People go shopping on vacation and take dates to megastores. We are a nation of shoppers, and it is shoppers who become shoplifters. Moreover, since those stealing from stores are also those providing the profits, store owners are reluctant to fully guard against or incriminate shoplifters for fear of alienating potential customers."

The social compact at work

"If you plan to shoplift, let us know."

-- Sign on counter in the movie "Clerks."

State-of-the-art tactics

Heisting a newspaper is a high crime, but no big accomplishment until we figure out how to attach one of those clunky security tags to each Post-Gazette. To get around such pesky tags, your professional shoplifters carry out stolen merchandise in bags lined with foil or duct tape to avoid tripping security-tag alarms at the door. Or they use sophisticated technology to print out counterfeit receipts and labels. (Or so we are told; it's all news to us. Really.)

Many shoplifting rings use pregnant illegal immigrants. If caught, they are usually deported before their child is born in the United States. And, as PG readers learned recently, a growing problem is a sharp increase in the reselling of stolen products on the Internet, an area harder to track than flea markets or pawnshops. Heroin addicts in the Altoona area were paid as much as $800 to $2,000 a day to shoplift sporting goods, electronics and small appliances that were later sold online. "You don't realize that a longtime drug user that you would never do business with is behind Uncle Bob's online store," one security expert told the AP.

Stealing to make a point

Shoplifting as a rage against the capitalist machine was popularized in the 1970s by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Now, the seven radicals left in the country are paying big money for designer fatigues.

But four years ago, an activist group called Yomango emerged in Spain with a kind of guerilla shoplifting performance art.

Founded in Barcelona, Yomango, Spanish slang for "I steal," is a "marketed lifestyle" that encourages "the promoting of shoplifting as a form of disobedience and direct action against multinational corporations."

Yomango combines shoplifting with art shows, dinners (shoplifted food only, please) and protests at stores.

The media portray them as vandals and looters, but they sound more like the purveyors of bad advertising copy or leftovers from the self-help movement.

Visitors to the group's Web site, yomango.net, can read the "10 style tips for a Yomango life."

"Dare to desire. Yomango is your style: risky, innovative," says Style Tip No 2. "It is the articulate proliferation of creative gestures."

Or the prose can veer toward impenetrable academese: "The Yomango style is an open-ended process, generating tools, prototypes and dynamics which flow and proliferate, waiting to be reappropriated and to circulate."

Talk about incendiary. These people know how to whip up the shoplifting masses.

A nation of shoplifters

Author Rachel Shteir, who is writing a book on kleptomania, noted in The Los Angeles Times that Wal-Mart's decision doesn't reflect a softening of its character so much as a realization that it is unlikely to persuade Americans to give up their national pastime. It fulfills narcissistic or criminal urges and reflects our love affair with commerce. It correlates closely with depression. It can also be a means for betterment in a declining economic climate. I don't condone shoplifting. There is a cost to letting people get away with stealing. But I fear that the Wal-Mart approach -- laying off the less-than-$25 thieves to focus more on what the company says are organized gangs of shoplifters cutting into company profits -- may miss the point. The reality is that professional shoplifters are only a small part of the problem. The real shoplifters come right from our midst."