The Shoplifters

MANNERS & MORALS

Supermarket operators in Bellingham, Wash. (pop. 38,500) finally quit suffering in silence and broadcast a trade secret that had been kept pretty well by grim grocers across the country: since recession, the customers have been stealing supermarkets blind.

Bellingham's supermarketmen have been taking it longer than most because their city's lumber and fishing industries slipped early. Pilferage soon shot up over 1% of gross sales, took half of food retailing's narrow profit. The desperate grocers screwed up collective courage, got police to start arresting guilty customers and releasing their names to the press. Theirs was one of the few open moves against a corrosive crime that already takes at least $250 million worth of goods from U.S. supermarkets each year.

Cold Turkey. "About the only sure way to stop this stuff is to set your store up in a nudist colony," said a Seattle superman, by now suspicious of just about any housewife who carries a big handbag, wears full skirts or wraps up in a fur coat on a warm day. In many U.S. cities, market cashiers havealso learned to watch for more elaborate devices for sneaking merchandise past the cash register: improbably distended bras (cheese and caviar), hollowed-out books (chops), a bagful of well-used baby diapers (canned goods), the false-bottom market bag, fake laundry packages (packaged meat), bulky, many-pocketed coats, stretch socks and slacks (candy and cigarettes). In a Chicago suburb, aware of a National Food Store security guard on her trail, one Spartan shopper waddled two blocks down the street before she let loose the frozen turkey under her skirt.

Other types:

The "switcher," who puts quality butter (60-c- a lb.) in the oleo box (30-c- a lb.). Another switcher trick: she partially empties a potato-chip tin, hides meat and other items in the bottom.

The "fixer," who works on price tags, transposes the 78-c- tag from 2 Ibs. of hamburger to a $3.38 steak. In Southern California, where supermarket arrests rose 50% this year, a top security agent caught mothers who train their children to help mommy with the shoplifting by toting parcels out through the guard rails.

Impulse to Save. Supermarket defense devices are far less imaginative than the shoplifters' gimmicks. National Food trains clerks and checkers by film slides and lecture tapes ("An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of apprehension"), and most chains have beefed up their security forces. Checkers learn catcherlike signals (e.g., can tossed from hand to hand is S O S call). One-way mirrors, secret peepholes and closed-circuit TV help spot the heisters, but eat up the labor savings of self-service merchandising. Nor is a shoplifter spotted necessarily a shoplifter stopped. Grocers run the risk of being sued for false arrest if they cannot find stolen merchandise. More unsettling is the danger of creating a Gestapo atmosphere in a store where impulse buying is basic to sales.

Seven states (Arizona, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Florida, Kentucky) have passed laws to make arrests of suspected shoplifters easier, but nobody seems to have found a way to detain the easy conscience that assumes a high standard of living to be everybody's right, whether the money is around or not. The Bellingham grocers went farther than most with a practical plea for the community's help on informing and deterring the shoplifters. "Bring down your own high cost of living," their ads say, "since we must add these losses to your own grocery bill."

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