Shoplifting is more common than you think

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Shoplifting is more common than you think

What do Britney Spears, Megan Fox and Winona Ryder have in common?

All three have

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. And they are not alone.

Nearly one-quarter of ********* adults have shoplifted, according to a

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from LendingTree, the personal finance site. Roughly 1 in 20 consumers have shoplifted within the past year.

Shoplifting is a complicated ******. The motive can range from adolescent rebellion to ****** thrill-seeking to hand-to-mouth ********. 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.”

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Megan Fox is one of several A-list celebrities who have reportedly admitted to, or been accused of, shoplifting.

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 ****** consumers. The inspiration, Schulz said, came from an earlier survey about

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, 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

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.

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Britney Spears reportedly walked out of a gas station with a $1.39 lighter in 2007, quipping “Oh, I’m bad,” to the assembled paparazzi outside.

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

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in 2022, up from $94 billion in 2021, according to the National Retail Federation.

“Retailers are seeing unprecedented levels of theft coupled with rampant ****** 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 ****** category, shoplifting covers everything from the lone-wolf teen swiping chewing gum at Walmart to vast, organized, multimillion-dollar

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.

Shoplifting and other property ******* declined in the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, when stores shut down and shoppers stayed home, according to the nonprofit Council on ********* Justice. Property ******* rose anew in 2022 and 2023, as consumers returned to the malls.

“The pandemic gave us a master class in criminology,” said

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, CEO of the ********* justice group.

In the first half of 2024, ****** statistics

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in eleven of 12 categories in 39 ********* cities analyzed by the ********* 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.

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Winona Ryder was famously arrested in 2001 for taking thousands of dollars in merch from a Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills.

In shoplifting, the motive is not always financial

But shoplifting is a complex ******, and the motive is not always financial.

Spears, the iconic singer, reportedly walked out of a gas station

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in 2007, quipping “Oh, I’m bad,” to the assembled paparazzi outside.

Fox, the Hollywood actress, reportedly confessed she had been

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for swiping cosmetics in her teens.

Ryder was

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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

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. “They’re typically polite; they don’t run away; they don’t ****** 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 ****** 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

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, 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?”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:

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#Shoplifting #common

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