Shoplifting keeps stores on edge
Shoplifting is as old as retail sales.
And the day after Thanksgiving, when shopping for Christmas begins in earnest in this most mercantile of cultures, shoplifters are expected to be shoulder to shoulder with the more law-abiding consumers.
If and when shoplifters are caught, “it’s usually because of an alert clerk or one of the store’s loss-prevention officers,” said Craig De Costa, Kaua’i County chief deputy prosecutor
De Costa said the bigger stores, namely Wal-Mart and Kmart, generate the most cases, along with Liberty House.
“Shoplifters are a mixture. There are a lot of people who take things that can be easily sold. These are drug users usually. Then there are teenagers,” De Costa said.
Tourists aren’t shoplifting much.
“A very small percentage of our cases are visitors. One or two that I can recall agreed to pay very large fines for it (shoplifting) instead of staying” on-island in jail, De Costa said.
Wal-Mart’s loss prevention team officials asked for anonymity for security reasons, but did say the store has added personnel for the Christmas season.
“For us it comes and goes in spurts, but it’s a constant thing. Of course, we see some of the same people over and over. Some of them are regulars. Once they’ve been (arrested), they are banned from the store for one year. But even then, a lot of them are going to try and figure a way to get back in,” a Wal-Mart official said.
“We intend on having a pretty aggressive presence with our security guards. We are fully prepared to prosecute” shoplifters, said Wade Lord, general manager of Kukui Grove Center, the island’s largest shopping mall.
“We know the reality of it. As the economy goes down, historically, in the shopping-center business, it (shoplifting) can increase. Whenever the economy goes bad, there seems to me more of it,” Lord said.
He noted that Kukui Grove doesn’t have many repeat shoplifters.
“If they get caught, the experience is a pretty bad one. It’s a fairly public thing. You are taken outside, a security guard holding you by the arm, and walked to a waiting police car. I don’t see a lot of repeats,” Lord said.
On Kaua’i, a shoplifting haul of $300 or more is considered a felony, and those arrested may face serious jail time.
Shoplifting from $100 to $300 is classified as a misdemeanor, and under $100 is registered as a petty misdemeanor.
But repeat petty shoplifters can accrue some serious jail time. If shoplifters are arrested and convicted of multiple shoplifting misdemeanors, the fourth arrest carries with it an automatic nine months in jail, according to De Costa.
“It ain’t worth the risk,” De Costa said when asked if he had any message for future shoplifters.
Shoplifting security expert Chris E. McGoey claims there are an estimated 400 million shoplifting incidents annually in the United States, causing losses of approximately $10.5 billion. That equates to somewhere between 1 million and 2 million incidents of shoplifting per day, at a loss of about $20,000 per minute.
In some bigger cities on the mainland, police departments have discovered they are also dealing with gangs of thieves who fill orders by stealing from specific stores.
De Costa said Kaua’i County’s law enforcement personnel haven’t seen organized thievery on that scale yet.
According to Shoplifting.com of San Diego, approximately 5,400 shoplifters are detained every day; that’s 162,000 people arrested every 30 days for filching items from store shelves and displays.
But there is humor in almost every aspect of life, even shoplifting.
“There’s this one guy who has an m.o. (modus operandi). He always steals a fifth of rum and by the time the cops pull him over, the rum bottle is half-empty,” De Costa said. “Last year on the morning of Super Bowl Sunday, he steals the rum and some mango seed and then goes to a big department store to steal a television and a VCR.”
Unfortunately for the thief, an alert store security officer spotted the electronic equipment going out the door sans payment, and the man’s pigskin preparations were dashed.
The man missed the Super Bowl, but once again, the rum bottle was half-full when the miscreant was arrested. He had tailgated alone before looking for his home entertainment center.
Staff writer Dennis Wilken can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) and mailto:dwilken@pulitzer.net
