So, I was in the self-checkout line at a local grocery store the other day, dutifully swiping my items across the scanner and then setting them to the side.
When I was all done, I moved my reusable bag over so that everything could be packed away and carried out of the store. But as it happened, there were still a couple small items in the bag that I had forgotten to swipe.
Mark LaFlamme
It would have been real easy to just start packing up that bag, never bothering to swipe those items and essentially taking them home for free. Why, with the money I saved from this harmless bit of petty larceny, I could have bought something cool, like a Slinky or some Silly String.
What fun!
But of course, I didn’t do that. I hauled those suckers out and dragged them across the scanner so that I could pay for them properly, because going the other way would be thievery, and who wants to be that?
I have a suspicion this happens all the time in the self-checkout lines. People forget to scan items all the time and in that fraction of a second before they do the right thing, a small, childish voice whispers, “What harm could it do to take these items without paying for them?”
I have a feeling the local stores don’t go broke from shoplifting because for most of us, there’s a bigger voice, a voice of honesty and self-respect, that wins the day. We don’t steal, that voice reminds us, because stealing is a crime committed against our fellow man — against our neighbors. Swiping even just that little packet of cat food would transform us into something we don’t want to become and turning back from that is no easy thing.
For most of us, it’s that simple. By the time we are 10 years old, having suffered through nights of tortured guilt after pilfering handfuls of Zots or Bullseyes at the candy store, we have figured out that stealing is a well-defined path to ruin. Pride has compelled us to live honest lives and to pay as we go.
But not everybody wins the battle over that little voice, and especially lately. Today, historic numbers of people are engaging in orgies of stealing and the problem is compounded by the feel-good virtue signalers who condone the thievery.
We’ve all seen the stories about stores on the West Coast that have become so besieged by larceny, they have ceased all attempts to halt it. There are bizarre videos out there of men and women walking boldly into their local Target or Costco or Walgreens, filling up sacks with goods, and heading straight out the doors.
The inevitable result is that those stores can’t recover from the losses and so they close their doors forever, leaving entire neighborhoods without easy access to what the people who live there need.
By the end of last year, Walgreens alone had closed 22 stores in San Francisco where thefts under $950 had been effectively decriminalized.
I can’t help feeling that previous generations would have been appalled by this. But not this generation. These days, thieves are painted as Robin Hood-brand heroes and the people who try to stop them as villains.
The media is not helping.
After a man was recorded stealing various items from a San Francisco Walgreens, CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil condoned the theft, suggesting that the man probably needed all the trinkets he swiped, so why should he be stopped?
“I mean, you’re not getting rich off what you take from a Walgreens,” Dokoupil said, “you’re getting probably something you need.”
New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is now a journalism professor at Howard University for some reason, has taken things a step even further, calling out other journalists for reporting on the matter of shoplifting.
At the heart of all this is a viral video of a man casually stealing nearly a dozen steaks from Trader Joe’s in Manhattan. Several news agencies covered the theft as part of a bigger story about the scourge of shoplifting around the country.
Hannah-Jones isn’t having it.
“A person stealing steak is not national news,” Hannah-Jones wrote on Twitter, “and there have always been thefts from stores.”
Of course, this is the same lady who insists that all journalists should transform themselves into activists, and should dispense with annoying relics like objectivity in their reporting.
My lord, it is hard to be proud of this profession of late.
I’m getting tired of saying it: Objectivity IS our job. Our job is to report the unvarnished facts so that our readers can make of them what they will. Our job is NOT to slant the story one way or another to further this agenda or that one.
If the man stole all those steaks to feed his starving family, report that.
If the man stole all those steaks so he could sell them out of the back of his minivan, report that.
Maybe the reporting of this story, which Hannah-Jones thinks is so trivial, leads to bigger discussions about the matter of why people are so desperate for food, if that’s the case. Maybe it leads to a more thorough examination of why so many people feel entitled to steal with abandon.
The fact that there are big-league reporters and journalism professors telling us that we should either overlook these thefts or slant our coverage to their liking fills me with dread and disgust. I’m horrified, in fact.
I know that I’m supposed to stick to objective facts in my reporting the same way I know that I’m not supposed to take that extra packet of cat food without paying for it at the grocery store.
Should I become a liar as well as a thief just because that’s the way things are trending right now?
Thank you, professor. But nope.
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