Middle-class lefty professionals are proudly shoplifting as an act of ‘political resistance’. By Lauren Shirreff at The Telegraph.
These are the strange new rules of shoplifting. It is acceptable — even laudable –to steal from chain supermarkets, so long as you are a wealthy person doing it all in the name of progressive values.
If this shocks you, there is help at hand. The NYT’s Opinion podcast recently published a segment about this new frontier in modern politics, which is becoming just as much of a phenomenon among middle-class 20- and 30-somethings in Britain as it is in New York – where most young professionals voted for Zohran Mamdani as mayor last year, and consider it a point of great pride that their city is now led by an ardent socialist.
In the podcast, the NYT’s culture editor, Nadja Spiegelman, explains what she has termed “microlooting”. There is “a slight political valence” to this kind of theft, she says, “as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something”. It sounds like the kind of thing a university student might say after attending their first lecture on Marxism.
Sure, there’s the excuse, but given how wealthy they are it doesn’t hold water:
Jia Tolentino, 37, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the owner of the $2.2m Brooklyn townhouse, later admits that she’d stolen from Whole Foods on “several occasions”, including a handful of lemons. Having forgotten to pick them up as part of her shop, she simply swiped four of them on her way out the door. “I didn’t feel bad about it at all,” she declares.
The reasoning, viewers learn, is that big organisations such as Whole Foods underpay their staff while raising the price of their goods to boost their own margins. Companies and their bosses are, supposedly, not “playing fair” by hoarding their profits. Stealing from them is therefore not just permissible, but a political act — a part of sticking it to the man and a valiant hobby to discuss over $25 cocktails in Manhattan. …
It can be taken as a sign of acute social breakdown in both the US and UK, where young professionals feel that the system is stacked against them, making it impossible for them to own a house and drive an expensive car as their parents might have done. A sense of social injustice appears to be sparking an extraordinary new crime wave. Why not shoplift when you’ll never get the lifestyle you want through honest hard work?
In certain circles, “everyone” does it:
I am 25, and have met a lot of people who freely admit to (or, indeed, boast about) shoplifting prolifically. In most cases, it’s not those struggling to make ends meet in minimum wage jobs, but the ones earning £60,000 a year or more in offices, while happily forking out hundreds on drinks on a Friday night.
These are people who could easily afford their monthly £200 Zara hauls, but are instead stuffing their bags and walking out proudly as the alarms go off, knowing that, under the protection of class and status, the security staff would never suspect them of theft …
These days, “it sometimes feels like everyone I know steals from Whole Foods”, wrote an author called Nora DeLigter in a piece for New York magazine last month. …
In New York, “loads of people” steal, confirms Rebecca*, in her mid-20s, who recently moved to London from the Big Apple. The city “is full of these people who are armchair socialists, so it’s OK to shoplift from a Target or a Trader Joe’s, but you’d never do it from a bodega or a mom-and-pop shop [a small, family-run store]”.
Lefties are entitled to your stuff too, didn’t you know?
hat-tip Stephen Neil