Confessions of a teenage shoplifter

How much have I really changed since those days?

A few months ago, I inadvertently stole some cheese from Loblaws, and an old, familiar thrill passed through me.

I try not to shop at Loblaws. It’s too expensive, and Galen Weston is clearly a ghoul, but the Food Basics near me is always crowded, and the No Frills is poorly stocked, and the FreshCo didn’t have whatever specific thing I was looking for, so there I was, shopping for a few dinner party supplies at Loblaws.

When I got to my car to unload the bags, I saw a small (but expensive) wedge of cheese lying there, un-bagged, in the cart¹. I looked around, realizing that I’d just pulled a cheese heist. Nobody was chasing me, shouting “stop, thief.” So, I got into my car and went home, the stolen cheese nestled among the fruits in my trunk.

“I always steal when I go through self-checkout,” a friend told me when I mentioned that I didn’t feel any guilt about my accidental cheese theft. “I figure they owe me, for the free labour.”

I had to admit that I saw the logic. They used to pay cashiers, but now they want us to do the job for free, and be grateful for the convenience.

Of course, it’s only convenient because the store is so understaffed that waiting for human service takes an unreasonably long time, which forces people into self-checkout lanes, which is exactly what the supermarket wanted in the first place.

I’m not sure what I resent more about self-checkout: The fact that I’m being asked to feel grateful for doing unpaid labour that used to be someone’s actual job. Or, the classist way that grocery chains make the very people who they have forced to use the self-checkout feel like criminals for using it. The anti-theft measures that dominate the affordable Food Basics self-checkout area are almost entirely absent from the much more expensive Loblaws (which, in a fun twist, makes it easier to steal expensive cheese from Loblaws).

At Loblaws, there’s one employee in the self-checkout area who hangs around, helping people figure out how to scan items that don’t have a barcode.

At Food Basics, an intimidating security guard hovers around, and the employees monitoring the area are more harried than helpful. They make you weigh the reusable shopping bags you brought from home, and if the machine thinks they’re suspiciously heavy, it triggers the amber light to start flashing, and then an employee has to apologetically scan their badge while you stand helplessly next to a pair of clearly empty canvas totes.

The more affordable the grocery store, the more frequently the checkout terminal will bark “unexpected item in bagging area” at you, or turn on the dreaded amber light to signal a minor discrepancy in the weight of a loaf of bread pulled out of the grocery basket on the left and placed in a bag on the right. Inevitably, it takes forever for an employee to come over and deactivate this so that you can scan your next item, because every single other person in the self checkout area has also triggered the same alarm at least twice while just trying to pay for their goddamn cereal and bananas. At some stores, customers are subjected to receipt checks. It’s all a nightmare.

When I was in high school, I mostly stole makeup and shiny, pretty things that I didn’t really need, and probably could afford. I didn’t have to steal necessities. My family was, at this point in our lives, no longer poor. We’d gone through phases of having nothing, having a fair bit, and then sinking everything we had into immigrating to Canada, where we started from scratch. Sure, my parents worked three jobs to keep us afloat, but we lived in a nice apartment in a nice neighbourhood, and I could afford all the ‘70s vintage clothing from Kensington Market that my heart desired. Stealing was something I (and my friends, all wealthier than me) did purely for the thrill.

Our ‘90s teenage morality was pretty straightforward when it came to theft.

• No stealing from individual people

• No stealing from independent stores, or ones that sold things we cared about, (bookstores, music stores, and so on), which by extension supported people we might care about (artists, non-sellouts)

• Stealing from large, faceless, soulless corporations (a.k.a. “the man”) = A-OK!

I only got caught once, while stealing Gravol from a Pharma Plus, for a friend who felt nauseous (but was definitely not pregnant, she reassured the rest of us). The store called my parents, and this set off a (hilarious only in retrospect) chain of events in which several sets of parents in the friend group tried to solve the mystery of whether the kids were all getting high on Gravol, and whether it was, in fact, possible to get high on Gravol.

Weed was very easy to buy in ‘90s North York, so we didn’t need Gravol, which is just as well, because I was banned from Pharma Plus drugstores for life.

Portrait of the author as a teenage criminal doing some sort of yoga pose, as captured by yearbook staff. Clueless indeed!

Please note the green eight-hole Docs, the homemade bellbottoms and the absurdly long scarf that prompted my mother to make inappropriate Isadora Duncan jokes², in the picture above. Would you suspect that teen of having criminal tendencies?

I know a few men who stole the occasional candy bar when they were really young, but none who continued doing so into their teen years. Among my female friends, it’s incredibly common, almost a rite of passage. I’ve never fully understood why, though on some level it’s never felt like that much of a mystery, either.

When I was 16, I craved drama, excitement, the thrill of doing something bad, but not especially dangerous — I didn’t want to get into “real trouble,” whatever that meant. Stealing stuff was a jolt of electricity, a high in the days when I was too scared to try anything stronger than a joint.

I had a serious case of Main Character Syndrome, and so did all of my friends. We all wanted to be like Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman. Sexy, dangerous, funny, bad to the bone. But, we weren’t allowed out past 10pm, so we drowned our sorrows by pocketing lip gloss and bottles of the ultimate early-’90s scent, Tribe, from the local drugstore, to spray onto our bodies while we smoked cigarettes and tried not to giggle while leaving racy voicemails for strangers on The Night Exchange. Engaging in inappropriate sexual behaviour through the safety barrier of a telephone line was another popular form of “bad but not dangerous” thrill-seeking.

The sparkle wore off a bit after I got caught, and was forced to see my actions through my parents’ eyes, as the baffling rebellion of an entitled and immature kid who had no idea how much had been sacrificed in order to give her this privileged life in a safe country where (if you were a white girl, at least) stores would call your dad instead of the cops when they caught you stealing drugs. When my dad was in high school, one of his classmates disappeared for a few years, and he found out decades later that the secret police had sent her to a detention camp for publicly questioning the government, or some equally minor infraction. I was such an ungrateful brat.

I stopped stealing sometime around my 18th birthday. The threat of being caught as an adult scared me. And besides, I was spending a lot of my time reading about Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman and trying to figure out what present-day issues I cared about most, and what kind of activist I would become, when I was finally done high school³. I no longer wore makeup, and I wanted my law-breaking to serve a higher purpose.

In the aftermath of my cheese caper, I considered whether occasional petty theft could be an interesting midlife crisis hobby, but perhaps going back to activism would be a more fulfilling way to shake the cobwebs off my life, and a better example to set to my kid, who has definitely inherited my loosey-goosey moral compass, just as I inherited it from my mom. She once stole a hunk of rock carved with cuneiform writing from Babylon, but that’s a story for another day.

Memories of Mesopotamia

1. Frankly, there are so many great cheese shops in Toronto that buying a fancy cheese from Loblaws should, in itself, constitute a major crime.

2. Isadora Duncan was a famous dancer who died in 1927 when her scarf became entangled in the wheel of her car, strangling her as she drove. This was the kind of random factoid that was common knowledge in my household.

3. I did end up finding a passionately radical community during my first week of university, and my baby activism (mostly anti-poverty and anti-corporatization-of-public-spaces stuff) in the late ‘90s did did shape my 20s in some major ways, but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about doing crimes!