Sam’s life of crime started in the cheese section of his local grocery store about seven months ago. The plan for dinner was to make fettuccine alfredo for he and his wife, and their two young children, and the recipe called for a block of cheddar. But the brand-name, nothing-remotely-fancy cheese he was poised to put in his cart somehow didn’t seem quite good enough.

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Stop, thieves! Why otherwise honest Canadians are shoplifting at the grocery store Back to video

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Surveying more premium cheeses, all Sam could think about was that the prices, driven ever higher by inflation, were seemingly double what they had been the month before. If everyone has a breaking point, the cheese was his. He put a higher-end cheddar in his cart, headed for the self-checkout and meticulously scanned each item, save for the cheese, which he held to the scanner with the barcode turned away from it.

It was an act of brazen grocery store banditry perpetrated by an otherwise honest, home-owning, gainfully employed, educated parent without a criminal past.

“I was like, ‘Screw it, I don’t care, I am taking the cheese,’ and that was the first thing I took.”

Sam — not his real name — has since graduated to stealing bread and meat. He lives in southwestern Ontario and typically shops, and shoplifts, after work. He doesn’t wear a phony moustache or some other disguise, and will boldly, albeit politely, chat up store employees, some of whom he has come to know in that way we all come to know the local grocery store workers we see every few days, but don’t really know at all.

His goal as a thief is to knock 25 per cent off each bill. Every nickel he doesn’t spend at the self-checkout is redirected toward some other pressing household expense: mortgage, bills, kids, life.

“This is not about thrill-seeking,” Sam said. “Everything has gone up in price.”

Has it ever. Statistics Canada in March said consumer inflation slowed to 5.2 per cent in February, but supermarket prices kept soaring ever upward, increasing 10.6 per cent year over year. Canadians are feeling the pinch, and some are now pinching pennies by pilfering items from the supermarket.

We are not talking about pros who treat thieving as their day job, but regular Joes, and Sams. That is, shoppers engaged in a game of moral jeopardy, weighing what they know to be true (stealing is wrong) versus what they also know to be true (prices have gone, well, bananas, and grocers are reporting huge profits). Many are arriving at a place, often in the automated self-checkout line — but also at cash registers staffed by gangly teenagers and other part-timers — where thou shalt steal, because household finances are tight, has become an operative commandment.

This is not about thrill-seeking

Sam

Meanwhile, the Big Three grocers appear to have their own commandments around shoplifting, chief of which is: thou shalt not publicly speak of it. Empire Co. Ltd., parent company of Sobeys, Safeway and other brands, “politely” declined to comment upon the subject, as did Loblaw Cos. Ltd. A Metro Inc. company spokesperson allowed that “in times of high inflation such as these, we usually see an increase in shoplifting.”

One Toronto-area grocer acknowledged theft is a “huge problem” at their store, but said an even bigger problem would be speaking out for fear of being punished by “head office.”

The grocers’ reticence around the subject can be partly explained by a belief that there is no upside to bellyaching about shoplifting, according to one industry insider who requested anonymity. The potential downside is loyal, honest, battered-by-inflation customers are made to feel as though they are being looked upon as a throng of potential petty crooks.

“Theft is a taboo subject among grocers,” Sylvain Charlebois, a professor and food industry expert at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said.

But the grocers clearly know theft is rising and are doing little things to try to stop it. Some only allow baskets, no more carts, at self-checkouts; some have stopped selling wine and beer, which are very enticing items for thieves; some are forcing shoppers to completely empty their carts onto the checkout stands; and some are either adding a security guard to stand watch or asking for the receipt upon exit. But for every manoeuvre they make, thieves find a way around it.

Data around theft is hard to come by. But by Charlebois’ best, admittedly imperfect, estimate, each store loses between $2,000 and $5,000 per week to theft. Take the upper limit of that ballpark estimate as a starting point and do a little back-of-the-napkin math — multiplying the number of stores each of the big three grocers operate by $5,000 — and the annual losses due to theft could ring in as high as $635 million (Loblaw), $415 million (Empire) and $250 million (Metro).

Even if those numbers are wildly overinflated and you reduce them by 90 per cent, the major grocers’ cumulative loss from theft would still total about $100 million annually.

That is a lot of cheddar cheese, and it hints at the degree of moral jeopardy being played by the great mass of Canadian consumers, 30 per cent of whom believe price gouging by grocers is the “main reason” for high prices at stores, according to a recent survey by Charlebois and his colleagues at Dalhousie’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab.

“People feel that grocers are profiteering,” he said. “And if you believe that a retailer is profiteering, then you could argue that the company is stealing, so why not steal back?”

Further muddying our collective morality is the automated self-checkout. The machines have been around since the mid-1980s. An Ultra Food & Drug in suburban Toronto was among the earliest Canadian adopters. Gerald Good, then chairman of A&P Canada Co., the store’s parent company, met CTV Canada AM co-anchor Keith Morrison in the “power lane” in April 1993 to walk him through the new technology.

Morrison asked about theft. Good answered that the “computer had some sensors” that would negate any problems. Morrison also asked about the company’s motivation for installing the machines, and wondered whether it wasn’t part of a grand strategy to reduce the numbers of employees. Good dodged that question, and stuck instead with the company line about how the machines better serve “customers,” a half-truth if ever there was one.

Consumers and unemployed cashiers know better. They know a machine is not human, a flesh-and-blood fact that can influence the choices they make, including the criminal ones when they sidle up to an automated self-checkout.

Consumer behaviour experts describe shoplifting at the self-checkout as a form of “consumer misbehaviour,” June Cotte, a marketing professor at the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business in London, said.

“It is not that consumers are good or bad,” she said. “It is that sometimes the opportunity makes the crime far more common.”

The self-checkout just so happens to be where the opportunity to be bad knocks quite loudly. Research shows the ideal conditions for a shopper to “forget” to scan, say, a steak is when they are among a crowd of people with no store employees looming nearby.

“The situation can make that last-minute choice more likely,” Cotte said.

Along with the opportunists are the rabble-rousers, who have internalized a righteous narrative that shoplifting isn’t wrong, but a means to hit back at the price-gouging “Man.” This is not an illogical line of thinking. Inflation is biting into household budgets at a moment when grocers are making big money. Loblaws’ fourth-quarter earnings were up 11 per cent and top executive Galen Weston was just awarded a $1.2-million pay raise by parent company George Weston Ltd.

Now along comes Sue, the hypothetical shopper, moving through aisle six. She might be feeling a little ticked off about those events on top of feeling stressed out about prices.

“People steal to get back at retailers,” Cotte said.

The self-checkout is the perfect accomplice because it is a machine, and humans are far more likely to feel less guilt about a crime when the victim is technology. Were retailers to install self-automated checkouts embedded with a video of a smiling, cheerful, human face, prompting the shopper in a human voice to “pay now,” research suggests people would be far less likely to steal.

People steal to get back at retailers

June Cotte

There is anecdotal evidence of a generational honour code among thieves. On TikTok, a wildly popular platform among young people, users bypass community guidelines to post content that promotes stealing. They’ll use coy euphemisms such as “borrowing” and a lesser-known slang term called “racking,” which refers to shoplifting from big corporations, instead of mom-and-pop stores. There are even tutorials and tips on how and what to steal without getting caught.

But supermarkets aren’t exactly sitting like fattened ducks waiting to be fleeced by the young and old alike. Tom Doyle is a guy no thief would want to meet. He is a loss-prevention specialist, or grocery store detective, and he is built like a human fire hydrant: bald, 5-foot-8, 250 pounds, scary-looking.

Doyle has been in the business of busting shoplifters for almost 40 years, and is co-owner and vice-president of operations at Corporate Protection & Investigative Services, which does a lot of work for major grocery stores. He has been stabbed, bitten, punched and had bottles swung at his head in the line of duty.

“Meat is the hottest item right now,” he said.

By hot, he means shoplifters are looking to steal it. Most of the shoplifters Doyle encounters are not otherwise honest, upstanding Canadians, but professionals who steal for a living.

Every store detective has their own method of catching a thief. His preferred technique involves walking the aisle with a grocery item in hand, watching for suspicious behaviour. He puts on a fancier outfit to blend in with the other customers if he is working at a more upscale store, and he never wears sandals or flip-flops to guard against getting his feet “stomped.”

There is a certain art to shoplifting, Doyle said, and a few weeks ago he saw a new shoplifting masterpiece. A man and a woman separately entered a store, got carts and walked the aisles loading up on goods. They each had a stack of steaks tucked in a corner of the cart and a reusable shopping bag slung over their shoulder.

“This is different,” he remembers thinking.

The pair casually transferred the meat to the bag while they shopped and went to pay at a cashier-staffed checkout lane only to have their cards rejected. A big show of apology ensued, and assurances were given that they would call their bank to sort out the problem and be right back to pay. They then walked out of the store with the meat slung over their shoulder, which is where Doyle confronted them.

I feel no remorse

Sam

In the old days, he would have called 911. But call for the police these days and they don’t show up for hours.

“You are last on their list,” he said.

Sitting in the manager’s office with a shoplifter for six hours is six hours spent not monitoring the floor, so most of the time Doyle retrieves the stolen items, photographs the shoplifter with his smartphone and warns them that he will call police if he sees them around again.

It is a different kind of moral jeopardy when the punishment for a crime is no real punishment at all. What the righteous, as well as the TikTok savvy, fail to realize, Dalhousie’s Charlebois said, is that consumers ultimately bear the cost of increased theft, because the grocers simply pass whatever the costs are on to them.

In recent weeks, Sam has dialled back on shoplifting, but not due to any attacks from a suddenly guilty conscience.

“I feel no remorse,” he said.

But he has noticed store employees paying increased attention at the self-checkout, and their vigilance has him more heavily weighing the risks of being caught. He imagines he could talk his way out of a jam, if need be, but could he explain it to his kids? Children tend to be moral absolutists: Stealing is wrong, and so it is, but life is a little more complicated for adults with mortgages and mouths to feed beside their own.

“I don’t steal frivolous things,” Sam said. “I don’t steal beer — though some days I feel like I need it — I just want to be able to feed my children some good, healthy food.”

Don’t we all?

• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com | Twitter: oconnorwrites

With files from Bianca Bharti.