Shoplifting, a multibillion-dollar cultural phenomenon

This multibillion-dollar industry lives and thrives in the shadows, where bags and baggy coats are the tools and practitioners are more likely to get arrested than get rich.

We're talking about shoplifting, also known as the five-finger discount, and now the subject of a new book, The Steal, a Cultural History of Shoplifting, by DePaul University's Rachel Shteir.

"Shoplifting has been a sin, a crime, a confession of sexual repression, a howl of grief, a political yelp, a sign of depression, a badge of identity, and a back door to the American Dream," she writes.

While shoplifting persists in good times and bad, the book's publication resonates in this unforgiving economy that has left so many people without jobs and slammed the front door on their dreams.

Barbara Staib of the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, which offers alternative sentencing programs for offenders, says she saw an uptick in referrals beginning in 2007, when the economy began convulsing. They leveled off last year.

Preliminary findings of the most recent National Retail Security Survey show that unaccounted-for retail merchandise, including losses from clerical errors, employee theft, and shoplifting, rose to $37.14 billion in 2010 or 1.58 percent of retail sales, up from $33.5 billion in 2009, or 1.44 percent of sales.

Shrinkage (an industry term for missing merchandise) amounts globally to $100 billion a year, says Farrokh Abadi, president of Shrink Management Solutions, part of the Philadelphia-based firm Checkpoint Systems.

Thievery is as old as civilization itself.

Eve was goaded into taking that apple. Mythological Greek gods stole to bestow such gifts as fire upon humankind. In Elizabethan England, milliners, booksellers, cheese mongers, and others were victimized by men known as lifters. The Shoplifting Act of 1699 sentenced the thief of an item worth more than five shillings to hanging.

In the mid-1800s, the way Parisian department stores displayed their merchandise nurtured shoplifting as a women's activity. Pockets and bulky clothing accessories with sewn-in linings were favorite - and fashionable - hiding places.

Shoplifting increased in the 1900s, and with it, a lucrative antitheft industry that spurred shoplifters to become more creative, such as using bags with false bottoms and lined in lead to foil security devices. Organized retail-theft crime rings are more threatening, working in teams and targeting not only stores but deliveries of goods, sometimes going after a specific item dictated by the boss.

These days, eBay has even become an unwitting electronic marketplace for stolen goods. The online auction giant now works with law enforcement authorities and chain stores to catch these crooks.

"What's new about shoplifting today is that it has become a cultural phenomenon - a silent epidemic, driven by pretty much everything, in our era," writes Shteir.

The crime's practitioners are a diverse bunch, who do not fit a single profile.

They are unknown and famous - Winona Ryder was preceded in celebrity shoplifting by silver-screen star Hedy Lamarr, former Miss America Bess Myerson, and filmmaker John Waters. They are senior citizens - a Florida program exists to help the elderly deal with criminal charges, the most common of which is shoplifting.

And they are young.

In fact, Staib worries about the number of youths who steal and still think they live ethical lives.

A recent study from the nonprofit Josephson Institute in Los Angeles reported that 33 percent of boys and 25 percent of girls, out of 43,000 high school students surveyed, said they stole from a store in the previous year. Yet to them, shoplifting was not a character flaw: Nearly 90 percent believed that being a good person was more important than being rich. They see stealing as an acceptable way of getting a desired item with low odds of being caught, Staib says.

"It's not just an economic and criminal issue," she says. "It's really more of a sociological issue - how society views it, reacts to it, and inadvertently promotes it."