This story started Tuesday when the NY Post covered an incident of shoplifting that was caught on camera:
A man was caught on Post video allegedly brazenly swiping about a dozen steaks from a Manhattan Trader Joe’s on Tuesday morning…
Two helpless Trader Joe’s staffers had followed the man up an escalator leading to the store’s exit but only stopped him from taking a shopping basket outside — not the meat, the video shows.
“They basically just tell us not to do anything, just let them go,” a Trader Joe’s worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, later explained to The Post.
The NY Post put the shoplifter on the cover with this amusing headline:
Now, as you can already tell from the cover, there are two points of outrage here. One is the brazenness of the crime and the fact that no one at the store is allowed to even try to stop it. It seems to many people that, as often as this happens, people doing it ought to be arrested and discouraged from carrying on as if this is normal behavior.
The second related point is that this isn’t a one-off. Crime is up in NYC and elsewhere. The issue here isn’t just one guy stealing a few steaks. The issue is lots of guys like him stealing stuff to the point that many stores are struggling to cope. The Post published a story the next day with video of another man shoving canned drinks into his pants at same Trader Joe’s.
Getting back to the Hamburglar, he wasn’t stealing ten expensive steaks because he’s starving. As the Post had previously reported, a lot of stolen merchandise gets sold on to bodegas. This isn’t desperation, this is boosting merchandise to make money.
