Earlier this year, the president of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society went shopping at the Co-op Food Store in Lebanon, bought a cart full of groceries, and left the store with a 12-pack of Diet Cherry Coke for which he had not paid. He was not busted, there were no proceedings in Lebanon District Court and no TV news program learned of the story.
I am confessing this now to explain why I, as the president in question, was particularly interested in Jim Kenyon’s recent account of the Dartmouth professor who was arrested at the same store and charged with stealing two $30 bottles of dietary supplements. Although the professor purchased some groceries, the supplements were not among them. Those she simply took off the shelf, stuck in her purse and did not pay for before leaving.
As one who has literally been there myself – outside the Lebanon Co-op, with an item I didn’t purchase – I hope the professor succeeds in convincing the court of what her lawyer has already convinced Mr. Kenyon: that she made an honest mistake. But unlike Mr. Kenyon, I think the Co-op itself handled the situation responsibly and appropriately.
Mr. Kenyon points out that the alleged shoplifter is a 66-year-old professor at an Ivy League school, arrested by a loss prevention specialist 41 years her junior. In a previous column, Kenyon complained about a Norwich police officer who allegedly overreacted to a friendly snowball fight purely because the participants were teenagers. Not making judgments about people and their motives, based on superficial facts like their age and academic credentials, would be a good approach to the incident at the Co-op as well. But nothing requires consistency of newspaper columnists.
By contrast, the Co-op is governed by a higher authority – namely, the Statement on the Cooperative Identity adopted by the International Cooperative Alliance, which sets cooperatives apart from other kinds of businesses. Among the values enshrined in the Statement are equality and equity. This requires the Co-op to treat everyone alike, regardless of whether Jim Kenyon (or anyone else) is impressed by a particular person’s demographic profile.
Alternatively, it appears to be Mr. Kenyon’s view that shoplifters should get away with warnings from the Co-op, and that by using a loss prevention specialist the organization is succumbing to a “gotcha” mentality. The facts, and the applicable principles, suggest otherwise.As my Diet Cherry Coke experience demonstrates, it is arguably too easy to take merchandise away from the Co-op without paying for it. I like to think that the Co-op can afford to be more sanguine about shoplifting than other businesses because people realize that stealing from the Co-op is equivalent to stealing from one’s neighbors. But if word got around that thieves faced nothing more from the Co-op than a stern lecture, those few no-goodniks who prey upon their neighbors would do so with impunity. If management took such an approach, it would contravene explicit instructions from the Board to protect the assets of the cooperative.
Sadly, a serious theft problem at the Lebanon store led management to use loss prevention specialists. It would be one thing if the pattern involved indigent parents taking baby food for their children, or capricious teenagers stealing whoopie pies, or even random losses suggesting the absent-mindedness Mr. Kenyon attributes to the arrested professor. In fact, what has been chronically walking out the door are luxury items like expensive bottles of wine and costly dietary supplements of precisely the sort found in the professor’s purse. The market for these items consists largely of people who can afford them, which undermines Mr. Kenyon’s theory that theft should be deemed a mistake when an obvious motive is lacking.
The Co-op nevertheless owes Jim Kenyon thanks for providing an opportunity to distinguish its way of doing things from conventional businesses. Would a typical supermarket publicly explain its approach to loss prevention? Could such a store confront, much less discuss in a newspaper, the philosophical implications of dealing with shoplifting?
And as for that Diet Cherry Coke: I’d put it on the low shelf of my shopping cart and neither I nor the cashier noticed it when I checked out. Discovering my oversight at my car, I hustled back into the store and paid up, with apologies. Was I a shoplifter?By law, the answer turns on whether I intended to steal. Concerning intent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once famously observed that “even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.” The soda was a stumble. Whether the dietary supplements taken by the professor were a stumble or a kick is a question the court will have to decide.
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