So I shoplifted as a kid. An open letter to my D20 kids about shoplifting..
“I couldn’t understand how I went from feeling such a good feeling of being clever and getting away with being better then the system to having what felt like a physical pit in my stomach and a flush of shame that I was convinced would never, ever go away…”
The other day, we caught some kids figuring out how to scam the card machine at the store. These weren’t bad kids, but it didn’t even occur to them that they were stealing, or if it did, they didn’t draw the line to the wrong of it. So I decided to pull out a story that I’ve only told a few people about what happened with me when I shoplifted at about the same age that these kids did.
Stealing and shoplifting are a fact of life for a store like D20, and what you would only know if you actually did the books at the end of the month, is that while the stealing is a fairly small percentage of our sales, so is the profit that we end up with each month, and that little bit of stealing here and there, really hurts us a lot.
But that is never my first thought when we catch someone stealing, particularly a kid. I know, from personal experience, that moment in time can be the point where someone chooses what kind of person they want to be. This is the time when …
So I shoplifted as a kid. An open letter to my D20 kids about shoplifting..Read More »