The thread on “Permanently Banned” got me thinking about an incident a couple of years ago where a teenaged girl in my household was banned for a year from shopping at Claire’s and Icing (mall sister stores selling earrings and other jewelry/trinkets, often branded with teen popstars, to pre-teen and early-teenaged girls,) for pocketing a pair of earrings. The store manager told me that they catch at least 5 girls a day shoplifting at each store on school days, more on the weekends. They fine the teens’ parents $200 above the cost of the item stolen, from a form letter sent by their legal department. So that’s at least $1,000/day revenue in fines, mostly profit. The funny thing is, they must make more money in shoplifting fines than from goods sold after product costs are subtracted, especially since very little in there is over $15, and most items are around $6. In fact, I think that is their business model - display gaudy, small pocket-able trinkets to girls who in their peak shoplifting years, sit back and collect the dough. I can’t decide if it’s cruel or brilliant.
Yea good luck getting that money from me. They can ‘fine’ me all they want, but if my daughter stole from the store and was caught, all they can do is charge her with shoplifting and trespass. Fines are issued by the government, not some piss-ant retail outlet who’s been done wrong. They can sue me for their stupid little fine.
And charge the kid.
And sue you for, oh, 5 X more.
Learn to recognize your own self-interest.:dubious:
And if there’s no notice posted anywhere in the store about this little fine scheme, good luck to them in finding a judge who’d consider it legitimate, especially pushed against parents of a juvenile offender.
Are there time limits on when someone can be charged with shoplifting? Does it have to be at the time of offense if the person is caught redhanded, or can the store go back a month or two later and bring charges?
If they can go back and bring charges when the fine is being ignored, it would cost a great deal more in bail bonds and attorney’s fees than the amount of the fine. Plus your kid will have a shoplifting charge on her record.
It might be a racket, I don’t know. On the one hand they may be thinking that this approach will get talked around among the kids and thereby lessen shoplifting, or on the other it might just be a way of tempting kids into providing them with an excuse to extort money from their parents. Either way, once the damage is done, paying the $200 would be the smart thing to do.
If it’s their business model, why ban the shoplifter?
So you wouldn’t pay the $200 to avoid a shoplifting conviction on your daughter’s record?
Trust me, she’d be in more trouble with me than the courts ever could consider. And a juvenile offense for minor theft? I’d fight it because even if I lost it would be sealed at 18 (at least in the state in which I ahem know juvenile justice).
Plus, knowing me such a letter would royally piss me off. It’d be worth it just for the fight.
The stores usually do post the notices that they can fine you for shoplifting. It’s in fine print on the big SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED signs. Most stores around here will send a civil demand for triple the price of what was stolen, even if they recover the items and can immediately restock them. If they don’t get it, they supposedly send you to small claims court (I’ve never actually talked to someone who says they went to small claims court over this, though). And the civil demand is wholly separate from criminal or delinquency charges. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “But I paid them what they asked for, why did they charge me?” in my line of work. “Because they can” is the best answer I can give.
Absent the threat of criminal charges, how do they enforce the fine? Does simply posting a notice create a liability? Can I fine people for littering in my yard, for example, if I post a notice?
Not a chance. And this isn’t from some pedestal. I’ve got a young daughter. Depending on her age and survivability tendencies, I’d probably let her spend a night in the clink if it were an option.
A “shoplifting conviction” is a much better lesson than daddy buying her out of trouble. I’m having trouble thinking of a single good thing (with respect to discouraging her from a life of crime and encouraging a sense of personal accountability and responsibility) that could come from me paying off the manager who is likely pocketing $200 per threat.
If this just happened to the OP, I’d go so far as to call the corporate HQ and see if they felt that extortion was the appropriate response to shoplifting. There’s a near-zero percent chance that it’s corporate policy and near 100% chance that it’s FU money for the retail manager.
Who can “charge” the kid? Charge them with shoplifting? Charge them the cost of the material?
Sue who for 5x more of what? What civil theory is the store looking to recover under, when they caught the shoplifter and recovered their merchandise?
Unless the kid had a history of prior arrests, I would think a letter sent days or weeks after the incident purporting to require a cash payment to the store in consideration for not pressing charges would not warrant to much follow up by law enforcement.
If my little princess did shoplift, she would be far more interested in talking to the police than me. At the same time, I would be thrilled to receive one of these letters. It would give me a nice laugh at a time I would otherwise be worried about my child.
Not that I really think this is their business model, but the answers would be that it creates a barrier to entry and discourages some potential shoplifters. Even if you get a lot of money from these fines, you’re not going to catch everyone who steals, so you don’t want everyone to do it. I don’t think that many people who get caught are going to come back to the store anyway.
If it’s your business model you do. Pretty much by definition. If it’s not their business model my question is irrelevant, as it was predicated on it being the business model.
But this isn’t like making a sale, where as long as you sell an item, you get something back. If the merchandise is stolen successfully, you get nothing. You’re not going to catch and fine them every shoplifter, and the more people steal from you, the lower your success rate gets. So at a certain point you’re losing more money from theft than you are taking in from … theft. Granted that would have to be a lot of people, but if you give the successful shoplifters repeated chances to get back into your store you’re going to lose more stuff.
Perhaps the reasoning is that the threat and the $200 “fine” stops working on the parents if a given girl is caught more than once…maybe they’ve found that the parents tend to prefer that a second offense be dealt with criminally, or balk at paying the $200 multiple times.
If that were the case, allowing a “caught” person back in would be less likely to generate the $200 fine, but banning her might be MORE likely to result in her talking her friend into stealing something “to get even”…and then they can “fine” the friend’s parents.
Should I worry that I can think like this?
All you are doing is making the case that it’s a bad business model. My question had nothing to do with that. I simply asked why anyone would ban shoplifters if attracting shoplifters was what they counted on to grow their business. As stated in the OP –
You’re not going to be losing more money to shoplifting than you’re taking in when each trinket earns you a dollar profit or less but each caught shoplifter earns you close to $200.
The fine that the store imposes is independent of any police action. All stores around here do it. $200 is the maximum civil penalty they can charge over the cost of the item when the item is valued at under a certain dollar amount. You can fight it but you won’t win, as the store will have called the police and there is a police report on record.
The teens are banned for a year, but since hundreds shop there every day, they are in no danger of running out of [del]marks[/del] customers. And the lure of the glittery jewelry and Hannah Montana lip gloss is enough that a lot of girls do go back before the year is up, because they know that realistically, they won’t be remembered. I’ve never seen any pictures posted of shoplifters there, and at the rate of 5/day or more, it would be impossible to keep track.
FYI: The criminal penalty in my city for this is about 12 hours of community service assigned through Youth Diversion and a $172 fine to the county court (for a first offense). So that pair of $4 earrings ends up costing close to $400 to the parents. Believe me, it takes a long time for a 14-year-old to earn that money back when they’re too young to hold a job.
How is that not considered blackmail? of course i would not pay it, i would in fact sue them.