Evidently I Just Helped Catch One Of The Biggest Thieves In Chicago

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

OK I was in the grocery store today and I followed a woman in. She has a little boy and is talking on her cell phone (And you all know how much I love cell phones :D)

Anyway I was pushing my cart around and Junior over there is dragging around a backpack. It’s a fair sized one. Then I noticed he put some candy in it.

Well I was “OK whatever.”

Anyway I kept running into Mum and Junior and I kept noticing he was putting things in his backpack (All goodies kids like to eat).

I thought “Should I say something,” But then I got distracted and somehow I wound up behind her in the store check out. There she was yacking away on her phone and Junior puts yet another candy bar in his backpack.

So I figure, “I better say something.” I said, “Excuse me ma’am, but you’re wee little shaver is putting stuff in his back pack.”

She smiles and says “Justin come here.” She picks up his backpack and says to him, “You know better than to put things in here that don’t belong to you.” Then she says “This isn’t yours, this isn’t yours,” Then she says “Oh my God, none, of this is yours. Half this stuff isn’t even from this store.” She looks at him and says “Where did you get this stuff, you little thief”?

And little Justin who is about, I would say three years old is like trying to make sense out of this. He seems to understand his mum is mad at him but does’t exactly know why. (Or maybe he does, it didn’t seem like that to me.)

So I was just laughing, and mom turns to me and says “This isn’t funny, he’s been stealing from all over the place.” I said “It’s only not funny to you, 'cause you’re his mother. If you were a stranger watching this, trust me it’s funny.”

So she got out of line and was seperating what Justin stole from the store from his other sticky finger’d goods, as I left.

So does anyone else got any amusing stories of young kiddies robbing stores blind without the parents realizing it? Did you return home only to find out your kid had more than you actually paid for.

I don’t mean actual deliberate stealing, I mean like this example. I don’t have kids so maybe little Justin was stealing but he didn’t seem to have a clue.

2

All I can say in Junior’s defense is that when I was about his age, or even a tad older, I started putting box after box of cereal into mom’s shopping cart. She came back from the other aisle and said something to the affect, “You can’t take all of those - we have to pay for them!” She then put most of them back on the shelf.

I vividly recall that was the first time I realized money had to be exchanged!
I just thought you took what you wanted, put it in the shopping cart, and then went home and ate it.

3

I think most kids, and a fair number of adults will sneak a few grapes or cherries out of a produce bag on the way to the checkout stand. I don’t remember this but my Mom told a story of when I was about three or four years old I managed to get a major fraction of the grapes from one bag without her noticing. She just went back and grabbed an additional bag of grapes, told the clerk to weigh the full bag twice and then marched me over to the store manager and told me in no uncertain terms that I should offer sincere explanations and apologies…now.

4

My mom, half-shamefully. half-angrily (not at me) recalls a in incident where I, at three or so, opened at ate a Cadbury Creme Egg while she was paying for groceries.

She turned to pick me up, and of course instantly realized what happened, me being covered in a chocolaty sticky mess, as a small child will be after eating said confection.

Mom had had enough. See, the store had placed a lot of colorful, shiny candy at floor height right by the check-out, where any child was bound to spend several minutes. She felt the store was running a scam on purpose. Me not sleeping for more than two hours at a time might have contributed to her short fuse at this point.

So she blew up at the clerk (who happened to be one of the owners - she wasn’t being mean to a random salesperson, we knew them). I believe she called him a scam-artist, and a few other unpleasant things, for which she later apologized. The man, at that point single with no kids, agreed with her, and from then on, the candy was placed above the newspapers, as god intended.

She forgot to yell at me, but I got the point.

5

You don’t?

Uh-oh.

6

I had my daughter in a backpack at the PX one time. After we had gone through the checkout, we stopped at the cookie store down the mall for a treat, when my daughter hit me in the head with something hard. I reached behind and took from her tiny little hand the calculator from the checkout stand…even had a tape label on it with “Property of AAFES…Checkout #3” written on it. We slogged back and I turned it in at the ID check stand…the clerk was amused. My head hurt. My daughter was too young to even lecture. Good thing it was labelled, otherwise I may never have know exactly where she’d filched it from, since we’d been several places.

7

At four years old, I took a Snickers candy bar from the store, not getting the “pay for it” thang. When my mom found out on the way home, she turned the car around, and we went back to the store, and went back to the cashier. I had to return the half-eaten candy bar, apologize for taking it, and, then pay for it (money supplied by mom). That combo approach was a good lesson; four decades later it is a vivid memory of what NOT to ever do.

8

At 3 I did the candy bar thing. Not understanding money or any of that. The packages are all pretty and there is chocolate in them!!

Got back to the car, I pulled the candy bar out of my pocket. Got drug back into the Pharmacy, had to apologize, got a little lecture about “stuff” not being “free”. Mom paid for it, and on the way back to the car I said “Mom, I go this in the grocery store”. That was right next to the pharmacy, where we had been 5 minutes earlier.

She figured, screw it, she paid for it somewhere.

And worst of all, an Almond Joy, Nuts and Coconut, my two favorite things right next to colonoscopys (sp?) and root canals.

Much like my mom was then, that mom must have been horrified. Now its something we laugh about. By being a wise ass, you’ll just make it more memorable, unless the kid is really a scumbag and ends up in jail.

9

About 3 weeks ago, I’m doing School Pickup, and the kids have been running round on the playground for half an hour or so, when I decide it’s time to go. I gather up the girls, and call to my son (not quite 3, at the moment). He starts to come to me, picking up someone’s tennis ball as he goes.

That’s ok, I think. I’ll just make him toss it back on the grass when he gets to me.

Then he takes a huge bite out of it. It’s not a tennis ball at all - it’s an apple!

:smack:

So anyway, despite me hauling him back to where he picked up his contraband and waving it round at anyone I can see close by, everyone denies being the owner of the apple. (Also, they are highly amused. Great what you can get away with if you’re cute). I end up letting him eat it, since there’s no point in putting it back down on the ledge with a huge chomp taken out of the middle of it.

The kicker is, we actually had plenty of apples in the car, which I could easily have offered up in exchange - but without actually knowing who the contraband belonged to, there was no point. So now I’m an accessory after the fact!

10

I think each of my kids has been through the thief phase, usually from a handy stroller. And I, like the ones upthread, have dragged them back and made them apologize. However, when I was young, my mother was on the antique show circuit. We had groups of people (Mom always called them the gypsies, but I have no idea who they really were) that would send their small children into the antique show to blend in with groups and steal whatever they could fit in their pockets. Lovely role models.

11

I have a reverse story. When I was about 4 or 5, on a visit to my grandmother’s house, we went up to a local farm stand. The proprietor knew my grandmother well, but I was from out of state. Since it was a small, unassuming place, she let me wander around the stalls while she shopped. I’m looking around, checking the veggies out, and suddenly the proprietor is standing over me, screaming at me about shoplifting his produce, and how he knows I’ve been coming in several times a month and stealing money out of his family’s mouths.

I was terrified. I went running to find my grandmother, who was not amused. In the first place, I have never stolen anything in my life. In the second place, what was I going to do? Hide bales of turnip greens under my wee little shirt? Try to abscond with navel oranges by stuffing them in my golf-ball-sized jeans pockets? Good lord, she raked that guy over the coals. She was a hard mountain woman from north Georgia, who had lived off the land during the Depression. Not to be trifled with lightly.

Anyway, she convinced him that I had not stolen anything, and he was so abashed that he gave me a watermelon. :smiley:

The guy turned out to be a criminal himself, and eventually spent a lot of time in jail for burning down his own farmer’s market for the insurance money.

12

What’s all this with stories about kids stealing? Why all the emphasis on kids?

A few years back I was at a local food coop, and was getting all the ingredients I was going to need for that night’s yummy repast. Let’s see, milk. Going to need milk. Fish. Hmm, they don’t have trout, maybe tilapia will work well. Collard greens. That might be a nice touch.

As I was walking home, my mind was filled with how I was going to prepare everything. First I’ll chop the onion, then I’ll make a milk bath for the fish, and then I’ll…

“Excuse me, sir?” A checkout girl was chasing me down.

“Um, yeah?”

“Is that our shopping basket?”

“Uh, why, yes, it most certainly is. And you know, maybe I should actually pay for all of this food, too.”

She took it good naturedly and didn’t have me arrested.

13

I was playing with a whiffle ball in KMart when I was 4. My dad had taken us shopping for something or other. Somehow, I got it in my head that the conveyor belt was for things you wished to pay for. Whatever you wanted to give the cashier money for, you put on the belt and he’d tell you the amount.

Well I didn’t have any money, but I did want the ball, so I figured I’d just carry it out of the store. If I did it wrong, someone would surely say something, right? Well, no one did. Dad didn’t notice and I’m sure the cashier thought it was my ball anyway, so we just drove on home. I was like “Cool! I didn’t have to give any money for this! I wonder if my parents know about this trick.”

Later, my dad says “Where did you get that?” “From the store.” “YOU STOLE IT?!” and I’m like “No, dad, I just took it without paying for it. I didn’t STEAL it.” “That’s what stealing is, son.”

and I delivered one of the cutest lines in the history of four-year olds: “But I didn’t have a mask or anything!” because, hey, thieves on TV always had black bandana masks, right?

14

When my daughter was a new baby, all of 2 months old, I was browsing at a clothing store. I saw a baby hat I liked, and tossed it onto the hood of her carriage, intending to browse around a bit more and then pay for it.

In a little while, the baby started crying, and I flipped the hood shut to soothe her, which didn’t work, so I hustled out of there and put the baby in the car, got home, left the stroller in the car until 2 days later when we went for a walk and I flipped the hood open. And found the hat. Oops. But the baby looked super-cute in it.

That baby grew up to be a 6-year-old who shoplifted a christmas ornament from Michael’s (good girl, stealing sparkley-pretty-stuff instead of chocolate) and had to go through the whole return to the store, give the ornament back, and appologize through tears senario.

(Do they train store clerks/managers on how to handle those moments? Because the one at Michael’s was really great: firm, kind, not scary but quite serious. And she winked at me over the 6-year-old’s head.)

Moral of the story: She’s gonna grow up to be a better person than I am. :slight_smile:

15

Sometime in my twenties I was about to leave for a party when the host called and asked me to bring a couple bottles of soda. I stopped at the White Hen which was right next to where I lived. What kind of soda should I get? Coke, I guess. And there will be girls, so I should get Diet Coke. But wait, now I have two colas. What if someone doesn’t like cola? I should get Sprite. No, 7-up is on sale. But wait maybe I should get regular Coke, and diet 7-Up. Okay, what time is it? I haven’t been to my friends new apartment yet. I wonder what the best way to get there is? Should I go down Division or Main? Let me just get this CD in the player and… Wait, why is the store clerk knocking on my car window?

“Sir, are you going to pay for that soda?”

:smack:

16

Two weeks ago, I stole a peach. I didn’t mean to steal the peach. It was up in the basket next to my bag, while the rest of everything was in the cart. I didn’t notice until I was getting ready to push the empty cart back to the cart-holder.

Seeing as the peach was maybe 1/4 of a pound (it was tiny), the grocery store was crowded, and I am generally a terrible person, I just shrugged and left with it, rather than go back to the grocery store to pay .25 cents.

When I was a kid, my little sister stole a candle, which she gave to my mom as a present. She was only about 3 at the time. My mom had to try not to laugh when she took it back.

17

Candy bars? Rank amateurs I say. How about a $200 bike? video here

18

Yep - the baby and I have inadvertently stolen 6 bucks worth of paper bags from Michael’s (put them in the basket, put all the other stuff I was buying on top of the canopy and coffee tray) and toothpaste. Each time I hadn’t discovered it until he was already strapped into the car seat and I was folding the stroller. Oops.