Hands Off

 

I wonder when stores will return to a model of effectively being basically pickup locations, where customers were not able to browse the merchandise.

If you'd told me, prior to my going into Target, that socks and underwear were a major target of shoplifters, I would have thought you were pulling my leg. Yet, here we are. Row after row of locked cases for Fruit of the Loom and (perhaps ironically) Pair of Thieves.

I'm not at all tied in to the lives that most lower-class Americans lead. That's why I have no idea why anyone would bother shoplifting undergarments in large enough amounts that the Target store I was in had them on lockdown. And perhaps that's a problem.

Of course, I understand that poverty is a problem, and a situation that makes many people both desperate and cynical about rules. And so it made sense that people would steal baby formula; it's expensive and it's not hard to find a buyer who won't ask questions. Likewise with laundry detergents; nearly everyone uses it, and the chance to get it below MSRP is attractive. And I presume that something similar applies to socks and underwear. But I'll admit that I'm guessing. Maybe people are simply starting to find the prices of boxers to be out of reach of their budgets.

And I suspect that I shouldn't be guessing about it. Not because there would be a news story on it, if I just channel-surfed long enough, but because it's a bad thing for people on different rungs of the economic ladder to be completely out of sight of one another.